Studying Instagram as a platform for gendered politics

Instagram has become an important platform for political communication for especially women politicians. In my presentation I introduce methodological difficulties and choices related to studying Instagram as a platform for gendered politics. My presentation is based on an empirical research carried out in Finland at an exceptional time, when five young women ministers and party leaders led Finland’s government. I use as data Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s government’s five key ministers’ Instagram images and captions from 2021 (N=915) and Instagram stories from April 2022 (N=550). I combine quantitative and qualitative content analysis and employ the notions of depoliticization and politicization as a conceptual framework for analyzing gendered politics in Instagram. My analysis shows that politics in Instagram materializes through tensions between the private and the public, the masculine and the feminine, political differences and collaboration. In my presentation, I focus on Instagram as context, images and captions as data, and the combination of quantity and quality in the analysis. I pay specific attention to methodological choices related to analyzing gender in social media.