No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Feminist theorists have long critiqued the conceptual binaries that underpin western thought as mapping to gender. In the late 20th century, digital technologies seemed poised to rework the boundaries of divides such as public and private, self and Other, masculine and feminine, or virtual and real. Drawing on posthumanist, transfeminist, and new materialist approaches in feminist thought, I analyze digital media interfaces as material sites of enacting and producing gender. In my fieldwork with young, mobile, urban cosmopolitans in early 2000s Berlin, many contested conventional gender, in ways tied to class status, even as they navigated implicit understandings of gender in interface design. I argue that these technologies must be analyzed as material interfaces or surfaces through which gender is constructed discursively and materially. Feminist technology and design scholars ask how new technologies and interfaces can support alternative, non-hegemonic enactments of gendered selfhood, as a means to challenge and rework how gender is constructed in and through sociotechnical systems. But such interventions require asking what exactly gender is online, as a virtual practice that combines the material with the informational in new ways.

For many cosmopolitan urban Germans and Europeans in Berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. But these platforms, such as Facebook or Pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. Sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like Twitter or Facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. Visually based sites like Pinterest and Etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. Although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. In this article, I consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.