Digital Gender Diversity

Since about the mid-2010s, the idea of gender diversity has come to enjoy unprecedented popularity, not only in academia but also in politics and popular culture, and especially in the Anglophone world, but also elsewhere. New terms for gender identities—such as nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid, demigender, or agender—have proliferated in youth cultures and have been adopted by mainstream media. Digital media have played a key role in the emergence and popularization of these terms, not least because culture in general has become heavily digitalized in the recent two or three decades. Moreover, digital media have allowed many alternative gender communities to flourish, connect to each other, and explore and express a wide range of gender identifications. This bibliography presents an overview of the emerging research on digital gender diversity, understood here as any challenge to the gender binary in digital cultures. The focus is placed on social media, but the bibliography also includes works on other digital technologies, including voice-activated personal assistants, fan fiction websites, video games, advertising, and biotechnologies. The bibliography first lists major works that provide a general overview of the topic and center on the conceptual rethinking of the idea of gender. The next section focuses on how the gender binary has been reproduced or challenged in digital structures, especially through social media design and governance, interfaces, and algorithms. The following section moves on from works on digital media production to studies of digital media use. In two subsections, it elaborates on research into social media use by ordinary users and content creators, respectively, emphasizing users’ agency and its limitations. The subsequent section zooms in on the discussions about gender normativity and gender transgression in video games from the perspective of both game players and developers. The final section drifts away from the focus on digital media and, instead, offers a selection of works that analyze gender diversity from a historical and global perspective. While digital media have undoubtedly helped gender diversity to rise to prominence as an important topic for social and political discussions—especially in the Anglophone world—gender diversity has a much longer history across the globe—a history that should be acknowledged in any analysis of digital gender diversity.