Doing gender and sexuality intersectionally in multimodal social media practices

Abstract

The chapter focuses on how members in participatory cultures engage in everyday, informal, and interest-driven social and discursive practices primarily on social media but also in ways that relate to the material and physical contexts of their lives. We show how social actors operating in these sites construct gender and sexuality intersectionally and multimodally. We argue that gender and sexuality are always constructed at intersections with other identity categories. With respect to both digital and physical participatory activities, multisemioticity is, in turn, necessary as an analytic perspective: it allows the investigation of how participants routinely draw on and deploy a range of multimodal and embodied resources for the production of discursive, social, and cultural meaning.

In discussing the nexus of participatory cultural practices, social media, intersectionality, and multimodality, we highlight how an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to capture the multi-sited and entangled nature of gender and sexuality construction in the lived realities of participants. We illustrate this with the help of two examples of our previous studies. Guided by our specific research questions and data, in these studies we have designed multi-disciplinary approaches that have selectively drawn on theoretical and methodological tools suggested by ethnography, cultural studies, sociolinguistics of social media, language and gender studies, intersectionality theory, discourse studies, and the study of multimodality and embodied action.