Gender and writing in digitally social spaces

I tend to get around to updating this when I have something interesting (or, at the very least, interesting to me) to share with the 10 people who occasionally visit the site. Kidding, there are like 8. Which is fair, this is niche stuff.

But today I am going to share just a bit about what I’ve learned regarding the role of gender in the place where the citizen authors are writing and reading fiction in online communities. First, communities, in this sense, began by me looking at social media (digitally social platforms/networks/sites/whatever) but has morphed into a wider definition as a place on digitally social platforms where people come together over a work, or the potential to create a work of fiction. The key element here is links to my definition of what a book is: as any piece of framed content that has a basis in text, can be reproduced, and has an element of sociality, insomuch that it has the potential to be shared or made public at some stage in its development.

Here, in the digital realm, it has to do with that potential to be shared, made public, and, going one step further, it has the potential to be interacted with and/or upon.

So I’ve been looking at the communities in places like Wattpad, FanFiction.net, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…basically any and all the places where someone can write a work of fiction, share it, and get some feedback on that work. Firstly, I need to say that I am not conflating all the platforms into a single identity. At other places in my research I deal with the issues of mediation and the power held by the platforms themselves, and when it comes to gender this holds true, and each platform has different ways of handling it/monetising it.

To make it easy, here’s a brief summary of the things I’ve discovered in my consideration of gender, the citizen authors, their online communities, and their relationship to the wider publishing industry.

• Men and women use social spaces differently – most social sites are over 50% female, except for Twitter. This is visible in the way users interact in these spaces – Twitter is more IN YOUR FACE and Instagram is more ‘personal’. (Shen, et.al., 2017)
• There is more support and interaction between authors in sites that are more female driven.
• When writing for a ‘masculine’ audience of literary gatekeepers female-identifying citizen authors self-select and censor what they create and where they send it. In the digitally social spaces where they write, they expect the audience to look more like themselves and write accordingly.
• Women are more likely to be readers and writers. “Although 80 percent of the fiction readers are female, ‘the tastemakers, our critics, remain chiefly male’” (Messud, qtd. in Radcliffe Magazine, 2014).
• Genre fictions really show the gender gap: Science fiction is roughly 2/3 male authors, Fanfictions are majority female, as is the writing on Wattpad; I could go on.
• The perceived intimacy of a female-dominated sphere creates a safe space that feels like “women’s work”: sitting around the kitchen with a cup of tea. It normalises the sharing of writing from author to reader in a similar fashion.
• Female-identifying citizen authors and readers appreciate narratives of authenticity that make the ‘otherness’ of an avatar online relatable and more real. It’s the same reason we love when celebrities admit or showcase their flaws; we relate to the humanness of that.
• These narratives of authenticity bring about perceived intimacy, which, in turn, enhances the feelings of connectivity within a community (note, all these traits and words that are typically associated with the feminine).
• This perceived intimacy and authenticity encourages members of the female-identifying community to engage with one another in a supportive manner.
• Gendered performances in digitally social spaces are mediated by the platforms themselves, which is a form of power relationship between the user and the platforms (and their designers via the user interface). This also brings into play the role of censorship on platforms – especially of bodies (usually female) and graphic stories.
• The gendering of digitally social spaces, where having more options of gender is seen as forward thinking, is based on the “marketing logic of consumption” (Cheney-Lippold, 2011, p. 167), where more info is more monetisable.
• When the citizen author is no longer actively seeking to join the wider industry, they have the freedom to create works that do not conform to the socio-economic discourse of publishing, recreating their understanding of ‘legitimacy’ as an author.

There are other details that came to light during this part of my research, but I’ll save that for a fuller publication at some point (I’m looking at you, journals industry).

Cheney-Lippold, J. (2011). A new algorithmic identity soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. Theory, Culture & Society, 28, 164–181. doi:10.1177/0263276411424420

Shen, K., Zhao, F., & Kalifa, M., 2017. Dural Identity Process for Virtual Community Participation and Impact of Gender Composition. In Internet Research, [e-journal] Vol. 27 Issue: 2, pp.182-198, https://doi.org/10.1108/IntR-06-2015-0166