Finnish Women Politicians’ Instagram Content through the Lens of Popular Feminism

This paper analyses the Instagram-posts of Finland’s previous government’s five women leaders through a popular feminist lens. The aim of the research was to see, if the posts adhere to popular feminist logic or contain its qualities. Using qualitative content analysis and a data set consisting of nearly 200 posts, it was discovered that despite the title ‘feminist’ being quite heavily associated with this specific government, most of the women didn’t mention feminism in their posts but instead preferred to use the more catch-all term ‘equality’ and associated it with a wide variety of issues, not just gender. The two women who did tackle topic of gender specifically, Maria Ohisalo of the Greens and Annika Saarikko of the Centre Party, both posted things that could be described as being popular feminist, with Saarikko in particular embracing a neoliberal can-do attitude, while Ohisalos’ posts also contained some more critical feminist thought. Almost all the posts with feminist tones in them also promoted the women's respective parties’ political goals, showing that feminist expressions were just a tool among the rest rather than the government’s defining principle.