Social Media and Gendered Power: Young Women, Authenticity, and the Curation of Self

The chapter looks at the relationship between social media and gender by exploring the role of authenticity through the curation of the self-online by young women. It begins by discussing traditional psychological research on the presentation of self and then moves to the production of gender online. By drawing on a theory of power that is relational, the discussion is able to attend to the ways in which the role of authenticity can serve to facilitate or hinder agency. To illustrate how these might play out, we focus our attention on three practices associated with young women: the posting of selfies, the engagement in activism, and the promotion of celebrity to explore the production of intersectional online selves through notions of agency and authenticity. We complete our chapter with a reconsideration of the gendering of power in social media.