Our fourth issue of 2024 has a focus on a range of media forms and practices – sexts, selfies, community question answering sites, blogs and video games.
In the first of these, Willemijn Krebbekx considers how a gendered script about sexting prescribes how it is understood and dealt with. Focusing on a case where a girl’s nude picture was circulated in a secondary school in the Netherlands, Krebbekx shows how the script adopted by teachers and pupils highlighted the girl’s responsibility and guilt for sending the picture, while making invisible the actions of others, such as boys who also send pictures and girls who own pictures of both girls and boys. The use of the script worked to mask and enforce power relations of race and gender as well as obscuring important aspects of the daily practices of taking, sending, and relating through pictures.
Su Holmes and Bethany Atkins draw on their interviews with mothers about their maternal selfie practices, locating these in the broader histories of family photography and historical ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ motherhood. They explore how mothers navigate the selfie in relation to their motherhood identities and how they both resist and reproduce discourses on acceptable forms of motherhood in the process. They show how selfies are important in making women visible, but also operate as a way of demonstrating good motherhood practices, and examine the difficulties of negotiating norms of attractiveness, authenticity and displays of negative affect.
The next two papers consider how women use media spaces to challenge gender orthodoxies. In the first of these, Rongji Zhang, Yumin Chen and Xiang Zhao consider how female PhDs – depicted in Chinese mainstream media as sexless ‘leftovers’ resist these representations in China’s most popular community question-answering site – Zhihu. Invoking personal authority to establish their legitimacy to speak, they draw on a range of strategies, resisting their negative portrayal as leftover women, re-evaluating PhDs as sought-after and intellectual, and reaffirming women’s pursuit of activities and goals that men have traditionally dominated. In the second, Mark Nartey shows how women resist subordination and centre empowerment in Nigerian blogs on gender issues. Bloggers counter toxic gender narratives, offer positive constructions of women’s identity, call out sexist attitudes and applaud women who oppose sexism. The paper sheds light on oppressive gender practices in Nigeria and on the ways that women use their voices to challenge these.
Lucinda Saldanha, Sofia Marques da Silva and Pedro D. Ferreira discuss their study of game jams and video game communities, examining women’s experiences and perceptions of the gendered dynamics of these. Women in their study described unequal numbers of male and female players, unequal power dynamics between men and women, excessive criticism of women’s work, the pressure to demonstrate many skills to present a ‘good’ representation of all women, and discussed their attempts to deal with and challenge these.
Two further papers consider the spatial dynamics of gender; the first in relation to drag queens in Singapore and the second in relation to transgender men in Malaysia.
Orlando Woods argues for a topological understanding of the embodied politics and potential of gender and sexuality in the socially and politically conservative context of Singapore, bringing together theories of the body as an infrastructure with those of topological space. Woods argues that drag performativity shows how everyday practices of dressing, speaking, moving and being have a potentiality that transcends the marginal position of the subject. This approach offers a way of disrupting notions of socio-spatial fixity.
Joseph N. Goh focuses on the everyday forms of aggression and vulnerability that transgender people encounter in seemingly innocuous spaces. Goh explores how Malaysian transgender men experience everyday precarity through forms of ‘oblique hostility’. These materialize when their ability to pass in accordance with their gender identities is called into question in spaces that may seem gender neutral on the surface but are grounded in normative gender expectations, such as airport x-ray scanners, road blocks and Roman Catholic ecclesial communities.
Finally, Salem Skelton, Damien W. Riggs, Annie Pullen Sansfacon, Sabra L. Katz-Wise, Manvi Arora and Charles-Antoine Thibeault explore experiences of gender euphoria – the feelings of joy related to gender and the external affirmation of one’s gender, an area that is under-researched because of a damage-centred approach to understanding trans people’s lives. Drawing on their Australian study of the experiences of pre-pubertal trans young people and their families in relation to gender-affirming medical care, they show how gender euphoria can arise as a product of self-understanding, receiving affirming medical care, close interpersonal relationships, and interactions with people in the broader community.