Piety Commodification of Niqabis in Social Media Instagram (original) (raw)

This article explains how the discourse of piety displayed by Indonesian niqabis celebrity women on digital media such as instagram has been negotiated and commodified for certain purposes. Using the theoretical concept of the commodification of piety, in the sense of adding a brand (a kind of new capital of piety) to explain commodity marketing, this article argues that by using the social media platform instagram, niqabis women who own muslim fashion businesses have modified their values of piety about the female body in the Islamic context. A qualitative approach with a feminist paradigm is used to view the diversity of digital data in the form of text captions and photos in Instagram posts. The conclusion of this article reveals that the niqabis on Instagram utilizes the value of piety in the form of hijrah discourse and the 'syar'i' muslim fashion categorization, to build a brand, which unconsciously also contains propaganda for muslim women's body regulation. It means that there is a process of commodification of the values constructed through Instagram social media. The process does not only involve the niqab and messages of piety, but also the female body which is used as a commodity to boost sales of muslim fashion products.