“Life sucks, coffee helps”: Articulating the authentic entrepreneur on YouTube's girlboss channels
Publié en ligne: 29 janv. 2023
Pages: 1 - 22
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2023-0001
Mots clés
© 2023 Ida Roivainen, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The term girlboss was popularised by American entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso (2015), who wrote an autobiography,
Over the last decade, Western economies have certainly seen an “entrepreneurial renaissance” (Fonseca, 2014), and an “exponential growth in influencer commerce” (Abidin, 2016: 86), with increasing numbers of self-employed digital media workers, freelancers, and the like. Lately, the term influencer has been particularly connected to people working on social media. Crystal Abidin (2016) describes influencers as one form of microcelebrity (see also Marwick, 2013) who accumulate a following on social media through narration of their personal, everyday lives, upon which paid advertorials for products and services are premised. Further, while the growing amount of user-generated content emphasises the importance of “ordinary” people representing their “ordinary” lives (e.g., Ashton & Patel, 2017; Cunningham & Craig, 2017; Noppari & Hautakangas, 2012), the principles of contemporary branding also authorise branding the self as authentic, because self-branding is seen not as an imposition of a concept or product by corporate culture, but rather as an individual taking on the project to access their “true self” (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 61).
Accordingly, the entrepreneur-inspired girlboss trend shows how platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have provided spaces where ordinary women have been able to assume power as both consumers and producers. Meaning, girls and women – and their practices that have been historically situated outside the realm of technology – are now exploring social media as space for creative identity-making, communicating, and career-building (Banet-Weiser, 2012). Not surprisingly, due to the feminised history of the beauty domain (e.g., Peiss, 1998; Wolf, 1992), beauty and lifestyle channels have grown to be among the most populous and engaging spheres of user-generated content on YouTube (Ceci, 2022) and other social media among young women (Pixability, 2018), internationally (e.g., Bärtl, 2018; Weinzimmer, 2018), and also in the Nordic countries (e.g., Reinikainen et al., 2020; Torjesen, 2021).
While this study is connected and partly overlapping with the growing body of research on influencers, it distinctly addresses the group of female entrepreneurs who use the term girlboss to express their social media engagement. Thus, the focus of the article is on social media workers who both portray themselves as girlbosses and pursue a self-made, entrepreneurial career. While Amoruso – the trendsetter of the girlboss – has described what girlboss means to her, I ask: Which central communicative ways do female social media entrepreneurs use to represent “girlbosness” on their YouTube channels? How do these representations articulate a sense of authentic self, and what meanings are expressed through these articulations?
The netnographic (Kozinets, 2010) observation of 23 girlboss YouTube channels, related social media platforms, and three complementary in-depth interviews reveal that girlbosses articulate their sense of authentic self through 1) productivity, 2) ordinariness, and 3) belonging, and that particular cultural repertoires (e.g., coffee) are used to articulate these distinct ways. According to my analysis, recurring representations of coffee articulate girlbosses as productive and ordinary entrepreneurs who seek belonging and meaning in life. Finally, I argue that participating in the communicative practices of entrepreneurial femininity seems to offer girlbosses an experience of optimism – a promise that authenticity will lead to happiness. However, at the same time, the attachment to authenticity becomes problematic when the one pursuing it realises it is never pure.
This study contributes to the field of feminist media studies, new media, cultural studies, as well as digital labour on social media. I provide nuanced analysis of key articulations relating to social media entrepreneurship and authentic self-branding, in addition to shedding new light on specific mechanisms that make girlbossness desirable for millennial women.
When thinking about the current neoliberal brand-culture, where social media enhance and enable (Carah & Angus, 2018) entrepreneurs like Sophia Amoruso to publicly share their thoughts and sell their brands, it is good to keep in mind that the current logic and form of brands were created in the 1980s, when management theorists turned their focus from developing products to developing brands (Arvidsson, 2006; Bookman, 2016; Klein, 1999). This shift from product to brands paved way for the self-branding that has become a penetrating force within the advanced capitalist political economy (Arvidsson, 2006; Bookman, 2016). Further, the rupture of the old media landscape and the rise of user-generated content have enabled the production and consumption of media content that benefits from “ordinary” people and their “ordinary” lives (e.g., Ashton & Patel, 2017; Cunningham & Craig, 2017; Noppari & Hautakangas, 2012; Torjesen, 2021): that is, self-brands, such as girlbosses, operating in different media environments and based on product–consumer relationships where the individual self-brand recognises its role in the production of the brand. The representation of the self has become part of an identity that is produced on different social media platforms both for oneself and others (Scolere et al., 2018).
