Introduction published in:
Sexuality and the discursive construction of the digital self in the Global South
Edited by Nell Haynes and Baird Campbell
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 9:1] 2020
► pp. 1–13
Introduction

Constructing the digital self in the Global South

| Rice University , Houston, TX, USA
| Colby College , Waterville, ME, USA

The papers in this special section examine how people in various contexts of the Global South “construct the self” in online spaces. With examples from Chile, Senegal, and Trinidad, the papers show the wide range of discursive practices, encompassing the textual and the aesthetic, which individuals use to enact gendered and sexual selves online. By privileging gender and sexuality as central components of selfhood, we draw from the longstanding attention paid to gender and sexuality in linguistic studies of identification (see Bucholtz & Hall 2004). In placing this concept within digital worlds, we pay attention to the ways in which daily life is now lived and experienced online. Authors in this issue think critically about practices of self-formation and the performance of gender and sexuality that differ from those that have normalized in the Global North, considering both revolutionary possibility, and re-entrenchment of constraint.

Keywords: construction of the self, digital media, Global South, sexuality, gender identity, queer, masculinity, Chile, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Global South
  • 3.Digital selfhood
  • 4.Language
  • 5.Gender and sexuality
  • 6.This special issue
  • References
Published online: 24 February 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.00006.cam
References
Adams-Thies, Brian
2012 Fluid bodies or bodily fluids: Bodily reconfigurations in cybersex. Journal of Language and Sexuality 1(2): 179–205. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2018 No longer the solitary vice: Bators, bonding, and homonormativity. (Paper presented at 25th Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI)
Adkins, Lisa & Lury, Celia
1999 The labour of identity: Performing identities, performing economies. Economy and Society 28(4): 598–614. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Albury, Kath, Burgess, Jean, Light, Ben, Race, Kane & Wilken, Rowan
2017 Data cultures of mobile dating and hook-up apps: Emerging issues for critical social science research. Big Data & Society 4(2): 1–11. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Alvarez, Eddy Francisco
2016 Finding sequins in the rubble. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(3–4): 618–627. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Apple, Harrison
2015 The $10,000 woman. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2(4): 553–564. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Arondekar, Anjali R.
2009 For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Atluri, Tara
2009 Lighten up?! Humour, race, and da off colour joke of Ali G. Media, Culture & Society 31(2): 197–214. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Austin, John L.
1976 How to Do Things with Words. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barendregt, Bart
2012 Diverse digital worlds. In Digital Anthropology, Heather A. Horst & Daniel Miller (eds), 203–224. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Boellstorff, Tom
2012 Rethinking digital anthropology. In Digital Anthropology, Heather A. Horst & Daniel Miller (eds), 39–60. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Bossewitch, Jonah & Sinnreich, Aram
2013 The end of forgetting: Strategic agency beyond the panopticon. New Media & Society 15(2): 224–242. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre
1980 The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary & Hall, Kira
2004 Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33(4): 469–515. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2005 Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5): 585–614. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bunt, Gary R.
2009 iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Burgess, Jean, Cassidy, Elija, Duguay, Stefanie & Light, Ben
2016 Making digital cultures of gender and sexuality with social media. Social Media + Society 2(4): 281–285. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith
1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
1997 “Excitable Speech”: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Christopherson, Kimberly M.
2007 The positive and negative implications of anonymity in internet social interactions: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Computers in Human Behavior 23(6): 3038–3056. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cifor, Marika
2015 Presence, absence, and Victoria’s hair. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2(4): 645–649. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Costa, Elisabetta
2016 The morality of premarital romances: Social media, flirting and love in Southeast Turkey. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 9(2): 199–215. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coté, Mark & Pybus, Jennifer
2007 Learning to immaterial labour 2.0: MySpace and social networks. Ephemera 7(1): 88–106.Google Scholar
Cvetkovich, Ann
2009 An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Bob
2015 Using archives to identify the trans* women of Casa Susanna. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2(4): 621–634. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dimaggio, Paul, Hargittai, Eszter, Celeste, Coral & Shafer, Steven
2004 Digital inequality: From unequal access to differentiated use. In Social Inequality, Kathryn Neckerman (ed), 355–400. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Doostdar, Alireza
2004 “The vulgar spirit of blogging”: On language, culture, and power in Persian Weblogestan. American Anthropologist 106(4): 651–662. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Duffy, Brooke Erin & Chan, Ngai Keung
2019 “You never really know who’s looking”: Imagined surveillance across social media platforms. New Media & Society 21(1): 119–138. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eckstein, Lars & Schwarz, Anja
2014 Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Edelman, Elijah Adiv
2015 The cum shot: Trans men and visual economies of ejaculation. Porn Studies 2(2–3): 150–160. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Elijah Adiv & Zimman, Lal
2014 Boycunts and bonus holes: Discourse about transmasculine bodies and the sexual productivity of genitals. Journal of Homosexuality 61(5): 673–690. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Essoungou, André-Michel
2011 Africa’s rising information economy. Africa Renewal Magazine. https://​www​.un​.org​/africarenewal​/magazine​/april​-2011​/africas​-rising​-information​-economy (October 15 2019) Crossref
Foucault, Michel
1988 Technologies of the Self. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Gerbaudo, Paolo
2012 Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving
1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Gumperz, John J.
1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hackett, Rosalind I. J. & Soares, Benjamin F.
(eds) 2015 New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Jack
1998 Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
2006 In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Hampton, Keith & Wellman, Barry
2003 Neighboring in Netville: How the internet supports community and social capital in a wired suburb. City & Community 2(4): 277–311. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Handy, Ariel B. & Johnson, Thomas W.
2015 Eunuchs online. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2(4): 710–716. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Herring, Susan C. & Kapidzic, Sanja
2015 Teens, gender, and self-presentation in social media. In International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, James D. Wright (ed), 146–152. Oxford: Elsevier. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ikeuchi, Suma
2017 Accompanied self: Debating pentecostal individual and Japanese relational selves in transnational Japan. Ethos 45(1): 3–23. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, E. Patrick
2003 Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Rachel & Ortlieb, Martin
2006 Online place and person-making: Matters of the heart and self-expression. In EPIC 2006: Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, Ken Anderson & Tracey Lovejoy (eds), 214–228. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.Google Scholar
Juhasz, Alexandra
2006 Video remains. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 12(2): 319–328. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kshetri, Nir
2015 Cybercrime and cybersecurity issues in the BRICS economies. Journal of Global Information Technology Management 18(4): 245–249. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lai, Chen-Yu & Yang, Heng-Li
2014 Determinants of individuals’ self-disclosure and instant information sharing behavior in micro-blogging. New Media & Society 17(9): 1454–1472. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leap, William L.
2011 Language, gay pornography, and audience reception. Journal of Homosexuality 58(6–7): 932–952. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Madianou, Mirca & Miller, Daniel
2013 Migration and New Media Transnational Families and Polymedia. London: Taylor and Francis. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Manalansan, Martin F.
2014 The “stuff” of archives: Mess, migration, and queer lives. Radical History Review 1201: 94–107. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marciano, Avi
2014 Living the VirtuReal: Negotiating transgender identity in cyberspace. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19(4): 824–838. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mauss, Marcel
1973 Techniques of the body. Economy and Society 2(1): 70–88. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mehra, Bharat, Merkel, Cecelia & Peterson Bishop, Ann
2004 The internet for empowerment of minority and marginalized users. New Media & Society 6(6): 781–802. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Daniel, Costa, Elisabetta, Haynes, Nell, McDonald, Tom, Nicolescu, Razvan, Sinanan, Jolynna, Spyer, Juliano, Venkantraman, Shriram & Wang, XinYuan
2016 How the World Changed Social Media. London: UCL Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Daniel & Horst, Heather A.
2012 The digital and the human: A prospectus for digital anthropology. In Digital Anthropology, Heather A. Horst & Daniel Miller (eds), 3–35. New York: Berg.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Don
2008 Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mort, Frank
1995 Archaeologies of city life: Commercial culture, masculinity, and spatial relations in 1980s London. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13(5): 573–590. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1998 Cityscapes: Consumption, masculinities and the mapping of London since 1950. Urban Studies 35(5–6): 889–907. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor & Capps, Lisa
1996 Narrating the self. Annual Review of Anthropology 251: 19–43. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pötzsch, Holger
2018 Archives and identity in the context of social media and algorithmic analytics: Towards an understanding of iArchive and predictive retention. New Media & Society 20(9): 3304–3322. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Prosser, Jay
2016 Exceptional locations: Transsexual travelogues. In Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Siècle, Kate More & Stephen Whittle (eds), 83–114. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Przybylo, Ela & Cooper, Danielle
2014 Asexual resonances: Tracing a queerly asexual archive. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 20(3): 297–318. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Raun, Tobias
2015 Archiving the wonders of testosterone via YouTube. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2(4): 701–709. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Lynne D. & Parks, Malcolm R.
1999 The social geography of gender-switching in virtual environments on the internet. Information, Communication & Society 2(4): 521–540. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rosen, Christine
2007 Virtual friendship and the new narcissism. The New Atlantis 171: 15–31.Google Scholar
Saker, Michael
2017 Foursquare and identity: Checking-in and presenting the self through location. New Media & Society 19(6): 934–949. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sauter, Theresa
2014 “What’s on your mind?” Writing on Facebook as a tool for self-formation. New Media & Society 16(5): 823–839. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, Raz & Halegoua, Germaine R.
2015 The spatial self: Location-based identity performance on social media. New Media & Society 17(10): 1643–1660. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sreberny, Annabelle & Khiabany, Gholam
2010 Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran. London: I. B. Tauris. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura
2008 Along the Archival Grain: Thinking through Colonial Ontologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Erin
2014 The curation of the self in the age of the internet. (Paper presented at IUAES 2014 with JASCA Conference, Makuhari Messe, Chiba, Japan)
Thomann, Matthew
2016 Zones of difference, boundaries of access: Moral geography and community mapping in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Journal of Homosexuality 63(3): 426–436. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tomlinson, Alan
1990 Consumption, Identity, and Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Turkle, Sherry
2012 Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Uski, Suvi & Lampinen, Airi
2016 Social norms and self-presentation on social network sites: Profile work in action. New Media & Society 18(3): 447–464. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vivienne, Sonja & Burgess, Jean
2012 The digital storyteller’s stage: Queer everyday activists negotiating privacy and publicness. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56(3): 362–377. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Waterloo, Sophie F., Baumgartner, Susanne E., Peter, Jochen & Valenburg, Patti M.
2018 Norms of online expressions of emotion: Comparing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp. New Media & Society 20(5): 1813–1831. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Woodland, Randal
1999 “I plan to be a 10”: Online literacy and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. Computers and Composition 16(1): 73–87. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Ortega-Barón, J., J. M. Machimbarrena, I. Montiel, S. Buelga, A. Basterra-González & J. González-Cabrera
2021. Design and Validation of the Brief Self Online Scale (SO-8) in Early Adolescence: An Exploratory Study. The Journal of Early Adolescence 41:7 ► pp. 1055 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.