Trainee hairdressers’ uses of Facebook as a community of gendered literacy practice¹

1. This paper arises from the UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar series ‘Young Women in Movement: Sexualities, Vulnerabilities, Needs and Norms’ (ESRC RES-451-26-0715), based at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2009–2011.

Abstract

This paper presents research into how four female trainee hairdressers use Facebook. The participants are friends, attending college in the north of England. In this work I was interested in participants’ presentations of self as presented through their Facebook activities. This work draws on New Literacy Studies to consider the written texts and photographic representations in Facebook profiles and albums; it also draws on Paechter’s concept of communities of gendered practice and combines these theories to examine ways in which the participants’ Facebook literacy practices could be considered as gendered – and what this might mean. Through regular online textual representations of their lives, the trainees not only continually reviewed their own lives on a moment-by-moment basis, but kept surveillance of the lives of their online friends. In this process they participated in the maintenance of gendered communities of literacy practice. The data comprise notes and transcriptions of group interviews about the young women’s uses of Facebook and from Facebook data itself – the girls’ Facebook walls and selected photographs.

Keywords:

• Facebook
• literacy
• gender
• communities of practice
• Discourse

Acknowledgements

This paper would not have been possible without Hannah, Jadie, Josie and Stacey, who gave their time, generosity and friendship. I thank them for their help.

Notes

1. This paper arises from the UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar series ‘Young Women in Movement: Sexualities, Vulnerabilities, Needs and Norms’ (ESRC RES-451-26-0715), based at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2009–2011.

2. In this paper I use Gee’s (1996) distinction between discourses with a small ‘d’ and Discourses. The former refers to spoken language, while the latter refers to ‘Ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking … of being in the world … that are accepted as instantiations of particular roles … by specific groups of people … Discourses are ways of being “people like us”’ (Gee 1996, viii).