Snapchat and affective inequalities: affective flows in a schooling assemblage

Abstract

Gendered power relations and cyber-objectification can be produced through Snapchat in schooling contexts. The research illustrates how social media circulates affect in an Australian high school setting. While “Snapchatting” can evoke joy, it can produce gendered inequities. This research details affective inequalities associated with Snapchat use. Affective inequalities (“lad culture”, “rape culture” and “everyday sexism”) are produced through texts, images and videos and are normalised through the gendered material-discursive relations in schools. Through making new material entanglements visible, the subtle sexist practices associated with misogyny in schools can be surfaced and recognised. Explicit critiques of misogyny are required to support gender equity in schools. This article contributes to the literature both as new material school-based research, and as an exploration of the gendered implications of Snapchat technology use among young people. It addresses the need to challenge masculine sexual entitlement, both online and in schools.

Keywords:

• Lad culture
• rape culture
• everyday sexism
• cyberbullying cyber harassment
• social media
• Snapchat

Introduction

Engaging with a feminist new materialist research approach (Bennett, 2010), we discuss a data entanglement that draws from research undertaken in a regional New South Wales secondary school. This article addresses two broad aims. Firstly we contribute to knowledge around the gendered implications of young people’s use of Snapchat and secondly we explore post-qualitative approaches to research. We add to the corpus of scholarship that has investigated how the architecture of social media and information technology mobilises affects in ways that both cluster and circulate emotional and embodied feeling (Hynnä-Granberg, 2021). Specifically, we address how affective inequalities circulating through social media can produce “lad culture”, “rape culture” and “everyday sexism”. Damaging practices can be taken for granted and “fly under the radar” when embedded in the gendered material-discursive relations in schools.

Social media is not seen as a separate entity or a tool to be utilised in a detached way by humans. It is agential matter (Bennett, 2010) in that its cyber-physical entanglement exerts an affective influence of its own. Affect creates a “flow” or bodily reaction in the form of “modifications of the body, whereby the active power of the said body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained” (Spinoza, 2009, p. 151). These flows involve an “intensity characterized by an increase or decrease in power” (Hemmings, 2005, p. 552). We can trace the affective intensities that are created through the transmission of images from phone to phone and body to body. Examples of these intensities which are produced through human and nonhuman (phone) entanglements can include the pleasures of capturing selfie body images, the degradation of fat shaming during and after the photography (Hynnä-Granberg, 2021), the moral panics associated with the circulation of images of young women’s bodies, and the humour, lust, and distress when explicit images are shared without consent (Charteris, & Gregory, 2020).

The research addresses the question: How can Snapchat support affective inequalities through the interconnected flows produced through texts, images and videos in a schooling assemblage? Assemblages are “processes whereby individuals, groups and societies are constituted and re-constituted and heterogeneous human and non-human elements interrelate via unexpected and productive connections” (Mayes, 2016, p. 107). This consideration of assemblages offers us a way to think about the emergent and entangled properties in research. Put simply, this article articulates our being in the world as researchers and our engagements with matter and mattering. As agential matter the use of mobile technology and the social media application, Snapchat (a photograph and messaging application), form and perpetuate affective flows in intimate relationships.

An encounter in a regional Australian secondary school is detailed, where we asked a group of four high school students how the ephemeral social media, Snapchat, influenced relationships. Images, field notes, and snippets of text from a group discussion with students is used to curate a research assemblage. Assemblages are or “agencement” are aggregations of various elements (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and as such are both process and product. They “are processes whereby individuals, groups and societies are constituted and re-constituted and heterogeneous human and non-human elements inter-relate via unexpected and productive connections” (Mayes, 2016, p. 107). The research process involves “working the assemblage” which integrates the materiality of accessing school and university grounds, collecting and assembling of images, notes, and snippets as embodied agents in moments of time, undertaking acts of analysis, and generating our findings on gendered affective flows.

We commence by outlining features of the mobile application Snapchat, detailing how it supports flows of affect that ripple through schooling assemblages when used for sexting and cyber-objectification. A restoried memory and excerpts from an interview are used provide a discursive-material reading of a research encounter in a school. In the analysis consideration is given to the affective inequalities. We discuss flows of affect where Snapchat is enravelled in sexualised youth relations as agential matter. An account of a visit to a school is detailed where we spoke with students about their Snapchat use. The nature of affective inequalities is addressed through an exploration of: gendered power relations and cyber-objectification; the intra-actions of technologies; and the relationality between researchers, students, and teachers and objects in the schooling research context.

Snapchat and sexting

Marketed particularly to under 35 s on the basis of its ephemerality (Ingram, 2015), Snapchat (Snap) has seen one of the most swift and unprecedented rises in the history of instant messaging services and social networking sites (Piwek & Joinson, 2016). A photograph and messaging application, the “Snap” sender can determine the temporality of their communication through setting a timer from between 1 and 10 s to disappear. With its countdown feature, Snapchat captures attention to images in a way that is not achieved through other social media. Images and videos are only shared with a select group of “friends” who need to have installed the Snapchat app on their mobile device and be Snapchat users. Senders determine (in the first instance anyway) who is permitted to review and view disseminated content. If the recipient takes a screen shot (capture), the sender is informed that this has occurred. However, there have been reports that third-party apps, such as “Snapsaved”, enables the recipient to create a hidden screen capture without the sender’s knowledge (Piwek & Joinson, 2016). Despite the potential for breaches in privacy, the app’s ephemerality has enormous currency in youth culture where, with the plethora of competing visual images, technologies can capture and sustain the interest of youth users.

