How to Show an Image of Myself: A Methodological Approach to Analyzing Media Self-Presentation in the Context of Gender-Political Positioning

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a methodological design for reconstructing media self-presentations on social media platforms. With the proposed framework we address the interplay of the action-based production and the visual self-presentation of social media accounts. We triangulate image cluster analysis according to MÜLLER (2016) and the text and thematic field analysis of ROSENTHAL (2015 [2005]) to capture both visual and textual components. The article is the result of a methodological exploration aimed at reconstructing the media self-presentation of an account in terms of its gender-political positioning and gendered representations. Using a politically far-right account on the platform X as an example, we reflect on our research practice, illustrate the potentials and limitations of this approach and discuss the methodological integration of the two methods. We argue that this combined analysis enables the reconstruction of thematic fields by considering the visual and the action-based dimensions, and the identification of the current political and gendered self-positioning as well as its visual and textual construction. In doing so, we can decode the Gestalt of media self-presentations.