In the context of girlbosses – and other social media workers – representing the self is often aligned with the discourse of passion, which enables entrepreneurs to find meaning for their lives through work that doesn’t seem like work (Duffy & Hund, 2015). For example, many YouTubers show how their leisure and work blend seamlessly, such as through meetings in collaboration parties, photoshoots in foreign countries, and the ability to work from home or at fashionable cafés. On the other hand, the type of admiration and practice of bonding among girlbosses also echoes typically masculine start-up entrepreneurialism, in which the identity is constructed as “a rock star, vital entrepreneur, and buddy in a start-up ecosystem” (Katila et al., 2019: 381). Many girlbosses articulate an identity that is based on circulating out-dated, typically masculine meanings connected to entrepreneurship, such as competitiveness, success, and heroism (Katila et al., 2019). Passionate self-accentuating speeches, open pursuit of bigger pay checks, and usage of “bad language” among girlbosses resemble the confidence quest that Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) discussed in
The fact that the entrepreneurial girlboss trend has empowered millennial women through different media technologies and working opportunities – for example, assuming power in places where women have historically been left out – is nothing new. Before bloggers, vloggers, and lifestyle-YouTubers existed, women's magazines inspired women to share information and build communities (Peiss, 1998; Wolf, 1992). Communities have also been built within families, between neighbours, and at workplaces, by sharing information about beauty, fashion, politics, and so on (Peiss, 1998). Going as far back as seventeenth-century Europe, where most countries banned women from accessing the public hotspots of culture and politics, for example, coffee houses (see Tucker, 2016), women invited each other to one another's homes instead, for coffee and exchange of information (Saarinen, 2011). Men often dismissed these meetups as meant for gossip, but for women, the coffee gatherings were a means to stay ahead of things and get organised before having the right to vote and taking part in political decision-making (Saarinen, 2011).
In the construction of a successful self-brand, the most prominent feature seems to be branding the self as authentic – that is, commercialisation and performance of the authentic are necessary parts of the modern “success myth” (see Dyer, 1998) of the self-brand (e.g., Ashton & Patel, 2017; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Cunningham & Craig, 2017; Pooley, 2010; Shtern et al., 2019). Representing and performing the authentic self operates as a means to achieve entrepreneurial goals in a publicly acceptable manner. The desire for fame and self-branding also seems to be a consequence of a society where success appears to offer enormous material, economic, social, and physical rewards (e.g., Jerslev, 2016; Marwick, 2013).
However, the quest for authenticity has also been connected to deeper, ontological dilemmas. For example, Charles Taylor (1989) has argued that, compared to previous civilisations, many contemporaries are not ready to choose between theistic and secular perceptions of existence, and that in modern society, life becomes spiritually senseless if there is no framework; thus, the quest for meaning is always a quest for sense. Moreover, Taylor (1991) has outlined three major fears that frame modern life: losing meaning, losing purpose for the primacy of instrumental reason, and losing freedom. As a result, for some, the answer to these fears is turning to authenticity as a moral principle. According to Taylor (1991), authenticity grants some individuals an anchor for their inner selves, when they follow and express their true calling.
These thoughts have sparked much debate; for example, Jefferson Pooley (2010: 82) argues that the ideal of authenticity as way toward finding one's “true self” results only in “calculated authenticity” that enforces the performative nature of authenticity that is amplified by the market of advertising and self-help culture (see also Shtern et al., 2019). In turn, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) considers authenticity a result of the commercial practice of cultural participation within a neoliberal media environment, where self-branding becomes the essential element of maintaining the broader landscape of brand culture. Further, within an ambivalent cultural system of self-branding, to access authenticity, one must first and foremost be “true to others” (Banet-Weiser, 2012).
To be clear, I do not claim there is a “pure” state or way of being that is ideally authentic. As Pooley (2010) argues, the tension between the self-fulfillment ideal and the injunction to work on oneself as an object is a productive contradiction. According to Pooley, all social action is performative, and therefore there is no such thing as nonperformative “authentic” self-closure on social media or in person. However, I do claim that in a modern society, where fears of losing meaning and freedom make people anxious (Taylor, 1991), there is a need to believe that a place, or a moral state of nonperformative authenticity, really exists. In other words, the moral ideal or pursuit of authenticity should not be regarded as merely “calculated authenticity” caused by the “authenticity bind” (Pooley, 2010), nor as part of the relational work between content creators and content consumers (Shtern et al., 2019), nor as an ambivalent process of commercial cultural practice (Banet-Weiser, 2012), but also as a need, an experience of optimism, that drives people toward “the good life” (Berlant, 2011).
According to Berlant, in optimism, the subject leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object. In the case of girlbosses, optimism involves the promise that authenticity will result in happiness and meaning. However, the promise of authenticity also creates a cruel dilemma: Since people always express themselves in relation to others, an attachment to authenticity becomes problematic when the one pursuing it realises it is never pure or disconnected from context. Therefore, in this article, I approach the question of authenticity from two perspectives: On the one hand, authenticity is understood as part – and a prerequisite – of the success of the self-brand in the digital media industry, and on the other, authenticity is understood with respect to “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011), where the promise of authenticity is expected to be the key to happiness. Yet, in a cruel way, this promise also prevents itself from actualising.
