Constructing the digital self in the Global South

In: Journal of language and sexuality, Volume 9, Issue 1, p. 1-13

Abstract

Abstract
The papers in this special section examine how people in various contexts of the Global South "construct the self" in
online spaces. With examples from Chile, Senegal, and Trinidad, the papers show the wide range of discursive practices, encompassing the
textual and the aesthetic, which individuals use to enact gendered and sexual selves online. By privileging gender and sexuality as central
components of selfhood, we draw from the longstanding attention paid to gender and sexuality in linguistic studies of identification (see
Bucholtz & Hall 2004). In placing this concept within digital worlds, we pay attention to
the ways in which daily life is now lived and experienced online. Authors in this issue think critically about practices of self-formation
and the performance of gender and sexuality that differ from those that have normalized in the Global North, considering both revolutionary
possibility, and re-entrenchment of constraint.