Insta-Poetry and The Patriarchy
By: Heather Grant
Tags: Instapoets, Instapoetry, Rupi Kaur, Patriarchy, Feminism

Insta-Poetry and The Patriarchy

You don’t have to hate it just because teenage girls like it

Photo by alex bracken on Unsplash

When did it become uncool to like Rupi Kaur?

The Indian-born Canadian poet, illustrator, and author rose to fame on social media sites like Tumblr and Instagram with her short poems and delicate illustrations. Her first book, Milk and Honey, sold over 3 million copies worldwide and spent over a year on the New York bestseller list, her second, The Sun and Her Flowers, led her to be named on the BBC’s 100 women in 2017. She was at the forefront of the ‘instapoetry’ movement, and innovated the traditional art form, popularizing it in a new demographic.

Now she’s frequently mocked, as are other insta-poets (who also happen to be young women). Parody sites make fun of the art form, and literary gatekeepers claim it isn’t even art at all.

Whilst you could locate it in an age-old debate of what constitutes ‘good’ art, I think it falls into a different tradition. In the same category as twilight, one direction, pumpkin spice lattes, and Snapchat filters, insta-poets are associated with a population that is always the butt of the jokes: young girls.

Anything young girls are interested in gets marked as silly and depthless and taint how people view it. If it’s liked in this demographic, then everyone else has to hate it.

Since the times the diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ was given to women showing too much emotion, and thus deemed them ‘insane’, girls having a passion about anything has been viewed as ridiculous. It’s this misogynistic narrative that permits men to let all emotions loose as a football match but embarrasses girls who hold up a handmade sign and let out a squeal at a Justin Bieber concert. And on a similar grain, poems that are emotive and unashamedly feminine must be ridiculous.

Rupi Kaur isn’t your traditional middle-aged male academic poet, and she isn’t writing for the same audience as them. Neither is Charly Cox, Leticia Sala, or Lang Leav. They’re young women in the modern world writing for other young women in the modern world. They can’t, and shouldn’t be, measured on the same quality scale as other literary greats because they’re not trying to do the same thing as them.

They’re sharing their experiences of body image, sex, self-love, romantic love, insecurities and anxiety, and teenage girls are relating to it. They’re choosing feelings over form, and have adapted to the platform they’re writing for.

The poems are short which makes them memorable, like affirmations you can repeat to yourself. They’re aesthetic, because that’s part of the art, and what Instagram is essentially about. And they’re full of emotions because so are the girls reading them. Insta-poets have innovated the traditional form to bring it to a different demographic, and consequently, they’ve become a voice and confident for a frequently overlooked group.

If you’re a traditional poetry fan and think these new innovators aren’t ruining the art, ask yourself is it simply just my taste, or because of who I associate these poems with? Is it because I think they’re bad, or because I’ve been told to perceive them that way? And are they bad, or just not aimed at my demographic?

Personally, I love traditional poetry. I also love insta-poets (and a pumpkin spiced latte and Snapchat filters for that matter).