Digital youth spaces in Chile Young people’s everyday negotiations of gender and sexuality

Young people have always searched for – and found – ways to hang out with their peers: in streets, squares, clubs, homes, bedrooms, or wherever. Nowadays, we can also add Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and many more social media platforms to this list. It is here, on social media, that the magnitude with which young people constantly relate to each other is strongly amplified. They post, like, share and comment on their own and each other’s daily lives in vivid, narrating and visual ways. This also means that young people’s gender and sexual peer cultures are increasingly constituted by, and intertwined with, their social media usage. We need a contextualized understanding of young people’s everyday complex digital cultures. This dissertation attempts to contribute to debates on digital youth cultures and gender and sexuality matters.
Through an ethnographic field study on Chile – a country characterized by the seemingly contradictory features of conservativism, neoliberalism and feminist activism – I seek to capture in this dissertation what is novel about performances of gender and sexuality, particularly on a peer group level, while simultaneously remaining sensitive to the continuities of existing gender roles and hierarchies. I explore how young people play with gender notions and practices in their digital peer interactions; I ponder what this tells us about shifting boundaries of femininities and masculinities, as well as the society in which they live. It was particularly my long-term presence in gender segregated women-only groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, and studying the women's culture there, that allowed me to observe interesting patterns of both gender conformity and subversion in the re-workings of young femininities in Chile today.