Poetry in Popular Culture: Instagram, Rupi Kaur, Feminism and the Utilitarian Value of Poetry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In order to explain the popularity of Instagram poetry, and of the Instapoet Rupi Kaur in particular, we have positioned it within the contemporary context of the changing poetic field, the context of popular media culture and the consumer society of late neoliberal capitalism. From a complex language construction requiring in its reception an educated reader, poetry has become simple, communicative and accessible to all. At a time when neoliberal capitalism appropriates, absorbs and alters every marginal practice, adjusting it to its needs, poetry has acquired a utilitarian value. The most interesting example of this utilitarian value can be found in the poems of Rupi Kaur, a Canadian poet with a South Asian background. Her poetry functions as self-help literature. Kaur defines herself as a feminist, which we have positioned within the context of neoliberal feminism, which has features in common with postfeminism and celebrity feminism. Postfeminism is a blend of feminist and antifeminist world views, and has contributed to the construction of new femininity. In the contemporary late neoliberal age it acquires a significant form in hyperfemininity as an unquestionable ideal omnipresent in the media, which all women must aspire to in order to be accepted by society. Kaur’s Instapoetry has appropriated feminist (intersectional) ideas for its (neoliberal) objectives. She provides advice on how to overcome painful relationship breakups, violence, racism, misogyny, the patriarchy and classism. This is realized through the use of formulas offered by New Age alternative spirituality. It is this spirituality that has been absorbed by neoliberal capitalism and incorporated into all aspects of services, in order to make the ruthless exploitation of workers in precarious jobs more bearable. Remediation is characteristic of Instapoetry. Poets use old and new media: drawings, handwriting or typewriting, photography, which is mediated by the digital technology of Instagram. In addition, they perform live in front of an audience, and an analysis of Rupi Kaur’s performances clearly shows that these are mass media events; thus Instapoetry can be understood as a specific form of popular media culture intended for a mass audience.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".