Digital Femininities

The Gendered Construction of Cultural and Political Identities Online

Frankie Rogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000604238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital Femininities: The Gendered Construction of Cultural and Political Identities Online examines the role of new media technologies in the production of girls' cultural and political identities. The book argues that the varied and complex spaces which make up our 'social media' should be conceptualised as important terrains upon which neoliberal and postfeminist subjectivities can be both reproduced and subverted. In doing so, the book explores many key issues underpinning current debates around gender politics and digital media, including gendered spatial politics, visibility, surveillance and regulation, beauty politics, and civic and political engagement and activism.

Over the last decade, the position of girls and young women within the digital landscape of social media has been a topic of much debate. On the one hand, girls' social media practices are presented as a key site of concern, wherein new digital technologies are said to have produced an intensification of individualised, neoliberal and postfeminist identities. Conversely, others have championed access to social media for young people as a potentially useful political tool, enabling previously marginalised political subjects (such as girls) to access and participate within new and exciting political cultures. Locating itself at the intersection of these two approaches, this book offers a fresh contribution to these debates. Based upon the findings from focus groups with girls and young women aged between 12 and 18 in England, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the digital cultures that emerged from the study.

This timely book will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary femininity and feminism and the role of digital media in the production of cultural, political and gendered identities.

1 Digital femininitiesAn introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780429356117-1

In January 2020, Dolly Parton kickstarted the viral ‘LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder’ challenge: a tongue-in-cheek comment on the various presentations of self that take place across different social media sites (Young 2020). The ‘joke’ of the meme, of course, was that a picture one might post on LinkedIn (a professional networking platform) would not be the same picture one might want to share on Tinder (a dating platform) or Facebook (where you have connections to numerous ‘friends’ and acquaintances). This nod towards the various and often quite distinct productions of self and identity that take place across various social media platforms sums up much of the research I have been carrying out into girls’ and young women’s digital cultures over the last eight years. As my research into girls’ relationships with social media developed across the 2010s, I became more and more aware that ‘social media’ was becoming increasingly nebulous as a term and, more specifically, as an analytical category for the purpose of sociological research. What does it mean to research ‘social media’ (and our relationship to it) when the sites and platforms available to us have become increasingly varied and are taken up for a variety of reasons (cultural, social, political) within different contexts? Examining the production of selves within different digital contexts is a central part of this book, and formed an integral part of my discussions with girls and young women in the research I conducted in England in the mid-2010s. As will be discussed shortly, the research I conducted demonstrated the highly complex and often contradictory nature of the relationship that people can have to ‘social media’ and, for my own research participants, the conflicting nature of their attitudes towards ‘social media’ can often be explained through the variety of apps, sites, behaviours and feelings the term encompasses for them.

Despite the term being increasingly vague, it is certainly true that, over the last decade, the position of young millennial and an emerging generation of ‘Gen Z’ girls and young women within the digital landscape of social media has proven to be a topic of much interest to a number of feminist academics, journalists and cultural commentators. On the one hand, girls’ social media practices are presented as a key site of concern, wherein new digital technologies are said to have produced an intensification of individualised, neoliberal and postfeminist identities (Duffy and Hund 2015). At the same time, others have championed access to social media for young women as a potentially useful political tool, wherein previously marginalised political subjects such as girls can access and participate within new and exciting political cultures (see Keller 2016). I began exploring this complex terrain of debate in 2013, when the perimeters of digital sociology were being formulated (Orton-Johnson and Prior 2013) and research into digital cultures was beginning to expand and intensify. Since then, as will be documented throughout this book, the debates and the cultural and political terrains they are operating within have become progressively more complex and fraught, making it increasingly difficult to assess and categorise what all of this ‘means.’

When I first began my research into digital cultures, a growing number of concerns around girls’ and young women’s uses of social media seemed to dominate public discourse. Reports of excessive or unhealthy engagements with ‘the virtual world’ were rife, and news outlets often focused on British women’s tendencies to take and post too many stylised or sexualised selfies. Some reports claimed that young British women between 16 and 25 years old spent ‘5 hours and 36 minutes a week,’ or 48 minutes a day, on the activity, often with the primary hope of ‘attracting love interests’ or ‘making ex-partners jealous’ (Strick 2015). The selfie became a key site of concern in popular discourse, with journalists, writers and commentators frequently trying to make sense of the broader ‘consequences’ of girls’ and young women’s digital media practices (Sanghani 2014; Sales 2016). However, at the same time, culturally powerful ‘hashtag activisms’ became increasingly common as a way to advance an emerging feminist moment (Clark 2016) and the #MeToo movement which became mainstream in 2017 demonstrated the capacity of social media to produce a form of networked feminism (although, of course, #MeToo and ‘hashtag activism’ more widely is not without its critics – see Zarkov and Davis 2018; Baer 2016).