Methodologically, I follow the idea of netnography, a concept developed by Robert Kozinets (2010), and which is participant-observational research based in online fieldwork that uses computer-mediated communications as a source of data to arrive at the ethnographic understanding and representation of a cultural or communal phenomenon.
I started following lifestyle videos and vlogs in 2012, when YouTube as a platform was very different from how it is now. Material was not as technologically developed as it is today, and there were fewer advertisements, brand collaborations, and professional YouTubers. During the past two years, I have changed from a regular but casual follower to a systematic and engaged observer to better understand the emerging female roles that social media platforms promote and enable. I am particularly interested in channels that have content described as “girlboss”. To gather data, I situated myself in the online field while keeping a research journal, writing field notes, and doing interviews (Kozinets, 2010). Although YouTube is the main platform for girlboss content, I have paid attention to other social media as well, such as Instagram and personal blogs that play important yet different roles in girlboss entrepreneurship.
In total, my sample consists of 23 English-speaking girlboss YouTube channels, which I selected according to two criteria: 1) the YouTuber must proclaim herself as a girlboss (i.e., through video titles and descriptions, images, image captions, hashtags, or showing girlboss-related merchandise, such as coffee mugs), and 2) the YouTuber must be or must pursue a career as an entrepreneur (usually mentioned in the channel description). In general, I limited my data to girlboss channels that contain lifestyle content such as beauty, fashion, wellness, and everyday life (e.g., Torjesen, 2021). The observed channels have between 4,000 and 1 million followers (the majority 100,000–400,000) and most of the channels are located either in the US or Canada, but there are also a couple of channels from Germany and one each from Slovenia, the Netherlands, Australia, and India. On the whole, based upon observation and interviews, my sample consists of mostly white, presumably middle-class, abled cis-women in their 20s and early 30s.
I searched channels, first through the YouTube search bar (by typing the word “girlboss”) and then through what I call online snowballing – that is, I selected channels that the YouTube recommendation feature suggested according to what I had already watched. I continued this sampling until I reached saturation (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). I performed inductive coding and content analysis on my observational data (Kozinets, 2010), which enabled me to abstract recurring themes related to girlbossness and entrepreneurship. Many of the themes I found overlapped with popular genres and categories recognised by other scholars investigating YouTube channels and lifestyle content. These included, for example, selfcare-, beauty-, and lifestyle-related tutorials and personal videos, or vlogs, as well as more specific video genres such as “how to”, “routine”, “get ready with me”, “Q&A”, and “story time” (e.g., Bishop, 2018; Bärtl, 2018; Torjesen 2021). Since I wanted to focus on the ways girlbosses represent, articulate, and express authentic entrepreneur life, I abstracted the recurring themes related to entrepreneurship and empowerment until I had three distinct content types: 1) productivity, 2) ordinariness, and 3) belonging. My data also revealed that these content types were often represented with particular cultural repertoires, such as coffee, cursing, and pampering. In this article, I focus on repeating representations of coffee to determine how these, perhaps banal or meaningless, articulations (Grossberg, 1986) express the productivity, ordinariness, and belonging of an authentic entrepreneur.
I also participated in a YouTube event in Finland in 2019 and conducted three complementary in-depth interviews (2019–2020) to better understand the lived experiences of girlbosses and their work. Two of the interviewees – recruited through Instagram direct messaging – belong to the channels I observed online; the third I found through recommendations while attending the YouTube event. All the interviews lasted approximately 1.5 hours each. Two of them were conducted through video calls and one was face-to-face. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed, and each participant gave their written consent. Two interviews were conducted in Engish and one in Finnish; I have translated into English quotes from the Finnish interview cited in this article.
Finally, in this study, I have considered ethics through a “process approach” (franzke et al., 2020) and reflected on my research practices with the ethical reflections of other researchers in the field in mind. To protect the privacy of the subjects of the study – and taking into consideration the threats that rising popular misogyny (Banet-Weiser, 2018) and affective circuits of online hate pose to women and minorities online (Sundén & Paasonen, 2018) – I decided to leave out the names of the girlbosses in this research. Though evolving photo software and reverse-search technologies make it difficult to reach full anonymity, I have, however, done my best to make identification as difficult as possible by de-identifying data (franzke et al., 2020) by anonymising interviewees, erasing all usernames and identification data, as well as using imagery where the person is not recognisable. Referring to fair use, I have used only imagery that is re-framed and altered by me for research purposes.
