Social Media and Gender Issues

Using Performance Theory as an explanatory basis, this essay explicates the performance of gender in social media beginning with the gendered history of digital technologies and an articulation of the social media venues' unique affordances for gender performance. Then, the chapter reviews the scientific research examining gendered online behavior in social media noting opportunities for enacting traditional sex role stereotypes and thus socializing others to do so as well as opportunities to enact equality and thus disseminating calls for liberation and increased equality between the sexes in all aspects of social life. Facebook, blogs, and online games are examined in detail as exemplars of specific social media cites of gender performance.