These contradictions and competing discourses seemed to raise a number of difficult and seemingly unanswerable questions. How can we unpack young women’s engagement with digital cultures when they are simultaneously positioned as a tool for the promotion of individualistic narcissism and as a site of collective political resistance? Must ‘social media’ be characterised as an either good or bad, oppressive or liberating terrain in order for feminists to be able to make sense of it? Why do women seem to outnumber men on (particularly visual) social media sites (Harris 2008; Schuster 2013; Pew Research Centre 2015; Miller et al. 2016), and what are the wider implications of this feminisation? Can social media be championed as a progressive political space for young women, when it is simultaneously accused of contributing to a rise in the (self-)surveillance and (self-)regulation of women’s bodies (Elias and Gill 2018) and being a site of digital or ‘networked’ misogyny (Jane 2014; Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2016; Ging and Siapera 2018; Bratich and Banet-Weiser 2019)? Indeed, is the term ‘social media’ – vast and diverse as it is – even particularly useful or meaningful as an object of analysis? This book engages with these questions and seeks to offer a nuanced investigation of the various ways in which girls and young women may produce cultural and political identities through their everyday engagement with digital cultures.

As such, this book offers a methodologically innovative intervention to a key topic of concern in a number of academic disciplines: cultural girlhood studies, youth studies, media studies and the (digital) sociology of gender. By exploring both ‘traditional’ politics and cultural politics, it offers new knowledge of the ways in which the cultural and political contradictions of femininity are navigated, negotiated and enacted within contemporary digital cultures through an engagement with a number of girls and young women between the ages of 12 and 18 in England. Feminist scholars have previously noted the often-irreconcilable demands that are placed on young women within the context of contemporary Western gender relations (Budgeon 2011: 88) and it has been noted that contradiction is at the heart of contemporary feminine subjectivity in neoliberal, postfeminist contexts (Gonick 2006; Baker 2010; Griffin et al. 2013). Negotiating these complex subjectivities becomes an increasingly dilemmatic process for girls and young women operating within digital contexts, where competing and frequently contradictory discourses are often circulating at the same time, in the same spaces. As such, this book aims to examine the ways in which digital cultures can be utilised as tools to both reproduce and – sometimes simultaneously – resist culturally and politically dominant constructions of young femininity.

With this book, it is my aim to offer an interpretation of and contribution to major contemporary debates in the fields of gender, digital media, culture and politics as they evolve within neoliberal and postfeminist contexts. As I do this partly by examining the experiences of a small number of girls and young women in urban areas of England, it is important to note that my discussions will be limited in their generalisability and cannot claim to speak to the experiences of every girl or young woman in the UK, nor the world more generally. Similarly, while I explore the gendered construction of digital cultures, it is important to note that these spaces are also highly structured by class (Yates and Lockley 2018; Fuchs 2019) and ‘race’ (Graham and Smith 2016; Hill 2018; Sobande 2020). While I touch on these areas where they emerge in my data, my focus group discussions were focused largely around gender, which inevitably means that my analysis does not represent a full and complete account of participants’ digital lives. However, this research can contribute to growing debates and discussions surrounding the increasingly complex intersection of gender and the digital. Although this study took place in England, there may well be scope for international crossover and overlap, as many of the theoretical works that are drawn upon in the coming chapters demonstrate that similar constructions of young femininity have operated in other global contexts. Having said that, it is important to reiterate that while this book explores some general trends, it does not claim to speak for one homogenous ‘experience’ of digital cultures. Rather, it explores some particular instances and case studies that emerged as important within my own research and amongst my own participants.

Gendering the digital

As has been called for by Green and Singleton (2013), there is a need to ‘gender’ the digital age. It has often been noted that, in the early days of internet studies, there was a sense of optimism about the gendered possibilities that a new technological revolution could offer. As a space where disembodiment appeared conceivable, there was a sense of possibility for the advancement of a post-gender world in a digital age (Haraway 1991). However, discussions of digital space in more recent years have tended to emphasise the highly gendered nature of the internet, and have highlighted the various sites and digital spaces which have re-traditionalised, rather than de-traditionalised, gender relations (Dobson 2015; McRobbie 2015; Elias and Gill 2018; Duffy 2015, 2016). Social media platforms such as Instagram (Abidin 2016), Tumblr (Kanai 2017), Snapchat (Handyside and Ringrose 2017) and YouTube (Wotanis and McMillan 2014) have been of particular interest to scholars studying the gendered aspects of contemporary digital life.

Discussions of social media in public life are also highly gendered, and are often centred around anxieties and panics in relation to the impacts that social media has on girls and young women, particularly around body image and mental health (see Campbell 2019; Macmillan 2017; Heger 2020; Criddle 2021). While the academic debates have moved beyond the binary thinking that has previously characterised technology and, specifically, social media sites as either oppressive or empowering, there remains an urgent need to capture the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions that characterise the everyday digital lives of girls and young women in contemporary Britain. As such, this research attempts to contribute to these debates which recognise and unpack the gendered dimensions of digital practices.

Contemporary youth cultures and the shifting space of ‘social media’: what it is and why it matters

‘Social media’ is a key component of what has been termed Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005), a phrase used to describe a new era of the internet dominated by social media and user-generated content. This contrasts to the previous era of the internet (Web 1.0), which for most people was largely limited to the passive consumption of content, rather than any active generation or production. Web 2.0 is characterised by spaces of media production such as social networking sites, blogs, image and video-sharing sites, and apps. There is no agreed-upon definition of social media in the academic literature, and there have been various attempts across disciplines to contribute to this theory-building by asking questions such as: what makes social media social? And, what defines specific tools as ‘social media’? (see Carr and Hayes 2015; Fuchs 2014). For Miller et al. (2016: 3), the term ‘social media’ refers to a new form of social life that is characteri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Digital femininities: An introduction
• PART I Theories and context
• PART II Digital cultures: New research
• Index