Judith Butler- Zoella

Judith Butlers ideas base around the ideology that Gender is a performance : its what you do at particular times , rather than universally who you are. She says gender is a social construct that reinforces a binary view of gender relations in which we are divided into two clear groups of male or female. She says that no one is a gender from the start and that it is constructed through the media and is performative.

We can see Butlers ideas of gender representation through Zoella and he platforms, including her blog, vlog and social media. These ideas are most prevalent in her blog/ website due to the posts and general website being clearly targeted towards women. To do this, Zoella uses numerous stereotypes to construct what society sees as "feminine" for example a overall clean, neat theme is used in the website with a great deal of pink and pastel colours being used. We also see female pronouns used frequently, inferring how it is suggesting a female audience. One article in particular that can reinforce these ideas would be "Snog, marry avoid! The Zoella teams best and worst beauty buys" This posts title alone suggests a very simple degrading representation of what the "Zoella team" perceives it to mean to be a woman. This title infers how all women are interested in is boys and beauty , by referencing the popular game stereotypically played by teenage girls. We can see this again when it says "Pretty packaging is our Achilles heel." suggesting how women are interested in unimportant issues, like if packaging of makeup is pretty, compared to how a man would be represented as being more interested in politics or current affairs. This perception of gender norms is constructed through the media and so Butlers theories apply.

In the past Zoella has always represented her self as a feminine, domestic, sexless woman creating a hyperreal construct for her audience.In turn her audience, often young and impressionable girls to follow certain constructed expectations of women through her censored image. However despite most people recognising her life probably isn't this innocent , she achieves a sense of authenticity by acting like the everyday person in every other sense, she films her shopping trips, doesn't edit out when she's clumsy or stumbles over her words. This idea that she is 100% real just intensifies the idea that this is what women should be like in her other aspects. However recently she has become more open about sex and even has a post about the best sex toys on her blog and describes it as "self care". This drastic change illustrates how gender conceptions are constantly changing, reinforcing Butlers ideas of gender being constructed and a performance as there are no permanent "rules " surrounding gender.