Online Presentation of Gendered Selves among Young Women in Egypt

Abstract

Social media and Facebook in particular have become an important arena of social interaction and premarital romance in Egypt. In a society where dating can potentially harm the reputation of young women, a decent public image is considered valuable symbolic capital. This is especially true for brides-to-be. Many university-educated young women have found Facebook useful for impression management. It is necessary for them to mask aspects of their behavior that may be condemned as morally inappropriate and they have thus developed strategies for navigating through certain moral expectations about female sexual purity, virginity and modesty. I define the young women who edit their profiles in order to conform to the prevailing norms of decency, in Goffman’s terms, as ‘cynical performers’. As I show, the embellishment of the self is a pragmatic solution to the problem of coping with existing dating practices and conflicting norms of proper gender interaction, often understood as ‘Islamic’.

Connected Sahrawi refugee diaspora in Spain: Gender, social media and digital transnational gossip

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Self-Presentation in Social Media: Review and Research Opportunities

“…Taking and posting "selfies," or pictures taken by and of oneself, has exploded in recent years as a social media practice, due in part to the proliferation of smartphones with cameras (Taylor, 2014). Research has found that females in particular are more likely than males to post selfies that demonstrate positive physical appearance (Jyrkiäinen, 2016;Pounders et al, 2016). While posting a picture of one's face online, and (c) visibility, or the appearance of messages easily in search results or newsfeeds.…”

Interrogating waithood: family and housing life stage transitions among young adults in North-West Africa countries

“…Nowadays young men and women can seek partners online and enjoy cyberspace romances (see Costa, 2016;Golzard & Miguel, 2016), Nevola, 2016). Females must make themselves available, appealing and seductive while maintaining the expected modesty and reputations of sexual purity (Jykiainen, 2016). All this is for fun, to experiment with presentations of the self.…”