Social Media & Comm

Gender
Feminist lens
● Paying attention to the ways genders are socially constructed
○ what behaviors, ways of communication and self-presentation are
permitted and expected of someone based on their perceived gender
● Our ideas and expectations about gender are partly socially constructed through
media

Male gaze
● Pleasure in looking without being seen (psychoanalysis, power-relations)
(voyeurism)
● Grammar of film and art developed by men (script, framing, lighting, editing)
● Not strictly visual like portraying women as “passive” characters in the service of
“active” male protagonists (can be sexist without being sexual. Bechdel test)
● Internalization of the gaze

Sex vs gender
● Sex: medical label assigned at birth (male/female). Traditionally based on
phenotype (penis/vagina), Later based on genotype (xy/xx chromosomes). In the
Olympics, sex is determined based on hormones (testosterone blood test)
● Gender: shared sociocultural expectations about how men and women act. Also
a legal category
● Gender identity: 1) an individual, internal, subjective feeling about one's gender
and 2) an external expression of gender
○ Cisgender; one’s gender identity and sec pretty much align
○ Gender (queer, variant, fluid): might feel like a masculine woman or
feminine man
○ Transgender: assigned sex differs from one’s gender identity

Gender
● Cultural and communicative

Gender and (re)presentation

● Representation: How is gender depicted
● Presentation: How is gender performed?
○ Clothes, makeup, hair, jewelry, certain colors, attitudes, emotions, body
language
Empowered
● self-esteem vs shame
● feminism vs misogyny
● being perfect vs loving oneself “as is”
● key? “sufficient drive, effort, and responsibility to take responsibility for her own
life”

Gender peer presentations

Kole
esraa al-shatti et al
impression management theory
● Erving Goffman present this theory
● Individuals seek to influence others' perceptions of themselves by regulating
information in their social interactions
● the role as women requires more sentimental and emotional behaviors.
consequences of impression management are higher for women (criticism)

men vs women posts

● men outdoors workouts
● women engage in more direct impression management tac
● women are more expressive

Lindsay
● gender dysphoria
● gender identity: what you feel
● Gender expression: what you show to everyone else
● physical and emotional attraction

● Judith butlers performativity: unintentional imitating

● Kimberle Williams Crenshaw: experiences cannot be reduced to one section of
identity
● Automediality: how we actually are and how we present ourselves on platforms
of social media are different

Ashleen
● Jiyoung Chase
● comparison to social media influencers and celebrities
● upward comparison: people they perceive as better than them
● downward comparison: people they perceive as less than them
● women experience towards social media in terms of beauty, men too but less
●