Gender Identity, Everyday Politics, and Social Media: Indonesian Female Millennials’ Social Media Activism
Article
This study aims to investigate how the female millennial generation engages in the expression of everyday politics on social media. Millennials are often perceived as disinterested in political matters; however, it is argued that they possess unique characteristics that shape the way they articulate their political preferences. By advancing previous research on gender, social media, and political resistance, this study fills a gap in the existing literature, as previous studies primarily focus on women’s involvement in political resistance on social media without specifically examining millennials, particularly females, and their utilization of social media for expressing their political preferences.
To conduct this investigation, a multimodal discourse analysis method was employed, analyzing posts on Twitter and Instagram that articulate political expressions by female millennial protesters against unjust government policies. The findings reveal that female millennials exhibit a distinctive attitude when expressing their political preferences. There exists an interplay between gender identity and politics, manifested through everyday life political narratives. For instance, female millennials employ the use of makeup as an analogy to symbolize their political standpoint. Additionally, they informally frame political issues. Social media platforms offer support by enabling female millennials to share images and videos that amplify the narrative of everyday life politics.
Queered affordances: Gender expressions of Filipino TikTok content creators
Article
Social media spaces have been used as platforms for gender representations and expressions. Therefore, it is essential to define and discuss what features of the platform allow queer individuals to showcase their identities and sensibilities. Moreso, current interest in TikTok has led to scholarly interrogations that define the platform’s potential and pitfalls. The paper, drawing from the constructs of social media affordances and the kapwa model, examined how queer individuals enact queer expressions through TikTok’s social media affordances. Online interviews of queer individuals from mostly urban settings were employed to elicit reflections and experiences of how they queer their social media presence. Moreover, content analysis of TikTok videos was used to understand better how platform affordances enable or restrict the production of queer social media presence. Finally, discussions and recommendations on the potentiality of online spaces to enable the formation of networked publics and communities through the creation of queer content on the social media platform are made.
