Analysing the performance of gender

Tonks et al (2015) analysed pictures posted by young people to Facebook in their research on young people’s drinking practices. They suggest that online digital photos can be used to answer questions relating to multiple concerns, including gender

displays. Similarly, it seems clear that gender displays are an aspect of vlogs that are as interesting to analyse as the spoken language in the vlogs. Obviously, this means that the analysis of vlogs will be in many ways different to the analysis of the more conventional interview data, because physical appearance (looks, make-up), use of body, movement, close-ups of body parts, visibility of body parts, camera angles etc. all form part of the vlog data.

Another tricky difference between vlogs and interviews is the self-aware performance element that is especially prominent in some vlogs. For example, one vlogger describes the channel of hers that I discuss here (she has others) as ‘the funny channel’. All vlogs, and for that matter interviews, may be seen as performance, but there are differences in the overtness and knowingness involved. In the case of performance done with a purpose of entertaining and being funny, this raises some interesting reflections on the status of the spoken language. Some vloggers at times overtly claim likes and dislikes and present self-descriptions that appear to be stated with the purpose of being funny. Although a discursive analysis avoids speculating about the intentions behind the words, it appears that the viewer is not expected to take the words spoken as a true descriptions of the way things are. It is therefore necessary to analyse carefully what such statements do, and what the jocular framing does.

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One further complication with vlogs as data is the way that the vlogs are far less ‘bounded’ or ‘contained’ than interview data. They frequently refer to other vlogs or

channels, speak to comments left on previous vlogs and invite new comments. Furthermore, vlogs, in comparison with interviews, often speak to current topics or issues on YouTube and can thus be seen as more overtly interactive and situated within ongoing conversations and events. This is on the one hand a very exciting feature of vlogs as data; they are in one sense more ‘living’ and ‘transient’ than interview data.

However, it also meant that I had to make decisions about where to stop, for example, to not include comments or follow referrals to other channels in my selection. As vlogs could easily be seen as part of a never-ending thread, I had to make some arbitrary selection criteria decisions.

Of course YouTube data cannot be taken as a straightforward representation of what concerns young women generally at this moment. I analyse which themes come up and how these young women talk about them in the vlogs they have chosen to upload on the internet. At the time of my selection, I noticed four main ‘loose’ categories: make-up tutorials, book/film/TV reviews, a broader theme of ‘diary-style’ musings on events and changes in the vlogger’s life, and vlogs more directly commenting on ‘gender-issues’, with some overlap between them within individual vlogs.

Gibson et al. (2015) argue, in relation to their research on online discussion forums for women living with breast cancer, that online spaces have been presented as positive, empowering spaces for people who traditionally have had limited control over their bodies, including women, but that these forums also reproduce existing gender norms and heterosexism. Other online spaces, such as the vlogs produced by and presumably aimed at young women, can likewise simultaneously be seen as sites that, theoretically at least, allow women control over discourses around young women, their bodies, their

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primary concerns, values, opinions, what they 'should' do and want etc., and sites that reproduce norms existing in their discursive contexts off and on-line.

As vlogs are to some extent interactive, in that others can talk back in the comments, (imagined audiences and their responses appear to always be considered), vloggers can clearly not be considered to be outside social contexts or to have complete control of the form and content of their vlogs. They are also, obviously, working with the discursive resources available to them. As Gleeson, (2011) quoted in Gibson et al (2015) argues “Visual images, like language, are not simply reflections of reality, but reproduce power relations”, and vlogs can be seen as reproducing some complex power relations.

Morison (2015), cites Markham’s (2004) argument that

“the Internet potentially provides critically oriented qualitative researchers with new tools for conducting research, new venues for social research, and new means for understanding the way social realities get constructed and reproduced through discursive behaviours”.

It is pertinent now to consider the internet in general, and YouTube specifically, as an integral part of young people’s social realities, and thus it is pertinent to consider how YouTube vlogs produced by and specifically for young women construct, challenge and reproduce possibilities for ways of being ‘a young woman’.

5.5. Conclusion

In this chapter I have described the data I collected in interviews and vlogs. In the next three chapters, Chapters 6, 7 and 8, I analyse the participants’ talk. This includes analysing what the interview and vlog material shows about how young women orient to their bodies, and what kinds of people they construct themselves as being. As expected, there were inconsistencies and considerable ambiguity in how the women talked about their bodies. I also analyse what kind of characteristics emerge from their

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talk regarding the ideal young woman today. In the final analysis chapter, I analyse how women construct themselves as particular kinds of responsible people, through the way they position themselves in their talk.

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