Gender Youth and Social Media
In the struggle to change the place ascribed to women in culture and language, the women’s movement has challenged traditional divisions between High Art and mass culture and the compartmentalisation of knowledge between disciplines. Arguing that cultural forms as diverse as the Page Three pin-up and the female nude in Renaissance painting articulate similar ideologies of female sexuality, feminist criticism undermines old cultural categories and makes a radical critique of all forms of representation. While, therefore, it is necessary to grasp the specific differences in the power and productiveness of images for women, it is equally important to see where different kinds of representation draw upon and restate the same relationships of sexual power and subordination between men and women.
Rosemary Betterton, Looking On, 1987
These research projects on gender, youth and social media take an inter-disciplinary approach, applying feminist representational critique from film, television and performance studies to representations created by young people online. This research is driven by questions such as:
- How do new technologies for self-representation and identity performance shape, transform, and reproduce gendered dynamics and sexual politics for young people?
- How can feminist conceptions of sexual objectification be understood within the relatively new context of social media representations?
Gender discourses within self-produced online representations are interrogated in this work.
Recent Gender, Youth and Social Media Projects:
Bitches, bunnies, and BFFs (best friends forever): A feminist analysis of young women’s performance of contemporary popular femininities on MySpace
Dr Amy Shields Dobson
This book is currently being written. It examines the phenomenon of highly assertive, hetero-sexualised, individualised and often ‘traditionally unfeminine’ self-representation by Australian young women on the social network site MySpace, drawing primarily on theoretical work from the disciplines of feminist media and performance studies.
There is an assumption underlying much early second-wave feminist film, television, and theatre critique that if and ‘when’ more women are themselves producing cultural representations, that images of women in the media will, as a matter of course, give rise to more diverse, authentic, and multi-dimensional female subjectivities.
I explore how this feminist ideal is playing out today in the self-representations of young women on MySpace. The chapters focus on four aspects of self-presentation found to be prevalent; ‘hetero-sexy’ decorations and images; display of female friendships; ‘laddish’ performativity and display of alcohol consumption; and textual mottos of self-worth and esteem. Aspects of popular young feminine performativity that feminist theory may be, as yet, ill-equipped to deal with and coherently critique are foregrounded.
Gender, young people and digital identities
Dr Amy Shields Dobson, Professor Denise Cuthbert, with students from ATS3852, 201
Completed with third-year Sociology and Gender Studies students, this project explores issues of gender identity in young people’s engagement with social network sites. Supervised by the chief investigators, students analysed gender discourses in young people’s expressions of identity in a range of online environments. They presented their work at a mini-conference held in December 2010. Student investigations include: an analysis of ‘emo’ male identity performances on MySpace; discourse analysis of comments on the Facebook profiles of Julia Gillard and Tony Abbot in the days leading up to the 2010 Australia Federal Election; the identity performances of veiled and non-veiled young Australian-Muslim women on MySpace.
Student work from this project has recently been published in the Warwick-based journal of undergraduate research ‘Reinvention’:
Cam Girls: Feminism and Girl Power in a Technocratic World
Amy Shields Dobson, 2004
This project documents and analyses the ‘cam girl’ phenomenon around the turn of the 21st Century. It provides a typology of cam girl performance styles and locates the cam girl phenomenon within popular discourses of ‘girl power’ and DIY cultural practices, interrogating the kind of self-production and self-commodification encouraged of, and engaged in, by young women.