This research focuses on the use of feminized virtual avatars (FVAs) in the fashion industry and explores the risk of using FVAs for the appropriation and exploitation of marginalized communities and identities. Through a critical visual analysis of the virtual avatars Shudu Gram and Miquela Sousa, this study analyzes how they are made to represent gendered and racialized women’s bodies. The research aims to understand how the representations of FVAs reflect and influence power dynamics and social inequalities. This thesis found that the representations of Shudu and Miquela reflect and reinforce racial stereotypes, perpetuate gender inequalities, and uphold unrealistic beauty standards. Moreover, their representations of a Black woman and a Latina reinforce the exotification and Othering of Black women and Latinas, reducing their identities to a commodified aesthetic. Furthermore, the sexualized representations of Shudu and Miquela reinforce gender stereotypes and power imbalances. Finally, the lack of agency and autonomy in FVAs further complicates objectifying and exotifying portrayals. This research's theoretical and practical implications emphasize the need for critical analysis, ethical considerations, and inclusive practices in using FVAs. The study highlights the importance of critically analyzing FVAs and their implications within the context of gendered colonial legacies and structural inequalities.

The present study comparatively examined the socio-political and economic transformation of the indigenous Sámi in Sweden and the Indian American in the United States of America occurring first as a consequence of colonization and later as a product of interaction with the modern territorial and industrial state, from approximately 1500 to 1900. The first colonial encounters of the Europeans with these autochthonous populations ultimately created an imagery of the exotic Other and of the noble savage. Despite these disparaging representations, the cross-cultural settings in which these interactions took place also produced the hybrid communities and syncretic life that allowed levels of cultural accommodation, autonomous space, and indigenous agency to emerge. By the nineteenth century, however, the modern territorial and industrial state rearranges the dynamics and reaches of power across a redefined territorial sovereign space, consequently, remapping belongingness and identity. In this context, the status of indigenous peoples, as in the case of Sámi and of Indian Americans, began to change at par with industrialization and with modernity. At this point in time, indigenous populations became a hindrance to be dealt with the legal re-codification of Indigenousness into a vacuumed limbo of disenfranchisement. It is, thus, the modern territorial and industrial state that re-creates the exotic into an indigenous Other. The present research showed how the initial interaction between indigenous and Europeans changed with the emergence of the modern state, demonstrating that the nineteenth century, with its fundamental impulses of industrialism and modernity, not only excluded and marginalized indigenous populations because they were considered unfit to join modern society, it also re-conceptualized indigenous identity into a constructed authenticity.