Mobile technologies are agentic objects that support relational flows of networked affect between bodies and objects (Paasonen, Hillis & Petit, 2015). Handyside and Ringrose (2017, p. 2) have noted that “Snapchat’s uniquely part-ephemeral, part-permanent lens” can lead to “playfulness and learning around gender and sexual relationship norms”. Snapchat has been linked with practices of sexting (Hasinoff, 2015) and cyberbullying (Charteris, & Gregory, 2020; Kofoed & Ringrose, 2012). There can be publicity of self-harm with images sweeping through school communities (Charteris et al., 2016). During our research undertaken with young people, we noted that there were both playful and detrimental uses of social media described.

Cyber mediated sexual expression ranges from sexy self-presentation through to sending sexually explicit material to a recipient (Drouin et al., 2013). Sexting practices are criminalised for minors in regions of Australia, the USA and Canada (Dobson & Ringrose, 2016). Van Ouytsel et al. (2019) highlight the need for research into sexting to better understand the context in which it occurs and the role that it may play within intimate partner violence and sexual coercion. This research is concerned with the latter coercion aspect of sexting practices among young people. Although we did not undertake research with minors or determine any “criminal action”, the issue of illegal activity, where sexts are received from students under 16 years, was a factor that the students we spoke with were aware of.

There has been debate around the best way to address the problematic of young people disseminating explicit images of themselves and others. Arguing from a United Kingdom context, Dobson and Ringrose (2016, p. 2) highlight that the prevailing emphasis in “sext education [is] to persuade young people to simply stop producing images”, rather than initiating programs that seek “to challenge the sexist culture that makes sexting ‘risky’ for girls”. Ringrose (2011, p. 102) points out that there are “normative forms of gendered and sexualised visual self representation… [that] must be managed in the construction of a semi-public digital sexual subjectivity”. In films that are used to educate young people on the perils of sexting, there are narratives where female sexters are “shamed, humiliated and in need of psychological help, and thus serve to uphold a framework of silence and illegibility around teenage female desires” (Dobson & Ringrose, 2016, p. 13). This silence reduces the focus to an emphasis on the girls’ reputations and “the psycho-social, rather than disciplinary and legal, consequences of sexting” (Dobson & Ringrose, 2016, p. 13).

In our research reported elsewhere, we found that social media acts as a conduit which fosters social cohesion and, at times, disaffection through participation in cyber communities (Charteris et al., 2018). A range of affects can be produced – from light-hearted banter and sexting (Korkmazer et al., 2019), through to cyberbullying and cyber harassment. Sexting, a portmanteau word encompassing sex and texting, is the practice of sending sexually explicit and (partially) nude pictures. Cyberbullying, as conceptualised by Kofoed and Stenner (2012, p. 168), centres on practices of inclusion and exclusion that are facilitated through digital devices and can include “hostile, unwelcome, or unpleasant audio and text messages and images posted on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, on apps such as Instagram and Snapchat, or exchanged as text messages”. Where there is a sense of connection with peers associated with cyberbullying, cyber-harassment centres on causing hurt or distress. It involves the mobilisation of social media and communication tools as a means to threaten or harass individuals or groups (Cox, 2014, p. 277). The notions of cyberbullying and cyber harassment can be problematic, as they can imply a humanist focus on individuals cast as victims of flows of aggression. Investigating the notion of cyber-objectification, we outline research where intra-actions proliferate affective inequalities through social media use.

The use of Snapchat among young people can be understood as material – discursive entanglements that disseminates affect. Through our exploration of the affective relations associated with bodily (human and nonhuman) materiality, we consider the boundedness of entities such as bodies, images, and technologies in light of entanglements (Warfield, 2016). Affect appears as “forces of encounter” where there are “capacities to act and be acted upon” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 1). Affect comprises intensities that pass between bodies, driving us forward toward movement, paralysing us with inertia, or overwhelming us with the world’s ostensible uncontrollability (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). Our researcher bodies are entangled in the assemblages we research and in this article and we knowledge this and address how social media circulates affect.

Affect and the viralisation of images

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of “affect” and “assemblage”, which leverages the philosophical work of Spinoza, inform our understanding that Snapchat is entangled in assemblages of gender and sexual relationality. The fluidity and interconnectedness of human and nonhuman entities form assemblages. New materialism recognises the relationality of matter (Bennett, 2010) where there is “engagement with the world as [a] body-mind entanglement” (Taylor, 2016, p. 201).

