Abstract

Traditionally, entrepreneurship has often been looked through the lens of masculine ideals,

but recent works have highlighted the role of social context, cultural and gendered norms in

shaping entrepreneurship (Essers et al, 2025; McKeever et al., 2014). Entrepreneurship has

often been believed to be the pathway for women’s empowerment and emancipation. This

framing rests on the western notions of agency and visibility, that assumes empowerment to

be the natural outcome of entrepreneurship (Ojediran et al., 2022). Feminist scholars have

challenged this view, arguing that empowerment is a contested process influenced by power,

visibility and exclusion (Ahl, 2006; Calás et al., 2009). Gill (2007) and Banet-Wiser et al. (2020) have also shown empowerment portrayed as having self-love, self-discipline, selfies, and being market-friendly instead of collective struggle or systemic change. Research in culture and media studies has already critiqued this view of empowerment, but

The entrepreneurship studies have yet to examine how empowerment is practiced, monetized,

and negotiated as an entrepreneurial activity in digital spaces. This paper investigates how feminist concepts of empowerment transform as they go through entrepreneurial practices? To answer this question, that chapter looks into the entrepreneurial practices in the Body positive movement—an originally activist space aimed at reclaiming diverse bodies, now widely commercialized across digital platforms (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). The chapter draws on the post feminism and entrepreneurship as practice (EaP) to examine how beauty practitioners and the influencers in movement engage in aesthetic, affective and moral labour to create entrepreneurial value. Postfeminism serves as a sensibility for understanding empowerment with emphasis on self-surveillance, discipline, choice, and individualism (Adamson & Kelan, 2019; Lewis, 2014). The EaP focuses on the “situated, embodied and relational” (Dey & Steyaert, 2022) actions of the entrepreneurs (the influencers and beauty practitioners) to create value and gain legitimacy (Thompson & Whiteside et al., 2021).

The study draws on the semi- structured interviews and discursive analysis of social

media accounts of three body positive influencers. The findings reveal how empowerment is

practiced through three entrepreneurial practices: 1) Appropriating activism 2) Aestheticizing

Empowerment 3) Branding Inclusion. This paper extends the practice perspective to show how value is produced through affective, embodied, and moral labor in digital spaces. The study demonstrates that practices such as self-branding, confidence building, and authenticity are essential for entrepreneurial actors create legitimacy and value on social media.