"It's just the thing you do": Physical and digital fields and the flow of capitals for young people's gendered identity negotiation

Abstract

This article examines young people’s negotiation of their identities in relation to gender. We explore this through two important sites for young people – physical relationships in the school environment, and mainstream social media sites (e.g. Instagram and Facebook) – with the suggestion that social media is an important site for young people that permits discursive and identity exploration. Specifically, we use a Bourdieusian framework to examine the flow of capital between fields as well as the identities that arise. We draw on the experiences of young people aged 15 or 16 from 70 semi-structured interviews (33 young men, 37 young women; mean age = 15.7) at three socio-economically contrasting schools. We argue that for capital to be accrued, young people’s identities are largely required to be consistent between the physical and digital worlds. Moreover, these identities are heavily tied to polarized gender stereotypes of heightened masculinities and femininities. Thus, a young person’s popularity (reinforced in both the fields of social media and schooling) is partly maintained by the negotiation of their gendered body and a gendered identity.