Affect is an embodied experience – an organic and non-organic system of flows that pass through human and non-human elements in assemblages, and in so doing, activates the agency of objects (Bolt, 2013). Flows of affect mark “the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and [implies] an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (Massumi 1987, p. xvii). Affect is prepersonal in that it emerges before ideas are rationalised and formed (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2013). The flows of affect connect the different aspects of an assemblage. These flows are a creative forces that are produced through mobile technologies, the range of cyber and physical spaces in which they are used, and the relationships they afford. Flows of affect influence relationships and processes of subjectivation. Because affect produces relations of power in assemblages, it can create disenfranchisement and inequalities as human bodies are attributed different status and value.

When electronic communications “go viral”, there are manifestations of networked affect. Viralisation involves images proliferating exponentially. As they circulate, they produce power relations (affect) across networks of social media users. Mobile phone technologies, used for the viralisation of non-consensually shared sexual images, have been described as “vehicles for the perpetration of sexual assault” (Walker et al., 2011, p. 9). In viralisation, entangled agencies, both human and non-human, produce intensities of networked affect (Paasonen et al., 2015). Networked affect involves communications that muster bodily reactions and include a plethora of affective attachments: “articulations of desire, seductions, trust, and memory; sharp jolts of anger and interest; political passions; investments of time, labour, and financial capital; and the frictions and pleasures of archival practices” (Paasonen et al., 2015. p. 4).

The changeable and shifting dynamics of relations shape online connections and disconnections, producing “proximities and distances of love, desire… between and among bodies” (Paasonen et al., 2015, p. 4). Through tracing flows of affect we can understand how social media posts have a “variable relational force of connectivity” (Handyside & Ringrose, 2017, p. 4). Networked affect was a concept that became apparent to us through the research process. Bodies are not “deterministically written by culture or hard-wired by biology, but as unpredictably entangled in living, moving and intra-acting… assemblages” (Holford et al., 2013, p. 713). As we now discuss, “lad culture”, “rape culture”, “everyday sexism” circulate through bodies and are produced in assemblages through the bio-technological flows of affect.

“Lad culture”, “rape culture”, “everyday sexism”

“Lad culture” is a group mentality that is characterised by sexist and homophobic slurs (Jeffries, 2020). Lad culture, as described by Phipps and Young (2013, p. 42), involves “heavy alcohol consumption, casual sex and sexist/discriminatory ‘banter’”. It is a form of toxic masculinity which fosters overt sexism, both on and off line (Retallack et al., 2016). It manifests as “popular misogyny” which is normalised as permissible in the mantra “boys will be boys” (Keller et al., 2018). Those who speak back to lad culture are often mocked as feminist killjoys (Ahmed, 2017) who, in calling out the issue, become the problem themselves (Renold, & Ringrose, 2019). At worst, calling out lad culture can result in individuals and groups being subjected to sexist attacks and abuse (Keller et al., 2018). As a communication medium which is used by young people in their networked peer cultures, Snapchat produces a bio-technological exchange of image creation and dissemination. As we highlight in this article, its affordances are an important feature in the production of lad culture.

Lad culture can be linked with “rape culture” which was a term coined in the 1970s by US feminists (Phipps et al., 2018). It can be defined as a socio-cultural context in which an aggressive male sexuality is eroticised and seen as a “healthy”, “normal” and “desired” part of sexual relations (Keller et al., 2018). It is premised on a set of beliefs that fosters men’s violence against women. These beliefs comprise normalising: the association between violence and sexuality; women’s passivity; the absolute right (often supported to references to “nature”) of men’s entitlement to sexual intercourse; and the obfuscation of the lines around consent (Phipps et al., 2018). The dissemination of non-consensual images can be seen as an aspect of “rape culture”. Rape culture has been surfaced and challenged in schools and in popular media in recent years, with a view to foster girl’s agency and resistance (Bernier & Winstanley, 2021; Greensmith & Froese, 2021; Ringrose et al., 2021). Practices include:

rape jokes, sexual harassment, cat-calling, sexualized ‘banter’; the routine policing of women’s bodies, dress, appearance, and code of conduct; the re-direction of blame from the perpetrator in an assault to the victim; and impunity for perpetrators, despite their conduct or crimes. (Keller et al., 2018, p. 3)

Everyday sexism is an opaque term as it can be detected in the banal micro-aggressions that women experience in their locally specific contexts (Crimmins, 2019). It has been traced among young people in Emma Renold’s (2013, 2019) work and is aligned with instances of sexual harassment that tend to slip by unchallenged and are not called out as unacceptable. Because of the everyday nature and subtlety of these three concepts, there is a lack of “clear theory” generated “of the processes and mechanisms by which [“lad culture”, “rape culture”, “everyday sexism”] work” (Phipps et al., 2018, p. 5).

This article builds on a new material argument leveraged previously that technologies can be agentic objects, that when enfolded in schooling assemblages, can mobilise moral panics associated with childhood innocence, slut shaming and the commodification of girls’ bodies (Charteris & Gregory, 2020). Schools have a responsibility to address the norms that underpin detrimental sexual practices between young people (Lloyd, 2020). Yet links may not be made between the gendered norms of “lad culture”, “rape culture”, “everyday sexism” and Snapchat as a social media. In this article we address this lacuna.

