Virtual influencer in una prospettiva di genere. I gender displays e le estetiche di Lil Miquela tra social fiction e cyberspace

This paper deploys the perspective of Gender and Media Studies in order to analyze the Instagram profile of Miquela Sousa (Lil Miquela), whose account has, since 2016, reached 3 million followers. The aim is to verify if and how the phenomenon of digital influencers, following a pop or post-feminist culture widely spread by social media, affects online gender aesthetics through the use of digital affordances and constraints. The results reveal an ambivalent mediated reality which does not appear as a simple continuity or breaking, but as a complication of different identity formations.