According to the data, girlbosses articulate their authentic entrepreneur-selves through productivity, ordinariness, and belonging. These ways are recognised by other scholars studying the neoliberal social media landscape, where visibility requires productive work (e.g., Duffy & Pruchniewska 2017; Glatt & Banet-Weiser, 2021), self-branding (e.g., Duffy & Hund, 2015), and engagement between content creators and content consumers (e.g., Cunningham & Craig, 2017). However, my analysis shows that, while authenticity is used for advancing visibility, self-brand, and recognition, it is also used for finding happiness and meaning. In other words, whether it be mundane representations of productive working routines, indulgent breaks and self-care, or honest discussions with followers and co-entrepreneurs on social media, both the empirical data and the interviews articulate a need to believe that being authentic and putting oneself “out there” grants meaning to girlbosses and their work. Further, these different articulations are often connected to particular cultural repertoires that, at first glance, may seem banal or meaningless, but through a closer look can reveal something more of the practices and communications of specific groups or cultures (Grossberg, 1986). That is, cultural repertoires are derived from a variety of cultural materials available in generalised cultures. Repertoires can be composed of ideas, practices, habits, and worldviews that are used by people to make meaning about the world in which they live, and further used to make sense of their actions towards both others and themselves (Swidler, 1986).
My data shows that coffee is persistent on all the analysed channels, whether as part of girlbosses’ productive working routines, daily lives, and leisure, or as a means of finding belonging and meaning. As mentioned earlier – particularly for women, and throughout history – coffee has functioned as means to stay connected, and even assume power, when possibilities to influence are scarce. In the following sections, I use representations of coffee – such as coffee mugs, coffee drinking, working in cafés, and one-on-one discussions over coffee – to demonstrate how girlbosses articulate their sense of authentic self, and further, what meanings are expressed through these articulations.
The data suggest that the idea of self-made success, like that of Sophia Amoruso, is represented repeatedly on YouTube's girlboss channels. Recurring coffee imagery – such as videos and images of coffee, coffee mugs, coffee drinking, and working in cafés – articulates a productive entrepreneurial life. In one example (see Figure 1), coffee, a coffee mug with empowering text, and the advice the girlboss shares with her audience are ways to manage the self, the business, and “do everything”.
Figure 1
Accordingly, one of the interviewees, who has a YouTube-channel and works as a freelance video editor, says that sharing coffee imagery is often connected to productivity and managing the self:
Well, I think it's like the stereotype girlboss. I think that's honestly the reason why, because, like, you know those really cheesy Pinterest quotes? I definitely have some of them saved from, like, three years ago, when it was like “Coffee, messy bun, and wi-fi, and I take on the world!”
When I asked the interviewee to elaborate why coffee, rather than other things, is so important to girlbosses, she continued:
I think as a girlboss it's cos […] our obsession with productivity or […] this whole girlboss-narrative and how it's, you know, a lie. Or productivity and the girlboss-life is so glamorised, when it really isn’t. And I think […] coffee […] makes you productive, and productivity is so celebrated in the whole girlboss-thing. You know, like hustling, doing the work, and yeah, that's why I think coffee [is so important].
The “hustling” life that Interviewee 3 described, as supported by my empirical data, is a life in which a girlboss starts her morning routine with a cup of coffee that she drinks from her inspirational coffee mug that says, for example, “I am not bossy, I am the boss” (see Figure 1); “Good things come to those who work their asses off”; or “Girlboss”; to mention a few. Both the drink itself and the inspirational mugs represent the efforts that productive girlbosses make to set the pace for the day and succeed. Thanks to the stimulating and refreshing effect of caffeine, coffee has been connected to productivity since it was invented around the eleventh century in Arabia (Saarinen, 2011). For example, in Finland, a country whose people drink the most coffee per capita, coffee has been a major part of work culture since the eighteenth century, when coffee was given to servants, farmers, and field workers to keep them working and satisfied with their employers (Saarinen, 2011).
According to Harsh Verma (2013), who has studied coffee and tea consumption in India, coffee has both functional and symbolic value. On the one hand, coffee is the caffeinated drink that helps people manage their working lives when needing an extra boost; in this context, coffee is valued for delivery at the physiological level. On the other hand, coffee can signal a break away from the ordinary, and its consumption is tied to special occasions and people in the hierarchy of relationships. Further, Sonia Bookman (2014, 2016), who has studied coffee culture and branding in Canada, argues that the growing significance of coffee brands in the urban environment, such as Starbucks, is related to the prominence of the symbolic economy in the so-called entrepreneurial city. That is, the centrality of consumer culture, as well as the concurrent emergence of the brand as a powerful market and cultural form, are factors that play a significant role in the branding of urban life (Bookman, 2014).
In the girlboss context, coffee articulates both its different values and its significance as a brand forming the entrepreneurial life.
