DOING GENDER IN WHATSAPP HOMOSOCIAL GROUPS

Abstract

Digital media and mobile apps are constantly used concerning social interaction and maintaining social bonds. The most popular platform used for these practices is WhatsApp (Statista, 2022) a cross-platform instant messaging service for mobile devices. Like other instant messaging services, WhatsApp permits its users to create groups to have an interaction between (usually) a restricted number of people. This chapter will focus on young adults' everyday life and their mediated interactions using WhatsApp groups composed exclusively of people of the same gender. Considering these groups as communities of practices (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and gender as something that is doing with interaction (Butler, 2004; Connell, 2005; Mac an Ghaill, 1994), this chapter will concentrate on how young adults perform and (re)shape masculinities and femininities using mobile apps. Starting from the analysis of 46 online interviews with young adults living in Italy, this chapter will focus on homosocial practices in WhatsApp groups underling how gender identities are performed in these specific digital spaces, to what extent uses intertwine with WhatsApp's affordances and which kind of (the idea of) masculinities and femininities are reproduced by users practices. The interviews show how digital homosocial groups are usually carried out as a humourous act between friends, as a form of social consolidation, as an attempt to gain or maintain peer status or preserve hegemonic/dominant ideas of femininity or masculinity and as a safe space where performing what for some interviewees is the real essence of being men or women.