Sander De Ridder

Drawing on a participatory observation in the popular social networking site (SNS) Netlog among Northern Belgium youngsters, this paper offers insights on how SNS institutions can be understood as actors that order storytelling practices in everyday life. Specifically, this paper deals with intimate storytelling practices that give meaning to sexuality, gender and relationships, developing a feminist and queer political critique on SNSs’ focus on the production of intelligible intimate identities and endless performative flows of stories. Theoretically, this paper proposes to put central everyday media-related practices to understand SNSs as actors shaping intimate stories, dialectically brought in relation to the website’s political economies and the cultural powers through which software is designed. Empirical illustrations show how de Certeau’s concept of tactics is useful to expose a complex struggle between digital media institutions power and everyday appropriations.

This inquiry shows how youths negotiate sexualities and gender when commenting on profile pictures on a social networking site. Attention is given to (1) how discourses are constituted within heteronormativity, and (2) how the mediated nature of the SNS contributes to resistance. Using insights from cultural media studies, social theory and queer criticism, self-representations in SNSs are viewed as sites of struggle. A textual analysis is used to show how commenting on a picture is a gendered practice, continuously cohering between the biological sex, performative gender and demanded desire. Although significant resignifications are found, they are often accompanied by a recuperation of heteronormativity. Therefore, this inquiry argues for continued attention to current contradictions in self-representations.

With the emergence of alternative R&B, contemporary R&B and hip hop culture are being confronted with a subgenre that challenges its key characteristics. One of the aspects that typify alternative R&B is the emergence of an alternative masculinity. The aim of this study is to research whether the alternative masculinities represented in alternative R&B resist the hegemonic masculine ideal established within R&B and hip hop culture. To this end, this study conducts a textual analysis of the representations of gender in the work of Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, artists considered representative for alternative R&B. The analysis reveals that Ocean’s work features successful nonnormative masculine identities, whereas The Weeknd refrains to representing postmodern exaggerations of the hegemonic male. Despite divergent representational strategies, both artists do engage in questioning what it means to be a man in R&B and hip hop culture and thereby at least attempt to challenge the supremacy of hegemonic masculinity.

New media applications such as social networking sites are understood as important evolutions for queer youth. These media and communication technologies allow teenagers to transgress their everyday life places and connect with other queer teens. Moreover, social media websites could also be used for real political activism such as publicly sharing coming out videos on YouTube. Despite these increased opportunities for self-reflexive storytelling on digital media platforms, their everyday use and popularity also bring particular complexities in the everyday lives of young people. Talking to 51 youngsters between 13 and 19 years old in focus groups, this paper inquires how young audiences discursively constructed meanings on intimate storytelling practices such as interpreting intimate stories, reflecting on their own and other peers' intimate storytelling practices. Specifically focusing on how they relate to intimate storytelling practices of gay peers, this paper identified particular challenges for queer youth who transgress the heteronormative when being active on popular social media. The increasing mediatization of intimate youth cultures brings challenges for queer teenagers, which relate to authenticity, (self-) surveillance and fear of imagined audiences.

Social networking sites (SNSs) confront communication and media studies scholars with significant challenges. Characterised by continuous 'audience activity' of producing 'user-generated-content', the analytical distinction between text, producer and audience is no longer tenable, but thoroughly disrupted.This contribution will focus on what 'people do', offering insights into the social and cultural complexities behind the actual media practices. 'Self-representational digital stories' will be the focal point of this contribution, as this is what 'audiences do' in SNSs.

This paper wants to challenge the tendency in media studies on gay and lesbian identities to remain within two dominant paradigms: the essentialist or the post-structuralist traditions. Consequently, we will elaborate on the question: if media research emphasizes social change, should it mainly adopt a political and strategic identity claim which refers to essentialism, or, should it acknowledge discourses as more important, and therefore use post-structural and queer theoretical insights? Since we discuss the case of gay and lesbian identities, we will focus on possible resistance in popular culture, which mainly involves offering alternatives to the continuous representation of heteronormativity.

We will argue that for social change to occur, there needs to be a symbiosis between agency and structure. To this end, a dialectic approach is needed that bridges the gaps between, on the one hand, a post-structuralist project that creates awareness of norms, discourse and hegemony, and on the other, identity politics that have the potential to change laws and institutions.

This paper will offer a mainly theoretical exploration and will use illustrations from popular media culture with a focus on television. To this end, this paper will illustrate how LGBT-targeted television channels employ the discussed strategies of resistance.