This book investigates how content creators on YouTube (YouTubers) construct multiple identities in their video-blogs (vlogs), including an expert self, a social self, and an authentic self. Bhatia employs a multi-perspective Critical Discourse Analysis framework to examine beauty videos and tutorials published by renowned YouTubers as multimodal discursive products that generate meanings through a combination of speech, body performances, and text (posted comments).
In chapter 1, YouTube is discussed as a representative new media platform that enables users to monetize their creativity via the intersection of social relationships, professional validation, and commercial pursuits. Considering ‘beauty’ as a topic that upholds a distinctive community of practice, Bhatia introduces the major identities of beauty vloggers on YouTube as relatable figures, knowledgeable experts, and entrepreneurial individuals.
Chapter 2 lays out the methodological framework, proposing a comprehensive analysis of YouTube beauty vlogs that engages sociocognitive, linguistic, and genre dimensions. Bhatia frames her research as about the interdiscursive identity formation of both vloggers and their audience, which is based on shared beliefs, practices, and generic knowledge that are mediated by the professional communication of YouTubers.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are the three analytical chapters. Bhatia shows in chapter 3 how beauty vloggers illustrate their professional expertise through compliance with YouTube interactive norms, deployment of specialized language, and demonstration of industrial insights. The author underscores a shifting dynamic in the digital age where established educational roles are adapted and exploited, while audiences transition from passive learners to active critics.
The focus in chapter 4 turns to the co-construction of ethnicity and beauty. Bhatia argues that YouTube facilitates the emergence of a virtual Third Space where diaspora communities wield linguistic power to redefine modern ethnic identities. By remixing language codes, cultural references, and material forms, YouTubers and their audiences challenge dominant expectations and creatively express their identities despite platform constraints.
Chapter 5 is an examination of the dialogic construction of an authentic self and connections with viewers in beauty tutorials, which features discursive strategies that aim to achieve a delicate balance between self-disclosure, commercial engagement, and community-building efforts. Bhatia argues that the emergence of digital intimacy within small collectives on YouTube channels is largely informed by a generated historical narrative about the YouTuber and her subscribers, who are believed to share values, knowledge, emotions, and practices.
Chapter 6 ends the volume with appeals for further investigations into how new technologies challenge traditional learning genres and blur boundaries between public and private contexts in a post-pandemic world, and into the mediating role of successful YouTubers in the reimagination of culture and region.
Investigating beauty tutorials as a professional genre of discourse, this book fills a research gap by analyzing how amateur experts in the YouTube beauty community reshape cultural intermediaries, professional practice, and authenticity. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists studying digital media would find this book inspiring in showing how users utilize technological affordances of platforms to discursively coordinate identity and community constructions. Bhatia's discussion of digital literacy would also be interesting for educators teaching in online spaces.
