Digital girls. Le ragazze e la ridefinizione dei rapporti di genere online e offline

The research investigates the processes of female subjectivation in relation to digital technologies. The work focuses on the in-depth analysis of the online and offline subjectivities in the post-feminist new media context, investigating the ways in which girls use and develop Internet and digital technologies in the everyday life. The study offers an empirical contribution to the academic debate about the postfeminist emerging scenario which indicates that girls are exposed to a model of femininity that pacifies instances inherited from feminism with neo-liberal values, which push them towards individualism and the reproduction of unequal relationships of power between genders. In this context, Internet represents an existential place in which, and through which, girls build, discuss and express their identities and relationships. The aim of the study is to understand how these communication technologies contribute in shaping certain gender representations and power relations. This research fits within a field of studies that aims at giving voice to the girls and showing their point of view on their subjective experience as young women in the new millennium. The empirical part of the research combines techniques of online observation with in-depth interviews with 32 girls between 15 and 19 years old, attending high schools in the city of Milan. The core of the research is the girls’ engagement with social networking site (SNS): a field of study barely explored in sociological analysis, which is investigated in order to understand whether and how the mediated nature of online space can offer opportunities of agency. The analysis of the relation between girls and digital technologies - in terms of familiarity, access, uses and practices - highlights that girls start to use Internet and computers in their early childhood. Technologies are negotiated in the domestic space with the rest of the family: the desire for privacy and independence that can be reached using digital technologies guides girls’ online behaviour. The research shows how the smartphone represents the main device, able to provide Internet access and to drive girls’ online habits, and it also defines the relational spaces in the offline life, modifying spatial and temporal boundaries. The mediation offered by the smartphone implies a more and more blurred border between public and private space, and marks the definitive collapse of the distinction between online and offline. Eventually, the study shows how family and peer groups are both the main reference points and the domains in which the girls negotiate specific gender performances. The research results show that, in SNS context, the relationship between the agency and its constraints is a continuous and complex process. On the one hand, the persistence of strict gender norms that control gender identities’ expression and regulate girls’ sexuality emerges; on the other one, the mediated nature of SNS can provide new opportunities of expression and resistance to normative gender models.