Coffee's functional value is evident in girlboss content, which connects coffee preparing, pouring, holding, and drinking with the act of working. Whether it be vlogs, routine videos, or Instagram stories and images, girlbosses show themselves having coffee in different working situations during the day to articulate their productivity. As the screenshot in Figure 2 shows, coffee and productiveness are evident on a vlog that represents both authenticity (i.e., what something looks like) and productivity (i.e., the working week). The image of the girlboss waiting for a subway while holding a Starbucks takeaway coffee also symbolises the twenty-four/seven worker constantly on the go and playing her part in the “entrepreneurial city” (Bookman, 2014). Coffee's symbolic value, on the other hand, is evident in videos and images, where inspirational coffee mugs, cafés, quotes, and so on, themselves articulate the daily life of productive entrepreneurs. Posting a coffee-related quote, such as “First I drink coffee, then I do the things”, on Instagram, for example, implies that the girlboss is productive and successful.
Figure 2
Coffee drinking also extends to the realm of social engagements and indulgence (Saarinen, 2011; Verma, 2013) – that is, being able to take time for oneself during a work week and going to a café, for example, are some benefits of being one's own boss. A close-up photo (see Figure 3) of special kinds of coffee and luxury-brand bags, as well as descriptions and hashtags (e.g., #productphotography, #luxuryblogger, #girlboss), articulate that, if you work hard, you can have indulgent breaks and purchase expensive designer items.
Figure 3
This type of “Instagrammable” imagery of aesthetically pleasing cafés, hotels, and special coffee connected to the luxury and freedom of being one's own boss also articulates zeal toward the things girlbosses do. The idea of “passion” (Duffy & Hund, 2015) enables content creators to depict a notion of work that doesn’t seem like work.
However, because the platform-specific self-brand (Scolere et al., 2018) requires impression management that first and foremost benefits the brand, there are certain things that girlbosses obscure. As Interviewee 3 described in the quote earlier, “productivity and the girlboss-life is so glamorised, when it really isn’t”. This, she explained, means that even though girlbosses are authentic and productive, there are many issues they do not reveal. On that note, when I asked Interviewee 3 why she herself shared her life so openly, she emphasised the connection between passion and creativity, while also making sure that she could “use and leverage” the audience she is building on YouTube.
Accordingly, it seems that girlbossness is a constant negotiation of what to share. This negotiation is connected to girlbosses’ own understandings of You-Tube's and Instagram's algorithmic processes and how they impact the visibility of their content. That is, creating “authentic” videos and images of productive working routines and daily entrepreneur life implies that girlbosses know how to customise their self-brand to the lifestyles of their audience, because self-branding is seen not as an imposition of product by corporate culture but rather as the individual taking on the project herself to access her “true self” (Banet-Weiser, 2018). On the other hand, girlbosses are aware of the ideal representations of productive entrepreneurs, and how posting images of themselves drinking coffee while working, or using trendy keywords like “girlboss”, can increase visibility and income.
Among girlbosses, authenticity is often articulated through homely content, such as publishing videos of preparing coffee in the morning, sharing intimate things about their personal life, or showing how she takes care of herself by spending time with her pet. These representations function as frames for ordinariness and relatability; after all, many of us drink coffee in the morning in our pyjamas.
In one example (see Figure 4), a girlboss invites her followers to have a look “behind the curtain” and find out what entrepreneurship is “really like”. In the image, the girlboss is on her messy bed drinking coffee and petting her dog.
Figure 4
Here, the coffee mug, dog, and image description are used to create a relatable feeling of an ordinary life off-camera. However, while girlbosses depict authenticity and ordinariness online, there is a difference in which parts of the self are shown and on which platform. Studies show that digital users react to the reality of collapsed contexts by introducing various socially mediated selves that vary between and across different social media platforms (Scolere et al., 2018).
For example, Interviewee 3 explained that for her, YouTube is “the place to be found and to attract people”, because it is the second-largest search engine after Google. YouTube is also the place to share personal things and give value to the audience, whereas Instagram is mainly the place to engage people and beat the algorithm with “beautiful pictures”. On the other hand, Interviewee 2, who works as a travel and lifestyle content creator and loves Instagram's edited travel-photographs, explained that for her, Instagram stories – rather than YouTube – is the place to be “completely unfiltered”. Instagram stories makes it easy to “just grab the camera and be spontaneous” without the hassle of editing. For Interviewee 1, who has a growing beauty brand along with her YouTube channel, sharing on social media resembles behaviour with different friends and acquaintances. That is, things are shared with some more than others, and certain things are not for sharing at all.
Articulating authenticity is a constant negotiation between different selves. On the one hand, girlbosses and their audiences want to be inspired by beautiful, edited, and positive content. On the other hand, girlbosses want to create and consume content that is relatable and “real”, revealing what the well-decorated home looks like when not filming, or how difficult and consuming it can be to be an entrepreneur, for example. As one girlboss explained in her video (see Figure 5), being an entrepreneur is not always easy. Showing a coffee mug with the text “Have a break” not only implies coffee's functional value as a refreshment when one gets tired during work, but the mug and its text also have symbolic meanings that connect coffee with comfort, self-care, and ordinariness – the common feeling of needing time off when life gets tough. Or, as Interviewee 3 told me, when I asked why coffee is so important to girlbosses, “I think it's just cos, obviously coffee kind of also… helps, like, ‘life sucks, coffee helps’”.
