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Abstract
Previous research about college students’ social media usage emphasizes social media practices, often ignoring the content that students’ post. Increasing knowledge about the language that college students use to describe their intimate relationships can inform student affairs practice. Using a digital ethnographic data collection approach and queer theoretical framework, this paper explores the dominant discourses about race, sexuality, and relationships circulated in a mobile social networking application. This paper used content analysis to describe the meaning of text and images produced by college-aged youth in the US. Through this analysis of social media content, I contend that college students engage in the complex representations and reproductions of sociocultural norms about bodies, sexuality, and relationships and that these representations and reproductions influence campus climate. I develop implications for student affairs administrators.
Notes on contributor
Erich N. Pitcher is a PhD Candidate at Michigan State University in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education. His research uses organizational perspectives to understand queer and trans issues within higher education.
Notes
1. Cisgender is a term coined by transgender activists that derives from the Latin root “Cis” meaning to align (Enke, Citation2011). Here cisgender is used as a way to describe those identities that align with one’s assigned sex at birth.
2. Racial identification is not easily determined by visual clues or phenotype. However, the vast majority of the people represented have light skin, brown or blue eyes, and straight brown hair. For the purposes of this paper, I presume most of the people represented are white, unless otherwise noted.