The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Female Body Narratives in the Digital Media Era: A Gender Anthropology Perspective

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_92How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Digital Media; Female Body Narrative; Gender Anthropology; Deconstruction; Reconstruction; Social Media; Performativity; The Gaze

Abstract

This paper looks into the big changes in female body stories caused by digital media appearing, using a special way called gender-anthropology to see how breaking down and rebuilding happen at the same time. For decades traditional media outlets have fed one monolithic and often Western-centric idealization of femininity into the world, objectifying and commodifying the female body. With the rise of digital platforms, especially social media, the single story is being significantly deconstructed. It has empowered the various ones, enabling the user-driven dissemination of different body types, races, abilities, and gender expressions, thus challenging hegemonies. But deconstruction phase is simultaneously met with a phase of complicated reconstruction process. New aesthetic orthodoxies have emerged, such as “Instagram Face,” while algorithms do the curation and amplification of particular forms of bodies. Even the empowerment achieved through movements such as body positivity is being commodified. Using a gender anthropological lens, it looks at it not just as media trends, but as cultural things involving performative and building digital communities and working out how identity gets formed. It analyzes the change of “gaze” to a male view point to a combination of the female gaze, panoptic gaze, and algorithmic gaze. The paper asserts that though the digital era unarguably cracked open the old monolithic narrative, it also built anew, far more complex, and oft contradictory landscape for female embodiment – one that demands sophisticated anthropological investigation to grasp completely.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ran Shan
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/26
TI  - The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Female Body Narratives in the Digital Media Era: A Gender Anthropology Perspective
BT  - Proceeding of 2025 8th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 858
EP  - 864
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_92
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_92
ID  - Shan2026
ER  -