Performative Micro-Identity of the Female Dāʻī : Aesthetic Piety and Platformed Authority in Oki Setiana Dewi’s Instagram
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Abstract
On Instagram, religious authority is increasingly produced through brief, visually mediated performances rather than sustained theological argument. This article examines how Oki Setiana Dewi constructs and sustains female Islamic authority through a performative micro-identity shaped by aesthetic piety, gendered expectations, and platformed commerce. Drawing on six months of non-reactive netnography and Digital Critical Discourse Analysis (January-June 2026), the study analyses 45 high-engagement Instagram posts and 1,500 audience comments using Saldaña’s two-cycle coding and Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework. The findings identify three recurring micro-performances: soft shar‘ī styling within tranquil domestic settings, a maternal preaching cadence that recasts sermons as care, and sub-ninety-second moral narratives that translate jurisprudential themes into everyday household wisdom. Together, these practices enable Oki to exercise public religious authority through nurturance rather than doctrinal confrontation. Commercial content further becomes integrated into this authority, as shar‘ī fashion and skincare are presented as legitimate expressions of modesty and received by followers as compatible with sincerity. The study advances the concept of performative micro-identity as a portable analytical lens for explaining how female religious authority is assembled, negotiated, and sustained within contemporary platformed Islam.
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Ilaihi, Wahyu, and Aniek Nurhayati. “Performative Micro-Identity of the Female Dāʻī : Aesthetic Piety and Platformed Authority in Oki Setiana Dewi’s Instagram”. Islamica: Jurnal Studi Keislaman 21, no. 1 (September 30, 2026): 31-57. Accessed October 1, 2026. https://islamica.uinsa.ac.id/index.php/islamica/article/view/1303.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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Robert Kozinets, Netnography: Redefined, 2nd ed. (London: SAGE Publications, 2015).
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Sarah Pink, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi, Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (London: SAGE Publications, 2016).
Sunarwoto, “Salafi Dakwah Radio: A Contest for Religious Author¬ity,” Archipel 91 (2016): 203–30, https://doi.org/10.4000/archipel.314.
Susie Khamis, Lawrence Ang, and Raymond Welling, “Self-Brand-ing, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influenc-ers,” Celebrity Studies 8, no. 2 (2017): 191–208, https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2016.1218292.
Taina Bucher and Anne Helmond, “The Affordances of Social Me-dia Platforms,” in The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, ed. Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell (London: SAGE Publications, 2018), 233–53.
Theresa Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Net¬works (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
Tim Highfield, Social Media and Everyday Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).
Yuyun Sunesti, Noorhaidi Hasan, and Muhammad Najib Azca, “Young Salafi-Niqabi and Hijrah: Agency and Identity Negoti-ation,” Indonesian Journal of Islam and Muslim Societies 8, no. 2 (2018): 173–98, https://doi.org/10.18326/ijims.v8i2.173-198.
Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry (Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications, 1985).
Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199999736.001.0001.