Female Creators and the Politics of (Dis)Appearance on YouTube Morocco

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Abstract

Building on the observation that young women engage in the production and circulation of qualitatively different types of user-generated video, this paper explores the gendered aspects of participatory social media production among youth on YouTube Morocco. The key argument advanced in this paper highlights the contradictory qualities of women’s social media production; it contends that while patriarchy’s shadow looms large in female practices of user-generated content production, emerging spaces of female participation in digital public culture allow for contesting the very patriarchal norms that shape gender-segregated spaces of UGC production. Methodologically, the paper makes use of a battery of online ethnography tools and methods (Kozinets 2010), including in-depth interviews with twenty prominent YouTube creators and immersion in online spaces of female content production. The paper traces the micro-processes through which offline gender norms are reproduced online in order to create gendered spaces of creative expression and cultural production.

Author

• Mohamed El Marzouki, Illinois Institute of Technology