Figure 5
This way to represent authenticity resembles that of celebrity culture. Fandom and the construction of stars and celebrities have always involved a search for the authentic person that lies behind the manufactured mask of fame (Dyer, 1998). However, instead of following Hollywood stars like people did in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, today people often admire microcelebrities and social media influencers (Abidin, 2016; Jerslev, 2016; Marwick, 2013), who don’t unveil their ordinary lives on special issues of magazines or late-night television shows, for example, but build their careers on showing themselves all the time.
As Interviewee 2 explained, to succeed on social media, one needs to be inspirational and share “what is happening in the background”, because “that actually interests people”. That is, inspiration is not only something ideal to look up to but also something that, at least seems to be, within reach for the audience as well. When a girlboss unveils parts of their ordinary life, entrepreneurship can seem more relatable than, for example, watching a Hollywood star's success story on television. This “real” sharing, according to my data, is what makes “authentic” social media entrepreneurs so popular.
Accordingly, among girlbosses, creativity, uniqueness, and “standing out from the crowd” are admired features. On the other hand, people also value ordinary, relatable, and authentic life on social media. The problem, though, is that there is conflict, even confusion, about what ordinary life is. For example, Interviewee 1 explained that the reason for starting her girlboss channel was because she felt unhappy:
I was sad and didn’t know what I wanted from life. And to be honest, I Googled […] how to be happy […] then I found one video from a YouTuber that was titled “How to be happy”. I […] was just really inspired by that person and thought, “Wow, what a great idea” […] and that is how my journey began.
As the quote above exemplifies, representing and performing the authentic self operates as a means to achieve entrepreneurial goals in a publicly acceptable manner. That is, sharing “inspirational” and honest content through homely videos and images of one's morning routines and difficulties articulates that authenticity can lead to successful entrepreneurship. Further, sharing these inspirational representations are also efforts to pursue the ordinary, authentic self that entails a promise of happiness and “the good life” (Berlant, 2011: 2).
While girlbosses use coffee imagery to represent their passion-driven productivity and pursuit of ordinariness and authenticity, they also use this imagery to depict sociability and belonging. Images and videos of sitting on a couch while talking to the camera, taking the audience through their daily life through vlogs, or posting empowering quotes create a feeling of intimacy (Berlant, 1998) while not having physical contact with the audience or co-entrepreneurs.
As early as the seventeenth century, coffee has been associated with habits and social hierarchies. The quality of the coffee, the manner in which one drank coffee, and the tableware one used to serve coffee, for example, articulated a person's social class and cultural background. Also, social coffee drinking has traditionally been more of a women's than a men's habit, having its roots in a time when women were not allowed public places such as cafés (Saarinen, 2011).
In girlboss entrepreneurship, coffee is persistent on all the analysed channels. For example, many girlbosses have particular YouTube vlog-types and Instagram-livecasts named after coffee, such as “Coffee Talk”, “Chatty Latte”, and “Coffee Time”, which often include content in which the girlboss wants to talk about intimate and personal topics such as friends, guy friends, and body image (see, e.g., Figure 6).
Figure 6
Virtual “chatty lattes”, or other engaging discussions between girlbosses and their followers, are also opportunities for being with others outside of home and work. While digitalisation and social media have changed the understandings of home and work, people's need to be involved with each other remains. For many, one of the main attractions of going to a café, or drinking coffee online, for example, is to be with others and feel less isolated. This is particularly important for those who work from home or live alone (Bookman, 2014). Moreover, the self-regulatory and self-monitoring imagination that social media enhances is used in re-creating feelings and situations that, through their relatability, foster attachments to homogenous girlfriend experiences (Kanai, 2017), or, as Interviewee 3 explained when I asked her what girlboss meant to her:
I think the coolest thing [about] being a woman in business is the connection you have to other women in business […] I have my business besties […] it's more about collaboration than maybe in the more traditional male business world, where it is about competition, at least in my mind.
Consequently, while girlbosses believe showing the real person behind the content is a way to stand out and succeed, it is also a way to search for meaning through what one is doing and to connect with others. According to the empirical data and interviewees, sharing content that sparks conversation and communication is one of the most important parts of being a girlboss. For some, belonging to a group of online friends who send nice comments and help each other to create content can even be the primary reason for participating on YouTube. It makes one feel like they’re “doing something important”; otherwise, without reciprocity, it would seem as if “no one cares” about making videos (Interviewee 1).
