Networked publics as queer spaces? Youth cultures, gender practices and sexualities in social networking sites

Social network sites (SNSs) are ultimate late modern technologies, providing spaces for gender and sexual subjectivities to be negotiated. These popular everyday media create public spaces, demanding activity on the part of the audiences, connecting them into networks. Next to the online networks have some typical formal characteristics, the actual social and cultural practices within are often not profoundly understood. Therefore, this empirical inquiry aims to expose if these networked publics can be understood as queer spaces. Recent literature looking into the producing of gender and sexual subjectivities emphasize different complexities (see Nayak & Kehily, 2006). Although in Western societies social and cultural progress is recognized in terms of positions towards gender repression and strict sexual morals, they are often limited by essentialist assumptions. A substantial portion of today’s teenagers acknowledge basic human rights, stressing equality between man and woman, respect the freedom of sexual minorities. However, informed by biology, discourses remain normative. As participatory media immerse today’s teenagers in an ongoing flux of producing, reproducing, consuming subjectivities, it is important to engage in deconstructing normativity. Consequently, this paper advocates for an ongoing queer criticism in digital cultures. Although research on youth and SNSs is expanding, it often comes to neglect the intersections power/difference and gender/sexuality. Moreover, most research consistently departs from interactionist sociology, not questioning the agency of the ‘self’ and cultural struggles within different youthful subjectivities. As this contribution will argue that networked publics create ongoing contexts for late modern gendered and sexual identities to develop, we will argue that digital literacy can benefit from a stronger connection with queer pedagogy. We see this digital literacy project as, next to investing in technological skills, questioning normativity and creating context for diversity rather than exclusion. In practice we will focus on (1) locations and dislocations of heteronormativity and (2) reveal the sophisticated role of the technological platform within democracy and change. Informed by a multiperspectival media cultural studies and social theory, we will mainly come to expose the struggles over meanings. This inquiry departs from a sample of 204 social network site profiles of Northern Belgium youngsters between 13 and 18 y.o. The sample was collected in November 2010 on Netlog, the most popular SNS among Northern Belgium youth. Netlog is a mainstream SNS, but different from Facebook since it allows more creative content creation. The procedure of the analysis is informed by a multimodal model for website analysis as elaborated by Pauwels (2011) and a grounded theory approach. After making an inventory of salient features and topics in these profiles we used sensitizing concepts to dismantle the data in different semiotic practices relevant for more in-depth qualitative analysis of the textual and visual. To expose the struggles over meanings and understand how this producing, reproducing and consuming works, we make use of a deconstructive queer criticism. Particularly troubling the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990) is approached as a political project (Chambers, 2008). Put otherwise, showing how and where heteronormativity operates, but also fails and undercuts its own messages