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Abstract
New media applications such as social networking sites are understood as important evolutions for queer youth. These media and communication technologies allow teenagers to transgress their everyday life places and connect with other queer teens. Moreover, social media websites could also be used for real political activism such as publicly sharing coming out videos on YouTube. Despite these increased opportunities for self-reflexive storytelling on digital media platforms, their everyday use and popularity also bring particular complexities in the everyday lives of young people. Talking to 51 youngsters between 13 and 19 years old in focus groups, this paper inquires how young audiences discursively constructed meanings on intimate storytelling practices such as interpreting intimate stories, reflecting on their own and other peers' intimate storytelling practices. Specifically focusing on how they relate to intimate storytelling practices of gay peers, this paper identified particular challenges for queer youth who transgress the heteronormative when being active on popular social media. The increasing mediatization of intimate youth cultures brings challenges for queer teenagers, which relate to authenticity, (self-) surveillance and fear of imagined audiences.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by Research Foundation – Flanders (Belgium).
Notes
1. An important note on the sexual identity labels we are using in this paper is necessary. We will be using both ‘gay’ and ‘queer’. We use ‘gay’ to refer to people self-identifying as having same-sex desires, and thereby share intimacies with people from the same sex. Consequently, our label ‘gay’ includes lesbian and bisexual people as well. Further, the term ‘queer’ is used in a broader sense, describing people who are broadly transgressing the heteronormative. This includes people who are gay, but also more broadly people transgressing the coherence between sex, gender and desire as described in the heterosexual matrix (see Butler Citation1990).
2. Although our research is situated within the context of Northern Belgium, our results and discussions refer to contemporary Western youth cultures in general.
3. Which Hepp refers to as the process of ‘moulding’.
4. The percentages used here are published every two years by the Flemish Network for Youth Movements (Jeugddienst en Jeugdnetwerk). The reports contain results from a large-scale quantitative survey on the new media use of Dutch-speaking Belgian teenagers. This research is executed by the research group for Media and ICT (MICT) at Ghent University. The 2010 and 2012 reports can be found here: http://www.apestaartjaren.be/node/585.