It is appropriate, given the materiality of affect, its place in the material – discursive entanglements of Snapchat (where “lad culture”, “rape culture”, and “everyday sexism” are produced), that new material research is deployed to consider how affective inequalities are produced through affective flows in a schooling assemblage

Agential cuts as an approach to new material research

New materialism enables us to look at flows of affect that entwine social media networks and the physicality of bodies in socio-material assemblages (Charteris, & Gregory, 2020). A materialist approach contends that social justice should involve acknowledgement of the place of nonhumans alongside humans in both knowledge production and power relations (Lupton, 2019). Though new materialism we recognise the constant flux of human and non-human relationships and the agency and temporality of matter (Hickey-Moody, 2020). Following Barad (2007), our onto-epistemological approach is a relational research practice that highlights the material-discursive relationality of research assemblages. Our approach aligns with other authors who write about and undertake new material research (Lather & St. Pierre 2013; Mayes & Wolfe, 2018; Wolfe, 2017) where there are entanglements of data and our role as researchers is to explore what is produced through the concurrences, incongruities, anxieties, silences, and visualisations that emerge from assemblages. A new material approach recognises that discourse and materiality are raveled up in research practice, processes and data production and researchers working in this emerging field are explicitly aware of the relationalities involved in linking knowing and being (ontology) to doing (epistemology) (Ringrose et al., 2018).

A diffractive approach enables us to illustrate how the phone and application Snapchat is agential matter and as such co-produces the affective politics of masculinity. First described by Haraway (1992) is as a means to consider differences rather than the similarities between ideas. Diffraction is an “optical device” with “diffracting rays (that) compose interference patterns not reflecting images” (Haraway, 1992, p. 299). Diffraction has been applied as a theoretical approach in a range of fields. Its uses have included as a means to consider: the spatiality of an online scholarly relationship (Barnes & Netolicky, 2019); ethical response-ability in higher education (Taylor, 2018); the uses and misuses of “voice” in research with children and young people (Mayes, 2019); mapped relations in higher education assemblages (Charteris, Nye, & Jones, 2019); and as an analytical process with children’s production of visual data (Magnusson, 2021). Post-qualitative research of this kind can produce “possibilities for new diffraction patterns – new material matterings – to take hold” (Taylor, 2018, p. 13).

It is a prevailing trope in new material research that researchers do not “do” methods in the conventional qualitative form as they are imbricated in the materiality of the assemblage-entangled in composition with other bodies (human and nonhuman) (MacLure, 2013; Somerville, 2016). Aligned with the tradition of the affective turn (Clough, 2009; Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2004), our research is embedded in the feminist traditions of memory work. We use a researcher’s restoried memory of the materiality of the school buildings and objects, along with data generated from a conversation with school students, and images that were captured on the day, to provide an account of both a material – discursive research process and a new material reading of Snapchat relationality. In doing so, we conceive agencies in our theorising that exceed human action. Intra-actions are the mutual intermingling of agencies. Entities, human and nonhuman bodies, are co-constitutive. They materialise through intra-actions.

The notion of affective intra-actions provide a transformational way to think about social media, in particular, how discourses, human and non-human bodies, and subject positions, emerge in assemblages and transform each other. Snapchat exceeds itself as an app when plugged into material – discursive assemblages. It becomes an intra-active – co-constituting human and non-human actor, including human bodies, discourses of female sexuality, childhood innocence, politics and religion and their associated policings of sexuality, child protection and moral panics. Furthermore, affective flows are generated through acts of cyber-objectification that produce humour, fear, shame, and lust. Therefore, what appears to be just an “app”, is really an entanglement of affectivities of culture and technologies that co-produce relationality.

The ephemerality of Snapchat and the diffractive patterns it creates when photographs are distributed enable a reconfiguration of “spacetimematterings” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). Past, present and future are not a linear unfolding, but rather are collapsed in on each other. Intra-actions enact agential cuts, which “do not produce absolute separations, but rather cut together-apart” in one move (Barad, 2014, p. 168). With an orientation toward experimentation and creation, we use Barad’s (2007) notion of agential cuts as an analytical concept. Agential cuts delineate difference and boundary-setting practices and can be used in research to shed light on practices that serve to perpetuate affective inequality. We use the concept of agential cuts to surface links between “lad culture”, “rape culture”, “everyday sexism” (Phipps et al., 2018), and Snapchat. These dynamics are co-constituted through the intra-actions within and beyond school. In these entanglements words are given meaning and “agential cuts” emerge.

The mattering of images on phones create evocative flows of affect. We focused on intra-actions of spacetimematterings to consider how young people using Snapchat can co-produce subtle and not so subtle affective inequalities. According to Juelskjaer (2013, p. 755), spacetimemattering manifests as intra-active relationality where “time and space are produced through iterative intra-actions that materialise specific phenomena, where phenomena are not “things” but relations”. Therefore, our research practice and the understandings we generate take account of materiality, time, and space.

