The electronic swapping of sexually provocative images and texts, commonly known as sexting, seems to have become part and parcel of adolescents’ social lives. In spite of both media and policy attention, questions remain about the way(s) young women navigate sexual relationships and construct their gendered identity discursively by endorsing/challenging social and behavioural norms of sexual agency. Guided discussions involving 36 young women were conducted. The main of aim of this study was to gain insight into the characteristics of sexualised adolescent cyberculture by analysing their discourses about sexting, the effects on their lives and its implications. In this article, I argue that the discourse analysis of these young women’s own construction of their sexualised gender identity may throw light on the interrelationships between dominant purportedly sexualised culture and agency.

By analysing 200 Tinder profiles of Spanish heterosexual men and 200 Grindr profiles of Spanish queer men, this article examines these men’s online gendered and sexualised self-representation strategies. More specifically, the study develops a discourse and feminist analysis of post-feminist media cultures which contrasts these men’s discursive representations. In so doing, the article attempts to cast light on the (d-)evaluating discursive strategies these Spanish heterosexual and queer men deploy when creating their profiles. Importantly, the analysis gives evidence of how occupying the masculine or the feminine position goes hand in hand with the devaluation and policing of femininity. Furthermore, the analysis calls attention to the contradictory gender ideas present in their personal profiles and this, in turn, sheds further light on the ways they construct multiple masculine identities to negotiate their sexual gendered identities.

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Despite its apparent simplicity, the speech act of complimenting has received a great deal of attention in the literature. However, studies have mostly focused on compliments’ realization in face-to-face conversational exchanges, while they have often been neglected in other channels such as online communication. This article is intended to redress the balance in support of online exchanges. More specifically, we aim to investigate how users of online social networks like Facebook use compliments to evaluate others and strengthen social rapport in English and Spanish. In order to do so, we gathered two balanced corpora in both languages (50 examples in each language). The samples were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed using a systemic functional framework. The analysis reveals that compliments constitute a system of choices where several available options help Facebook users to encode their evaluation of the other from various perspectives (e.g. as an emotion, as an unquestionable truth, etc.). Furthermore, results also show that despite superficial similarities, compliments in both languages follow remarkably different frequencies of use which reflect deep cultural differences.

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