Amy Shields Dobson's Post-Feminist Digital Cultures

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In the introduction of her book Post-Feminist Digital Cultures: Femininity Social Media and Self Representation, Amy Shields Dobson – whose postdoctoral research “focuses on gender and sexuality in digital cultures and social media in particular”— studies girls and young women as online cultural producers (Dobson, 2016, p.1; The University of Queensland, 2017). Her goal is to examine they perform “young femininity” in ways that are seen or constructed as wrong or problematic, such as sexting and making “Am I pretty or Ugly” videos (Dobson, 2016, p.2).
In her essay Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming out online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story, Mary L. Gray – a “Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Fellow at Harvard …show more content…

Dobson describes identities—and gendered bodies— “not as inherent properties of bodily matter, but as constituted and produced in concert with performative and discursive acts of self-articulation that give rise to the illusion of stable and bounded material bodies with stable ‘inner cores’” (2016, p.12). The author recognizes that there are power and social struggles at play that influence identity construction and that identities, such as gender identity, are often constructed “through symbolic, repetitive, and normative expression” (Dobson, 2016, p.12). Identity is performed online using visuals, sounds, and texts in a way that is similar to the way people express themselves through their choice of clothing, what they say, etc. (Dobson, 2016, …show more content…

She notably uses the example of Amy, a bisexual girl from a small town in Kentucky, to explain how identity comes to be developed (Gray, 2014, p.169). Indeed, she states that Amy’s sexual discovery did not emerge from spontaneous self-discovery, but rather from reading coming out and sexuality stories and talking to people from the LGBTQ community online (Gray, 2014, p.169). Following Gray’s train of thoughts, identity, has it has also been suggested by Dobson, is not so much biological as it is socially constructed; one comes to adhere to an identity or to see themselves as belonging to one group based on the way the group has constructed itself (Gray, 2014, p.169). For Gray, the concept of identity is inherently linked to another concept: authenticity (2014,

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