The study

With university ethics permission, the research team undertook a pilot study, speaking with high school students about their Snapshot use. Four students responded to an open invitation to a Year 11 cohort to participate in the research during one lunchtime. Entering this school and asking about technology mediated relationships, we encountered a gendered space with strong heteronormative threads. Gender is materialised in schooling spaces. Taguchi (2012) writes how the range of sensory elements is salient in the intra-active space of the research assemblage. “[T]he researcher is attentive to those bodymind faculties that register smell, touch, level, temperature, pressure, tension and force in the interconnections emerging in between different matter, matter and discourse, in the event of engagement with data” (p. 267). Acknowledging that it is problematic to give an account of spacetimematterings in linguistic form, we write of the embodied aspects of the assemblage.

Language and materiality are co-constituted where “language, the human, and the material [are] not as separate entities mixed together but [are] completely imbricated” (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013, p. 630). We explore how agential cuts capture the intra-acting movements of material – discursive entanglements. Højgaard and Søndergaard (2011, p. 9) observe that there are “intersections, distinctions, boundaries, demarcations, differences, [and] categorisations… often in the form of something we tend to perceive as evident and preconceived, and which many scholars would describe as fixed reality”. Tentative and unstable, our analysis is not an interpretation of a fixed reality. Rather, it involves investigating elements of the research assemblage in order to reveal its transversal relations and affects.

The research assemblage that follows comprises a restoried memory of a research encounter and a transcription of recorded conversation between the researchers and four high school students. Invited by email to come to a lunchtime meeting, the students who agreed to speak with us all identified as male and were aged around 15 years of age. All names are pseudonyms to keep the students and teacher’s identities anonymous. The space where this research took place influenced the nature of the conversation with the students. Rather than extracting voice from the assemblage, as if it can be divorced from the materiality of the affective politics of the relational space, the following material is a storied and voiced assemblage. In this way, we provide an account of both how bodies and objects are co-produced through a research event, and Snapchat use can influence affective inequalities.

The materiality of the old school

The school was established and prestigious. The building where the group discussions took place overlooked a sports oval. It was a typical sports building in that there were change rooms on the lower floor and a meeting space, with kitchen, on the upper level. There were school memorabilia covering one wall, and many doors out to verandas enabling sports viewers to view ovals from two sides of the building.

Researchers: We enter the historic brick school at the back gate. Standing prestigiously for over 120 years, established for the sons of gentry, the school is steeped in tradition and its buildings are a prominent landmark in the town. Laden with incubation bags of pizza and soft drink, we pick our way across a field, skirting cut up mud patches, over to a brick out building. The teacher, Chris, lets us into the old stand-alone building. Chris is friendly, sporting a fine wool jumper.

The researchers put down the bag of electronic tablets for digital recording and lay out the pizzas on a single line of desks (Figure 1). Chris appears nervous, telling us that despite the invitation to lunch, it is uncertain whether any students will turn up. The researchers decided that the participants should eat first and then hold the discussion after they had fed their appetites (if any turned up).

Figure 1. Pizza in the school room.

Looking about the room, we ask about the wall adorned with small coat of arms plaques. Chris tells us about a fading tradition where a visiting private school rugby team presents a plaque after a tournament (Figure 2). The practice is eroding as the competitive and camaraderie of rugby visits to schools morph with school traditions changing in nature. Around the walls, teams of players sit crossed legged straight backed, eyes sternly forward gazing out from their glassed frames. Uninhabited rugby jerseys hang proudly in glass cages at the back of the room – proudly testifying to the long tradition of rugger (Rugby Union) in the school.

Figure 2. School memorabilia: rugby team photos, jerseys and plaques.

Outside the buzzing leaf-blower and the reedy melody of bagpipes catches on the breeze. Four boys arrive and sit before the gaping pizza boxes with forks and napkins, eating lunch and making light conversation. The boys tall and smart in their blazers look calm and the researchers sit across from them – making a semi-circle, trying to appear open and easy in manner.

With the meal drawing to a close, the lead researcher pulls papers from her bag and explains the ethics process. Fluttering information sheets and consent forms and pens come and go. The littered boxes and remnants are abandoned as further chairs are drawn from stacks against the wall and placed into a circle. Electronic tablets are placed so that they inhabit chairs interspersed between the students. The three adults, the two researchers and Chris, take one side of the circle and the four boys sit across from them.

The talk proceeds and the boys appear to relax, talking over each other as they explain how Snapchat works to the two middle aged women before them (the researchers) and their teacher.

The group discussion

The following passage is a transcribed audio recording, taken 12 min into the group discussion. There was cross talk, which was hard to ascertain. were used as recording devices. The boys spoke about their experiences where they have seen flows of explicit images circulating phone to phone – body to body. The fact that the teacher was present, although saying very little throughout, forged a connection to the disciplinary structures of the school and a reminder of the expectations that teaching staff hold for student conduct.

Researcher 1:

Do you see people saving stuff that they wouldn’t like other people to see?

Malcolm:

Aaaawww not really, I don’t know, like – well most of my friends are pretty good people. So obviously, – you know.

(Crosstalk)

Roger:

If they tell you to delete it – you just delete it.

Malcolm:

Yeah – you just delete it.

Roger:

They would definitely delete it if the person asked them to delete it.

Malcolm:

Yeah delete it for sure.

Researcher 2:

Do you know others – not your friends – who may not use it appropriately?

Malcolm:

Yeah, definitely.

Roger:

Yeah. There are lots of people who are using it.

Researcher 1:

We have difficulty understanding what that is like or what actually happens. Can you tell us what happens?

Roger:

With sending inappropriate photos and that?

Researcher 1:

Mmm

Roger:

Well yeah.

Roger:

Well some people use it for that.

Steve:

Yeah.

Malcolm:

Some people use it for that… but, like, it takes two to tango – They’ re sending it and I'm not saying… Like – it is definitely bad. But, it is not like they’re pulling it out of them. Like, they are sending it. But then again – they can send it and then…

Roger:

It can get screenshotted.

Malcolm:

And it gets screenshotted.

Roger:

And that is what the worst thing is about Snapchat.

(Crosstalk)

Male:

You can get a screenshot.

Roger:

If the other boys find out … They are going to ask to screenshot it.

Malcolm:

 

And obviously you can be a good person and delete it, or you hear the stories all the time – when people come to the group and talk about it.

Roger:

That’s the worst thing, like, I’ve heard of boys and they have had a girlfriend and they have broken up.

Steve:

And then they send it around.

Roger:

Yeah, all the boys send it around.

Malcolm:

And, they come through school all the time and travel around talking about it and they act it out. Like, someone will send a photo and someone will screen shot it. And they say ‘here I trust you – just don’t show anyone’.

Roger:

And then two weeks later it’s all over Facebook. All over other people’s phones.

Agential cuts

The material assemblage of the bagpipes, the leaf-blower, the gatekeeping teacher, the agential objects evoking pride in the heritage of the institution and the implied male camaraderie of rugby field, intra-act with the two women researchers, the food and drink brought for lunch, and technology. As such the assemblage produces a data event. It draws us into the human and non-human relationships and the politics of gendered bodies-giving us a sense of the affective flows of denial and judgement.

In the entanglement and intra-actions of this material-discursive research assemblage, there were configurings of “good schoolboys”. In the grounds of the school with its historic buildings and whine of bagpipes, and in that room so steeped in objects of masculinist tradition (e.g. the jerseys on the wall, and the school uniforms so reminiscent of World War 1 militaria), the boy’s words take specific meanings and so that “agential cuts” are co-produced through the intra-actions in that relational space. Just as the cuts produced “good schoolboys” in the spacetimematterings of the research space, there were hints at the affective inequalities of those “others” outside who engage in cyber-objectification beyond the immediate assemblage.

It is ironic that phones with their Snapchat App are a silence in the research encounter – not present in the boys hands during the conversation with the researchers and possibly concealed in their pockets. They remain in the discursive realm during the research encounter – their materiality agency present in the space but not visible to the boys, researcher or their teacher. This is an intervention in human relationships, yet another form of its ephemerality. Through its ephemeral functionality, Snapchat takes up different subjectivities to mobilise different affects. This ephemerality sometimes prompts affect in ways that “lead to playfulness and learning around gender and sexual relationship norms” (Handyside & Ringrose, 2017, p. 2). There is joy it the App’s capacity to narrate stories and morph images. However, there is also gendered cyber-objectification in its mediation of power relationships – affect is evoked through its ephemeral intra-action or intervention in matter.

What was not supposed to matter, matters a great deal. An explicit image (a mattering) can be disseminated in a diffractive move six months after being initially sent to a recipient. The circulation of the image evokes further power relationships, amalgamating past and future into the present with the click of a button. The past re-manifests when the retained image is newly circulated. The future is projected in a potential diffraction that one can never know is coming. There are no assurances that an affect evoking image is ever completely gone. Once it is sent, it could surface at a later time, evoking shame through the matterings of the affective assemblage (Probyn, 2010). This is an agential cut, with the agency of matter influencing networked affect.

In the agential cut produced in the data, properties of Snapchat, and boundaries between people and their identities, are produced and become meaningful. In the research assemblage Snapchat is agentic in enabling trust and social cohesion and also in shattering it – producing betrayals. Through the flows of affect which are apparent in data above, trust is produced and broken. Phua et al. (2017) suggest that those who use Snapchat have close relationships with their friends because the Snaps are shared between people who already have real life connections. Snapchat has been found to foster emotional attachment and trust with the potential privacy of the tool enabling individuals to liaise with others who provide them with emotional support and advice to assist with decision making (Phua et al., 2017). It is this potential for closeness and trust, afforded by human -technology entanglements, that can make Snapchat betrayals so intense.

