Traveling imagery Young people's sexualized digital practices

Abstract

How is the sexualized digital imagery that young people engage in enacted and spread? How are negotiations of normativity reshaped by analogue-digital involvement? Th is study travels through shady as well as easily accessible parts of the web, combining insights with analogue research approaches in trying to contemplate these questions in new ways. We use digital ethnography, analogue fi eldwork, interviews, and helpline cases to study how young people's sexualized imagery moves through and transforms across boundless networks, and also across digital and analogue space. Th inking with new materialist analytics, we show how these movements blur the distinction between mundane and abusive practices, and how the opaque and indeterminate character of the material functions as a game changer and aff ects what it means to be young in gendered communities. Although the eff ects vary among diff erent young people and among diff erent social groups, in all cases they infi ltrate conditions for becoming, positioning, and relating.