In recent years, a new poetry genre has emerged, currently known as Instapoetry, and its chief practitioners are often young females (Pâquet 2019). Instapoetry has many characteristics influenced by the nature of the Instagram platform on which it is published, such as its brevity and its inclusion of visual effects with the text. However, its resemblance and links to older forms of modernist and post-modernist poetry are undeniable; such as its use of symbolism, expressionism, its move away from tradition, and its sense of activism. The “retrofitting” (Chasar 2020) of modernist poetic themes and formats for a digital medium opens up new possibilities for new ways of thinking. I suggest that this new format which can be seen as restrictive, allows for an opening and for new modes of subjectivity. Instapoetry engages feelings and ideas through an inclusive approach and that is essentially what gives it its potential as an activist and educational facility. Through its penchant for activism, Instapoetry engages in a metamodernist global consciousness shift, which Luke Turner defines as a move away beyond postmodernism and an “emergence of a palpable collective desire for change” (Turner 2015).  Female Instapoets often employ nature motifs in their Instapoetry, however, the nature motif is portrayed as something that connects, contrary to the restrictive sense often applied by patriarchal systems. In order to break away from a simplistic reading of Instapoetry as a poetic genre completely closed in by algorithms and word limits and to show the openings that this poetic genre allows, I suggest a new name “Digital Media Ecofeminist Poetry.” I attempt a qualitative methodology, through close reading of various Instapoems by female Instapoets, to demonstrate their nuanced use of form, language, and visuality and I examine the ways in which the digital medium influences this new form of poetry.

This thesis aims to find out how Rupi Kaur became a new voice of feminism. Research has shown that “social media can be capable of advancing the feminist movement by bringing greater visibility to women’s rights issues [and] facilitating effective communication” (Kamei, 2022). Thus, the thesis investigates poems from Rupi Kaur’s Instagram profile by examining which feminist issues Rupi Kaur highlights in her poems and how Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry gains visibility through networks.  The theoretical framework of the work is composed of feminist theories with an intersectional focus by hooks, Crenshaw and Spivak and of a feminist theory that includes the digital in addition to intersectionality, by Cochrane. It also engages with Castells paradigm of the network society. To examine relevant data, van Dijk’s (2013) approach of a critical discourse analysis is used.  The main results of the thesis are that Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry consists of pattern, textual and presentation wise, which gives her poetry a recognition value. Moreover, it reveals that whenever Rupi Kaur highlights feminist issues within the feminist Instapoems elaborated, they share a focus either on racial issues or on the empowerment of women. Finally, the thesis makes clear that all nodes in a network society, in interaction with the communication technology, are important for the visibility of the product of a network society. As a conclusion with regard to the research focus of Rupi Kaur becoming a new voice of feminism the thesis shows that she managed to build a brand for herself. While she independently delivers feminist messages that follow similar approaches as significant scholars of feminism, Castells paradigm illustrates that she depends on her followers and the algorithm of the platform with regard to the visibility of her Instapoetry. Therefore, Rupi Kaur became a new voice of feminism with the help of the network socitey.

Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry.