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

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: Trinidad and Tobago, Senegal, construction of the self, Global South, sexuality, digital media, queer, gender identity, Chile, masculinity
Published online: 24 February 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.00006.cam
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