L’incontrôlable besoin de contrôle

Starting from an ethnographic perspective, this article looks at YouTube videos made by teenagers, between 12 and 18 years of age, in order to analyze online performances of gender. In a conversational mode, the young videographers film themselves, in their domestic spaces, addressing an audience of female peers. Their discourses about the self are constructed through a double principle of intimate sharing and social recognition, through which the YouTubers create and validate a sense of shared belonging to a common gender. The article shows that, in this context, feminine gender conformity is correlated with the management of domestic intimacy. The expression on an irrepressible need for order, for cleanliness and control of everyday life is at the heart of these adolescents’ work to ritualize femininity online