Of course, what makes the presentation of the “authentic self” cruel is the paradox it creates: To belong on social media as an authentic person requires authenticity that is judged not by the self, but by others. According to my data, sharing the authentic self can become irrelevant if the audience doesn’t respond to or dislikes the content the girlboss shares; in such a case, sharing no longer makes sense.
Observing something as mundane as coffee drinking on girlboss channels reveals that girlbosses use many, often contradictory, ways to communicate their sense of authentic self and participate in making entrepreneurial femininity within popular feminist media cultures. Whereas coffee's functional and symbolic values articulate how a cupful in the morning prepares one for productive, passionate work – or a special cappuccino in the afternoon is a symbol of success and indulgence – an honest discussion about the hardships of entrepreneurship can enhance ordinariness and belonging. However, the significance of productive caffeine boosts, relatable coffee mugs, and intimate “chatty lattes” are also related to a larger consumer culture and symbolic economy. Through these examples, girlbosses take part in the co-creation of brands and the dynamic interplay between cultures, identities, meanings, and common worlds (e.g., Arvidsson, 2006; Bookman, 2016; du Gay et al., 1997).
As shown in the analysis, among girlbosses, representing the authentic self is often aligned with the discourse of passion (see Duffy & Hund, 2015), which enables entrepreneurs to find meaning for their lives through work that doesn’t seem like work. Girlbosses show how their leisure and work blend seamlessly, such as through meetings at luxurious cafés, photoshoots in exciting places, and the ability to work from home. Further, the image of a self-made “hustle”-life easily creates an illusion, that success is just a matter of hard work and inspirational cups filled with strong coffee. However, it is important to keep in mind that YouTube and other social media platforms also actively promote hegemonic, feminised cultural outputs from content creators with significant embodied social and cultural capital (e.g., Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Duffy & Pruchniewska, 2017). Moreover, YouTube and its algorithms can create a discriminatory visibility hierarchy aligned with advertisers’ demands and needs (Bishop, 2018; Carah & Angus, 2018; Glatt & Banet-Weiser, 2021).
This “having it all” ideal of girlboss entrepreneursip, thus, also articulates a form of entrepreneurial femininity that draws upon postfeminist sensibilities (Duffy & Hund, 2015; Gill, 2016) in which “the ideal postfeminist subject” (Liu, 2019: 21) is encouraged to show herself as an independent and ambitious “working girl” – even a feminist – who, at the same time, conforms to traditionally feminine conduct such as beauty routines, fitness goals, and cleaning. Further, shuffling between multiple social media selves across different platforms (often unpaid) does not just show how joyful, passioned, and inspirational working for oneself is; it is also a strategic and managerial device to gain visibility, reputation, and, eventually, money (Scolere et al., 2018).
Further, women who produce cultural content online are working in an increasingly precarious neoliberal environment (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Pruchniewska, 2018), which leaves the individual responsible for their own autonomy, well-being, and success (Rose, 2006). Self-employed digital workers, influencers, and entrepreneurs are left alone to advance their careers in the midst of rising popular misogyny (Banet-Weiser, 2018) and the absence of job security (Scolere et al., 2018), among other things. Engaging in content creation in an environment where influence is based on sharing one's life therefore requires “strategic relational practices” (Shtern et al., 2019: 1952) that reflect the social reality of influencer audiences. Social media work is constant negotiation between individual self-branding, promotional activities, and staying true to an audience seeking authenticity (e.g., Abidin, 2016; Ashton & Patel, 2017; Torjesen, 2021).
Consequently, seeing success and visibility as results of hard work and passion – and not, for example, bound by privilege and the architecture of algorithmic automation dictated by technology giants – is a meritocratic approach to entrepreneurship. Duffy and Pruchniewska (2017: 845) aptly point out that, in social media work, there is a “digital double bind” structured through imperatives that include soft self-promotion, interactive intimacy, and compulsory visibility. On many levels, these imperatives are also present in girlboss entrepreneurship. For example, girlbosses stress the importance of “showing up” and communicating with their audience if one wishes to succeed on social media. Moreover, girl-bosses acknowledge that showing what is “behind the curtain” and enforcing the meaning of an “authentic” self-brand (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Shtern et al., 2019) are key for creating real and engaged relationships with followers.
In intimate publics, affective expectations centre around the desires for normalcy, recognition, and generality (Berlant, 1998). Digital cultures and new media landscapes with their technologies, then, may shape not only the processes (du Gay et al., 1997) of entrepreneurial femininity but also how intimacy and sense of self are fostered and built in popular feminist cultures (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Glatt & Banet-Weiser, 2021), where branding offers a social structure under which the self may be related to others. It seems that the pleasure of being immersed within a supportive sense of “girlfriendship” (Kanai, 2017), or girlbossness, may be more powerful than articulating only self-absorbed individuality. Or, as the empirical data of this study has elaborated, communication with other like-minded “business besties” is one of the most important parts of being an entrepreneur.
