[ecrea] Special Issue Call - Making Digital Cultures of Gender and Sexuality with Social Media

Special Issue of Social Media and Society


Making Digital Cultures of Gender and Sexuality with Social Media


Jean Burgess, Elija Cassidy, Stefanie Duguay, and Ben Light

Digital Media Research Centre - Queensland University of Technology


Sociocultural Internet research has, for most of its history, engaged
with questions of gender and sexuality. Early work exploring  the
emancipatory potential of the Internet, for example, pointed
optimistically towards the possibilities for gender fluidity, but more
critically towards the problems of gender tourism and the reinforcement
of biologically deterministic conceptions of gender roles. Either way,
digital cultures are sites of gender construction. Similarly,
sexualities have been digitally mediated and re-mediated as people with
diverse sexual identities have found support via networked media,
experienced the entanglement  of physical and digitally mediated
embodiments of sexuality, and digital media have been  used for both
challenging and preserving heteronormativity.

This special issue aims to bring together new research and scholarship
on onn how digital cultures of gender and sexuality are made, focusing
on social media as a particular sociotechnical and cultural site of
these processes. Everyday social media activities are comprised not just
of exchanges between users but also involve the influence of platform
owners, designers, and other stakeholders, such as marketers and data
miners. For example, although Facebook’s decision to allow users to
display a custom gender identity (outside the male/female binary)
appears to be empowering to users, even this additional element of
self-presentation is influenced by programmed specifications, datafiable
for profit, and dependent on Facebook’s corporate policy-makers.

The importance of considering digital cultures of gender and sexuality
further, and a key reason for this issue, is due to a number of
developments. First, more people than ever are participating with
digital cultures due to social media. However, the nature of this
participation is complicated, mutable and in no way uniform. Second, the
sophistication of the devices, infrastructures, functions and interfaces
presented by social media to users is, without welcoming in
technological determinism, arguably becoming greater.  Moreover, this
sophistication is at the same time both visible and invisible depending
upon a range of considerations – such as levels of digital literacy,
commercial interests, algorithmic programming, politics and power.

This special issue seeks to further interrogate questions of the
contemporary making of digital cultures of gender and sexuality with
social media.  Whilst difference-based approaches to understanding the
gendered make up of social media users and audiences have been
addressed, this issue focuses upon the ways in which gender and
sexuality are constructed and circulated with and by this media.
Possible topics might include:

  *

    Identity

  *

    Harassment, discrimination, and cyberbullying

  *

    Activism, resistance, and reappropriation

  *

    Cultures and communities

  *

    Commodification and political economies

  *

    Inscription and regulation of gender and sexuality by software

  *

    Circulation of gender and sexuality based controversies

  *

    Pornography

  *

    Digitally mediated dating and personal relationships

  *

    Sexual health and wellbeing

  *

    Intersections of gender and sexuality with age, ethnicity,
    (dis)ability, etc.

Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted to Ben Light
((ben.light /at/ qut.edu.au) <mailto:(ben.light /at/ qut.edu.au)>) by 1 June  2015.
Where appropriate, please nominate an author for correspondence. On the
basis of these short abstracts, invitations to submit full papers (of no
more than 8000 words) will then be sent out by 14 June 2015. Full papers
will be due by 31 August 2015, and will undergo the usual Social Media
and Society review procedure. Please note that an invitation to submit a
full paper for review does not guarantee paper acceptance.

+++

new Sage open access journal Social Media and Society 
(http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal202332)
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