The Ugly Side of Brazil’s Online Influencer Ecosystem
by Deirbhile Ní Bhranáin
Junior Producer & Editor Global Digital Futures
This week, Chipo spoke to Rio de Janeiro-based researcher Thaysa Costa de Nasciemento about her work on the transgressions of Brazilian influencers. Their conversation touched on issues ranging from the digital influencer trajectory, to how race and gender affect the ways in which influencers are perceived and treated. Listen to the episode here.
The episode discusses Bianca Andrade, an influencer with nearly 15 million followers, who is a centrepoint of Thaysa’s research on influencer trajectories. It examines the ways in which Bianca and other female influencers are treated negatively simply by virtue of being a woman on the Internet. However, as is often the case, online dynamics can be an intensification of existing cultural and political dynamics offline. Brazilian women are often sexualised in ways beyond their control, and these dynamics also play out online.
There is a highly specific set of beauty standards for women in Brazil, modelled on a Eurocentric beauty standard. These racialised standards overtly discriminate against Black Brazilian women, both on and offline. Nascimento discusses how Black Brazilian influencers and actors have access to fewer opportunities than their non-Black counterparts: a particularly stark example is that of Black Brazilian actress Nayara Justino, who was stripped of her 2013 Beauty Queen title due to her skin tone. Within the influencer sphere, phenomena such as ‘blackfishing’ also increase the racial divide.
“Influencers are representative of a hyper-individualistic consumer culture, where reality is distorted just enough that its benefits look achievable - real - for an ordinary person, until a transgression is committed.”
Nascimento’s work on influencer transgressions discovers some interesting elements to the resulting audience backlash. Among influencers, there is immense pressure to conform to beauty standards in order to stay relevant and retain a platform, but there also seems to be an increasing pressure to appear ‘more real’ despite the widely curated format of social media. Despite their potential structural impact on beauty standards of a generation, influencers are representative of a hyper-individualistic consumer culture, where reality is distorted just enough that its benefits look achievable - real - for an ordinary person, until a transgression is committed.
The connections between ‘transgressions’ and the phenomenon known as ‘cancel culture’ is worth looking at. Similarly, it is interesting how these relate to the racialised beauty standards referred to above. This dynamic of transgressions continues to condemn the individual rather than encourage structural change among influencers, for example a conversation around why the petite, European body image is the mainstream ideal in Brazil. Naturally the way in which individual influencers treat ideals such as beauty standards, uphold them or subvert them, should be challenged; but so too should the culture surrounding the beauty industry, and the gendered and racialised politics of beauty itself.
On a more positive note, the connections forged by the internet brings forth the potential of social media to subvert mainstream beauty standards and to create alternative communities. Tattoo artist and activist Grace Neutral discusses the increasing movement of women changing beauty standards and taking back control over how they are perceived. Her 2016 i-D documentary saw her travel to Brazil to discuss beauty standards with several women from diverging communities. Many of the women from non-white backgrounds said they had discovered online communities with similar beauty standards, where their beauty ideals were more celebrated than in their everyday lives in Brazil.
Deirbhile Ní Bhranáin is an Irish author and journalist based in London. She is currently completing an MA in International Journalisms at SOAS. She is interested in the impact of the future on the present and on the utopian possibilities of narrative.