Digital Expressions of Gender in Africa

This book investigates the ways in which gender is performed in Africa’s digital spaces.

Social media and digital platforms provide young Africans with spaces to performatively resist gender conformance and assert bodies in transitions. These spaces allow gender identities to be fluidly made, unmade, and remade. Drawing on case studies from across North, East, West, Central and Southern Africa, this book investigates the ways in which social media-enabled cultural products resist heteronormativity and project varying masculinities, femininities, and personalities which negate birth sex. These identities, in turn, open up possibilities for transgender individuals, non-binary persons, and empowered women to performatively resist the systemic constructions of gender. Four particular themes are explored in depth: representations of women in cultural texts, call-out culture and resistance of cyberbullying, contested masculinities, and antinormative gender enactments.

The book’s inclusive exploration of gendered paradigms of digital expressions in Africa will be of interest to researchers across gender studies, sociology, performing arts, literary studies, linguistics, cultural studies and media studies.