There is a suggestion of the girls’ complicity in sexting images to boyfriends with a refrain that “it is not like they’re pulling it out of them”. The girls are choosing to send intimate images. As Schwalbe and Wolkomir (2001, p. 97) point out, we all give “selective strategically crafted accounts of our lives and actions” when asked about our actions. The comment that the images were given freely is a gendered defence. Although we have encountered instances when there has been coercion for images (Charteris et al., 2018), in this instance, the boys allude to the girls’ willingness to capture and send explicit images. It must be noted that there can be enormous pressure on girls to portray “sexy” as a form of “digital sexual attention seeking”, with Snapchat enabling them to “negotiate a fragile path between sexy and slutty” (Handyside & Ringrose, 2017, p. 11). This impetus to be seen as “sexy” is not a representation of teenage female desire but rather a response to the male gaze, with a juxtaposition of “slutty” emphasising the fragility of girls’ reputations. Likewise, the impetus to create a “lad culture” is also entangled in similar intensities.

There is cyber-objectification in the pressure to pass on an explicit image when other boys find out about it and ask to screenshot it. This sharing implies homosocial bonding and a sense of “trust” between the “lads”. This trust is stronger than the ties to the young woman who sent the image originally and may no longer be in a close relationship with the initial recipient. When the image goes viral and two weeks later “it’s all over Facebook” and “all over other people’s phones”, affect is an intensity that is intra-actively produced. What was once an intimate expression of sexuality within a relationship escalates with affective reverberations.

We can envisage that there are a range of affective entanglements in play-excitement in receiving an illicit image, lust for the young woman’s body, and potential shame of getting caught (Dobson & Ringrose, 2016). Affective intensities produce action to retain the images, send on, post on Facebook, or delete. The girl becomes an object-of-the sex-gaze rather than object-of-the-victim gaze, when the boys are positioned as not “pulling it out of them”. The power relations of cyber-objectification are diffused through the assemblage. Rather than a targeted enactment of power, the image creates “gendered cyber-objectification” and the girl’s shame is a by-product of the event – a diffractive ripple through the objects and bodies which evokes widespread affect.

There is mass involvement when all the boys send the image around. Here I trust you - just don’t show anyone. In sending it around to all the boys, gendered cyber-objectification becomes normalised. This normalisation corresponds with rape culture (Phipps et al. 2018) where women are portrayed passively, as victims of sexual crimes (Easteal et al., 2015).

Both “good person” and “bad person” positions locate young women as powerless objects of a cyber-objectification gaze. There is a strong sense of morality with the good/bad dichotomy enacted by those who send it on and those who delete it. The students understand that for those over 18 years old, capturing, retaining and/or disseminating images can result in criminal prosecution. The illegitimacy of the images is apparent in the boys’ repeated words delete… delete… delete. With a teacher present it can be seen as necessary for students to take this stance. However, there is inequity apparent between boys’ and girls’ rights to public bodily display and sexual “attention seeking” (Ringrose & Harvey, 2015). According to Dobson and Ringrose (2016, p. 11), it is hard to “imagine the possibility that girls are legitimately entitled to digitally mediate sexuality or express sexual desire” and therefore explicit critiques of sexism are required to support gender equity in schools.

Affective inequalities – flows through Snapchat as agential matter

Young people are entangled in affect networks where there are material – discursive entanglements that construct networked publics (boyd, 2014). Snapchatting can evoke affective inequalities in intimate relationships. Through the material – discursive co-constitution of a plethora of human and non-human agents, schooling peers and technological devices are drawn together and affective inequalities are perpetuated. Massumi (1987) writes that affect does not denote a personal feeling. Rather, is “an ability to affect and be affected.” Following this line of thought, we describe the Snapchat mediated gendered cyber-objectification as an “encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body” (Massumi, 1987, p. xvi). The transmission of images from phone to phone and body to body create entangled affective intensities.

Research into agential cuts in social media practices affords is an emergent enactment. Scrutiny is given to “materially embodied socio-political practices, and to the cuts, boundaries, and differences we co-constitutively produce through knowledge enactments” (Taylor, 2016, p. 203). Visibility enables us to learn about youth culture, as a means to engage with and understand it (boyd, 2014; Hasinoff, 2015). This analysis details how “lad culture”, “rape culture” and “everyday sexism” (Phipps et al., 2018) are normalised through gendered material – discursive relations in schools. These subtle practices need to be surfaced and recognised if gendered cyber-objectification and wider gender politics are to be tackled and challenged.

Our researcher selves were moved by the tenuousness of the boys as they were co-implicated – “coming into being” (Somerville, 2016, p. 8) in the research space. Rather than attributing responsibilisation for sexist practices, we view that they, like us, are immersed in the intra-active agencies, produced in the gendered politics of the schooling assemblage. We were all intra-actively co-produced – entangled with the school’s traditions, our university ethics procedures, the sounds of bagpiping, the glass mounted rugby jerseys of prestigious players, photographs of teams on the walls, the recording devices, tablets, notepads, the circle of chairs, the uniforms, the age differences of the researchers from the schoolboys.

