Fit for the Feed: Gender, Power and Discipline in the Multimodal Discourse of Instagram Fitness Influencers

Social media plays a central role in shaping appearance ideals and beauty standards, often by disproportionately representing certain body types as more attractive and socially desirable (Grabe et al., 2008). Instagram, in particular, an image-centric platform with features for liking and commenting, can foster a culture of appearance-focused evaluation and social comparison (Ahrens et al., 2022). In this environment, the figure of the fitness influencer has emerged: self-made digital celebrities who provide fitness instruction and promote strength or flexibility training. These influencers typically promote an ethos of self-transformation, encouraging users to reshape and harmonise their bodies according to dominant beauty norms. However, this rhetoric is often linked to negative outcomes such as compulsive exercise, disordered eating and body dissatisfaction. This study investigates how six carefully selected fitness influencers orchestrate multimodal representations of training, identity and the body on Instagram. These representations are analysed in relation to broader discourses of gender performance, visibility and power. The dataset comprises Instagram posts from six accounts chosen to reflect diverse embodied identities and ideological positions. These include: a gay male coach and a Muslim female trainer, both offering inclusive and counternormative portrayals of fitness; two instructors (one male and one female) who present a professional, motivational ethos grounded in education and discipline; and two influencers who exemplify more stereotypical extremes, that is, a hypermasculine male projecting hegemonic masculinity, and a hyperfeminised, sexualised female trainer. This contrastive design enables an in-depth examination of how visual and verbal elements construct, reinforce or challenge dominant narratives in digital fitness culture. Each post was analysed using Multimodal Discourse Analysis with particular focus on representational, interactive and compositional meanings. Key aspects included visual framing, caption tone and the imagetext relationship. The theoretical framework integrates postfeminist perspectives, the concept of hegemonic masculinity and Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power and reflexivity. This interdisciplinary approach reveals how online fitness content can both reproduce and resist dominant ideologies. Findings indicate that among the female accounts, only one constructs femininity in line with sexualised bodily norms oriented toward the male gaze. The other two offer more inclusive portrayals that challenge Western, male-dominated paradigms. In terms of masculinity, while one male influencer clearly exemplifies hegemonic ideals, thus emphasising control, aggression and superiority, the other two destabilise this model through care-based coaching and professional discourse. Nevertheless, unlike the female accounts, even the more inclusive male representations maintain an element of disciplinary control and reflexivity, thereby continuing to anchor masculinity within normative beauty standards