What complicates matters, though, is what this new girlboss media culture means in a larger sense. While popular feminism and self-branding refer to practices and conditions that are accessible to a broader public, these practices are often limited to public visibility and the abundance of banal hashtags and merchandise, such as coffee mugs saying “Girlboss”. As Banet-Weiser and colleagues (2020: 9) pointed out, this “safely affirmative” feminism that is visible in popular culture often “eclipses a feminist critique of structure”, in addition to obscuring the labour involved in producing oneself according to the parameters of popular feminism. Further, the pursuit of authenticity in this context seems to conform to rather than confront the logic of the neoliberal practices of freedom and self-mastery (e.g., Pooley, 2010; Pruchniewska, 2018; Rose, 2006). That is, while the “authentic entrepreneur” tries to enhance self-growth through “positive and inspiring” discourses of female empowerment without taking part in the critical discourses of feminism, these discourses are inescapable.
In a similar way, research on influencers have pointed out the importance of authenticity in social media work and creating engaged relationships with followers (e.g., Abidin, 2016; Ashton & Patel, 2017; Shtern et al, 2019). The performative nature of authenticity enforces influencers to promote “authentic” self-brands that, among others, can lead to different kinds of binds (Duffy & Pruchniewska, 2017; Pooley, 2010), and ambivalent feminist politics (Glatt & Banet-Weiser, 2021). However, this study shows that we should try to understand the structures of optimistic attachment that involve certain scenes of girlboss desires, for it is these desires that enable millennial women to expect that things such as authenticity can result in happiness and “the good life” (Berlant, 2011: 2). We should also recognise the need to believe, that the efforts girlbosses make in the precarious, neoliberal media landscape are worth it, because otherwise, being authentic and putting oneself out there would have no meaning.
As I have demonstrated in this article through close analysis of representation and identities, girlbosses articulate their sense of authentic self through productivity, ordinariness, and belonging, and further, particular cultural repertoires (Swidler, 1986) are used to articulate these distinct ways. That is, recurring representations of coffee articulate girlbosses as productive and ordinary entrepreneurs who seek belonging and meaning in life. I argue that through these articulations, girlbosses also express an experience of optimism that seems to offer a promise that authenticity will lead to happiness. However, optimism also creates a cruel paradox (Berlant, 2011), as sharing the authentic self can become meaningless if the audience doesn’t respond to the content the girlboss shares. Further, the pursuit of authenticity in this context seems to conform to rather than confront the logic of the neoliberal practices of freedom and self-mastery (e.g., Pooley, 2010; Pruchniewska, 2018; Rose, 2006).
Common articulations of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser et al., 2020) can hide those parts of entrepreneurial femininity that are not visible and therefore are often interpreted through the lens of ambivalence, performance, or some kind of bind. However, the processes of entrepreneurial femininity are circulating, overlapping, contradictory, and cruel, and therefore, we need more focus on the relationship between different processes of communicating the authentic entrepreneur. Or, as du Gay and colleagues (1997: 3) state, it is in a combination of processes that the “beginnings of an explanation can be found”.
Instead of looking at entrepreneurial femininity and authenticity only through a reductive binary – or through ambivalent cultural processes of self-branding attached to the forces of a neoliberal media culture – we should also look at these processes through the lens of optimism (Berlant, 2011). For, it appears that girlbosses’ internal tensions are resolved as long as certain aspects of freedom and power, such as communicating on social media or succeeding as an entrepreneur, create a sense that the “good-life fantasy” (Berlant, 2011: 194) is available. Of course, it does not follow that all these articulations and meanings are equally valid, since our frameworks of meaning are continuously shifting. However, unwrapping the mechanisms that make girlbossness desirable contributes to understanding entrepreneurial femininity in modern societies, where people suffer from perplexing ontological dilemmas and fears of losing meaning (Berlant, 2011; Taylor, 1989, 1991).
Due to the limited number of observed channels and interviews, the findings from my analysis are not representative of the entirety of girlboss entrepreneur-ship and what it can be. However, the netnographic mapping of a specific group of female entrepreneurs and their representational and expressive practices provides insight into contemporary media work and popular feminism taking place within the domain of YouTube's lifestyle channels. To get a thicker description on entrepreneurial femininity, the processes of production, consumption, as well as regulation, and their relationship to the materiality of new media technologies and visual practices, for example, are yet to be discovered. Understanding these complex processes separately and together thus requires much more work. There is also room for further research that focuses even more deeply on the motives and desires of female entrepreneurs outside of their work. For it is only by understanding the context, meaning, interpretation, motivations, commitments, and concerns of individuals that we can explain the cultural processes they engage in and interact with, also beyond the more apparent contexts of entrepreneurial femininity.