Abstract
Beauty standards are powerful sites where gender, race, class, and identity are constructed and contested. Far from being natural or universal, ideals of beauty are spatial and political, shaped by uneven global flows of culture and power. This paper uses a human geography lens to examine how beauty is produced, circulated, and resisted across digital spaces. With the rise of social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, the geography of beauty now extends beyond the body and the nation into algorithmically mediated, transnational networks. Social media amplifies globally dominant aesthetic, slimness, fair skin, Eurocentric features, while also enabling localized and hybrid forms of beauty to gain visibility. These dynamics create, what I coin, a digital human geography of beauty, where global visibility, regional traditions, and local politics interact in complex and unequal ways. Examples include the global marketing of Korean “K-beauty,” the persistence of French “effortless chic,” and the U.S. “trad-wife” revival of nostalgic femininity online. Yet these spaces are not neutral. Platform algorithms privilege commercially profitable and normatively attractive bodies, marginalizing darker skin, fat, trans, disabled, and rural identities. As a result, social media aesthetics do not simply mirror cultural preferences but actively shape boundaries of belonging and exclusion. Methodologically, the study combines digital ethnography of hashtags and influencer communities with discourse and algorithmic analysis. By situating digital aesthetics within human geography, it argues that beauty operates as a spatial and political field, one that maps power, visibility, and inequality across the digital landscape.
Presenters
Sabah UddinAssistant Professor, Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Bowie State University, Maryland, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Beauty Standards, Human Geography, Digital Spaces, Social Media