The Snapchat topic, in touching on sexuality, was risky in this particular schooling space, with its heritage and standards of conduct emanating as affect from the objects surrounding us. We could only ask what would be appropriate for the space – so the boys would not to get in trouble with their teacher (who appeared to be silently policing the conversation beside us). In the circumstances, the boys could only divulge what would ensure their safety – not “dobbing” (telling tales) on peers with repercussions afterwards, or saying too much with their friends in the room, witnessing how much they disclosed. They also had to be careful of what they said about themselves.

In addressing affect, we recognise that the act of recording itself is an affective influence. It intensifies and/or dampens the affect produced (Clough, 2009). As Somerville (2016, p. 8) points out, “any method of attending to affect… cannot simply be a matter of containment, interpretation, meaning, signification, or representation”. We could not use a video to record the entanglements of researchers, schoolboys, teacher and the many objects with the assemblage. The act of video recording would be an insertion of an agential object (Bennett, 2010) that could dampen the affective intensities due to the possibility of evoking bodily shame (Probyn, 2010).

In the room, while talking with the boys, we were immersed in the moment. Not a limitation in conventional terms, the materiality of the encounter could have been recorded with one of us writing the assemblage during the conversation. Noticing and recording the intra-actions during the talk would have further enhanced our “knowledge-making practices” as “material enactments” that are enmeshed in phenomenon we describe (Barad, 2007, p. 247). Furthermore, the validity of the research reflects a truth produced through the entanglement of an agential cut in the schooling encounter.

The truth-telling was mitigated by the age and gender of the researchers, the way that the research event was produced through the mattering of the old school, the presence of the students’ peers, and the presence of Chris, the teacher. Although we were hoping to speak with students without the presence of their teacher, Chris remained in the room for the duration of our discussions. Chris may have wanted to ensure that the students did not convey information that had potential to damage the reputation of the school. We assume Chris’ presence significantly influenced what the boys shared in this instance. The situated truth of this research is produced through the “ongoing ebb and flow of agency” that circulated between the bodies (human and non-human) in that space (Barad, 2003, p. 817). It is a paradox that Chris remained in the room for what could be seen as ethical reasons and yet, it would also have been ethical to conduct the interview in his absence, without the possibility that he could influence the boys and/or pass judgement.

Conclusion

We have illustrated how affective inequalities are produced through texts, images and videos in a schooling assemblage. Affective inequalities that produce “lad culture”, “rape culture” and “everyday sexism” occur when these relations are normalised through the gendered material-discursive relations in schools. Our analysis has illustrated how affective intensities are produced through the non-consensual transmission of images. Addressing the need to better understand the context in which sexting occurs (Van Ouytsel et al., 2019), we make the point that any consideration needs to look at relational dynamics and the politics of social intra-actions, rather than just isolating one particular aspect of the cyber-objectification issue.

In the restoried memory and our treatment of participant voice we have signalled the vitality of matter (Bennett 2010). It is our intention that these data “interfere with thought” and serve as an experiment that refuses “the separation between “dumb matter” and the linguistic and cultural systems that “represent” it and supposedly give data life and meaning” (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018, p. 478). The data assemblage presented is a means to decentre both default anthropocentric positioning in research practice (Charteris et al., 2020) and illustrate the affective flows that produce cyber-objectification.

We argue that gendered cyber-objectification should be acknowledged and challenged. Furthermore attention is warranted to the subtleties of ephemeral media and the ease by which lad culture, rape culture, and everyday sexism becomes normalised. Lad culture, rape culture, and everyday sexism are evoked through the “material – discursive articulations of the world” (Højgaard & Søndergaard, 2011, p. 9) that are produced through and with Snapchat social media. Making the bio-technical entanglements visible, we have extended the literature on “lad culture”, “rape culture”, “everyday sexism” by illustrating how these elements of toxic masculinity can become diffused and ephemeral as they circulate in an Australian high school.

We extend our previous considerations of affective flows in Snapchat related youth relations (Charteris et al., 2016) that aimed to rupture simplistic conceptions of sexualised communications, where there are gendered responses associated with moral panics. Although the participants who opted into the study identified as male and spoke of their contact with “girls”, we acknowledge that gender is not essentialised or binarised. Furthermore, there is scope for a nuanced investigation into experiences of cyber-objectification and affective inequalities of young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and intersex.

A new material research approach that acknowledges that “matter matters” permits explicit critiques of sexism to support gender equity in schools. Snapchat is a device that affords joy, laughter, and hilarity. Nevertheless, some of the affective intensities produced through Snapchat perpetuate gendered inequities which are symptomatic of sexist school cultures and masculine sexual entitlement that needs to be challenged.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Charteris

Associate Professor Jennifer Charteris is Head of Department Learners, Learning and Teaching in the School of Education at the University of New England. Jennifer’s research interests span student voice, the politics of teacher education, and professional learning. She is interested in how theories of affect and materiality inform education research.

Sue Gregory

Professor Sue Gregory, Head of School, School of Education, at the University of New England, holds a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. A long-term adult educator, her role requires developing strategic initiatives and developing and maintaining linkages, internally and externally, including accreditation bodies, industry partners and community leaders.