ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the embodiment of teen gender and sexual cultures and practices, examining their interconnectedness with media technologies. It explains how social networking affordances mediate gender and sexuality in the social lives of networked teens. The chapter argues that what Boyd calls social media 'drama' signals how social media affordances are affective. It focuses on one of the schools, Langthorpe College, located in a southeast London neighbourhood with high levels of economic deprivation and associated violence. It begins a discussion of how digital affordances shape the possibilities of connectivity and relationality in young people's gender and sexual cultures, and how this is played out in other physical cultural arenas and spaces. Mobile digital technologies cannot be treated like some add-on feature to young people's lives today. Young people were then invited to connect with us on Facebook for a three-month period during the research project.
