ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how one group of Black British teenage boys aged 16 and 17 from a London secondary school perceive and perform gender on social media platforms. We draw on data from focus groups and social media diaries where participants responded to the question “what’s it like to be a boy online?”, to explore their experiences and performances of masculinity in the digital sphere. First, we examine the specific cultural pressures and racialized, idealized masculinities the boys who participated in the research experience. Following this, we consider how participants use memes as resistance tools and look at the intersecting aspects of the boys’ experiences with racialized and localized aspects of masculinity. Lastly, we examine how the specific networked misogyny apparent in the memes is employed as a defensive strategy. Throughout, we demonstrate the way social media creates new terrain for performance of gender identity. We argue that memes function through solidarity, resistance, homosociality, and misogyny simultaneously and that this complexity demonstrates that boys require space to unpack their insecurities beyond the “banter” of social media.
