Sexualisation

• Zoella and other women are not often sexualised in her content
• Women are often shown in quite ‘family friendly’ ways eg no swearing, no revealing clothing, a focus on fun rather than shock value
• She may choose to represent herself and others like this because of the young age of her target audience
• Another reason is that she may want to avoid bad publicity, to avoid losing sponsors or brand deals
• She is not always successful in representing herself in a popular way and has gotten in trouble for posting homophobic comments as well as general slurs
• Controversial content such as swearing, or offensive behavior or imagery could lead to her sites being filtered out from audiences searches or could lead to her videos being ‘demonetised’ by Youtube or only available to an adult audience which would restrict her income
• So she represents herself as mostly quite ‘clean’
• Zoella ‘performs’ a lot of tasks repetitively in her videos
• Tasks that are often associated with femininity eg applying makeup, trying on clothes, cooking or cleaning
• These performances may construct her identity as female and reinforce notions of what femininity means to the audience
• As well as representing women in domestic ways, Zoella does also post content that often represents women in quite powerful ways too
• For example her National Women's Day post where she discusses family members, friends and celebrities who inspire her
• So there are some posts that challenge gender stereotypes to a certain degree