Ruptures in Authenticity and Authentic Ruptures: Producing White Influencer Vulnerability

Résumé analytique

This essay, part of CMTD's Kids & Technology series, examines how authenticity is performed in influencer culture. Sarah Banet-Weiser traces how visibility, vulnerability, burnout, scandal, and recovery are mobilized by predominantly white influencers, analyzing the layered relationships between visibility, authenticity, and vulnerability in the online performances of self by young women.

She argues that performances of authenticity for young women online depend on artifice and manipulation, and uses case studies of professional influencers to show how this dynamic works and what happens when it breaks down, in terms of burnout, scandal, and the creation of "fake" accounts. She further argues that these performances are bounded by the privilege of whiteness: how such performances of self are received and rewarded depends on one's racial identity. The essay considers what these gendered and racialized performances of authenticity and vulnerability mean for the young audiences who consume them.