Sexuality, gender, media. Identity articulations in the contemporary media landscape

A dialectical-relational approach to anti-trans sentiments on Hupu

“…The nationalist rhetoric, which surfaces from the sampled postings on Hupu, reveals an entangled relation between international geopolitics and trans-rights debates that is not specific to China but also observed elsewhere (Clarkson, 2020). This reiterates the nationalist interference with popular cultural consumption, amid increasingly more hard-lining populist politicians gripping power around the world today (Liu et al, 2021;Scarcelli et al, 2021;Yang and Fang, 2021).…”

“…Yet, trans people always represent a unique camp within the broader LGBTQ community (Tortajada et al, 2021). On the one hand, transgenderism allows one to oscillate between being female and male, posing threats to the orthodox view of sex being assigned at birth (Scarcelli et al, 2021). On the other hand, moving from one end of the spectrum to the other simultaneously subjects some members of the trans community to certain heteronormative gender norms (Tortajada et al, 2021).…”

Research on the Reconstruction of Gender Identity Affected by Fashion Consumption on Social Media

“…Gender, one of the most important identities of ourselves, have important influence on the ways in which we live our lives and interact with people around us. As media form the most important arena for shaping, articulating, representing and performing these definitions and the mass media blurs the private and public sphere, gender studies with a focus on media, become one of the main ways to understand our society, particlarly with a focus on privileges, power, differences, scripts, stereotypes, etc [1].…”

“…In this sense, gender is not stable, but an identity tenuously constituted in time, an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts, conceptions of which would be determined by our interactions with environment [2]. Studies on media consumption and this socially constructed gender identity has underlined the dialogic process of how identity and consumption of media texts mutually shape each other, where audiences are seen as active producers of meaning while they consume media products [1]. Francesca Comunello, Lorenza Parisi and Francesca Ieracitano analyze how users perform and negotiate gender scripts on dating apps in their research.…”

“…Meanwhile, Sofia Caldeira, Sofie Van Bouwel, and Sander De Ridder analyse young people's negotiations and contradictory discourses that shape girls' understanding of their gender scripts. Significantly, they recognize the users' need to negotiate the culturally prevalent negative and gendered stereotypes in media consumption and production [1]. Made by people and worn by people, clothing narrates the socially constructed gender differences with a clear distinction in male and female.…”