Selfies And Gender Identity in Modern Society

While digital media offer new opportunities for addressing some forms of structural inequality, other forms of inequality are steepened. Choose one of the following three areas and develop an argument as to whether digital media have addressed or worsened inequality (or some combination of these) in your chosen area:( gender has been chosen) Use clear case studies and an appropriate evidence‐based to support your argument. 
This essay mainly focus on the topic with gender and in the aspects of digital media causes in inequality for gender.
All the materials I have provided MUST be used for this essay, and at least 8 refs.
Here is an outline :
Essay Question:
Performance of Gender in ""?.... [select one sociological aspect of gender which is treated as a problem]
INTRODUCTION (general with specific focus of essay).
Digital construction of identity is widespread in the world of social media. This essay will analyse how selfies are used to construct gender identities over a wide spectrum (hetero, gay, trans), in the context of present research and theories of dramaturgy.

(brief review of critical sources on your topic – perhaps 1, 2, 3 etc…)
Mikhel Proulox (2016) has examined social media and dating networks in the context of “off-line” and “on-line” systems, such as technical systems and ideological systems.
Problem statements of your 6 sources – what questions are your sources treating (what answers are they supplying goes into the BODY of the essay).
THEORY
Give a short exposition of Goffman’s and Hogan’s theory of front stage and back stage and self- curating here and say that this will be framing your analysis of the problem of selfies you have selected for your essay question.
[BODY] RESEARCH
1. Proulx says that we cannot nave anonymity on digital media; we must perform ourselves and if we don’t have a presence on twitter or FB. We don’t exists (Proulx 2016) Thus in everyday social media we perform ourselves as a “digital ideal” (Proulx 2016, p. 115)
[how online identity performance is prescribed by digital systems, and hence how the legibility of networked self-imagery is coded in relation to both technical and social structures. Digital imagery relating to the self – specifically within social media and dating networks – participates in social anxieties about PASSing in terms of certain sexualized, gendered identities. Thus, performance online is coded – both by ‘offline’ ideological systems as well as through ‘online’ technical systems. (Proulx
2016)…
….. For all of us who enter social media networks, we find not the denaturalized, disembodied digital space purported to offer a liberating anonymity. Rather, this hope for invisibility of the body has been replaced by a requirement of its hypervisibility. Being linked in to social media protocols means being always connected, always participating in the unceasing assembly of digital information for which we are constantly performing. Performing in social media means subjecting oneself to self- regulation and data management, and it also means participating in a system based on numbers.
Here, a social capital of comments, reposts and likes defines a social presence reduced to an integer of how many ‘friends’ and retweets one accrues. We gain visibility by participating in these systems: if one is absent within the purview of a system – if one fails to check in – one is rendered invisible and outside of a given sociality. For many, if an experience is not presented on one’s Facebook wall or Twitter feed, it simply did not happen within the social register. ‘To live a tweetless life’, Geert Lovink articulates, ‘is constructed as not living’ (2011: 44).]
It is perhaps in the everyday imagery of social media and dating and cruising networks where we most clearly see these imperatives to perform the self as a digital ideal. It is here, of course, that we find the epitome of sexy self-imaging: a vernacular of postures that flaunt flattering angles of our bodies – madeup, pouted and flexed (if not completely Photoshopped). Self-presentation here means adapting to normative imagistic standards and cohering to a system’s protocols of legibility: if one wishes to be seen in these networks, one should expect to look a certain way. Online youth cultures in particular have been shown to exhibit a heightened imperative to perform stylized ideals in identity performance (Lynch 2012; Tiidenberg 2014). In many instances these may be meaningful acts of self-presentation performed with the relative safety of a personal computer, as has been shown with ‘sissy boys’ or black girls, for example (Davies 2014; Gaunt 2015). However, where these self-determined practices of imaging the self online may very well be empowering, more widespread tendencies have seen selfie cultures employ a shallow rhetoric of empowerment and self-serving individualism (Freeman 2016). Such navel-gazing vernacular photographic practices embrace conventions of posturing the self to rehearse certain cultural stereotypes. Such tropes are exploited by the internet generation artist Molly Soda, who over-identifies with the image of the self- empowered, hyper-feminine bedroom camgirl. In works shown in both art galleries and online, Soda’s selfies, GIF blog posts and webcam confessionals…..
YOU NEED TO PARAPHRASE THE ABOVE TEXT IN YOUR OWN WORDS! DON’T COPY OR QUOTE FROM YOUR SOURCES. BUT COPY-PASTE RELEVANT PASSAGES SO YOU CAN HAVE YOUR DATA HANDY IN FRONT OF YOU.
1.  Source Lynch 2012

2. Tiidenberg 2014

3. Davies 2014

4. Gaunt 2015

5. Ref?

Plus 1-2 other (non-academic journals and sources)
CONCLUSION
Re-word main findings that you have in your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,.- not more than 4-5 sentence.
Don’t introduce NEW sources or NEW points in the Conclusion, only re-play the points you made in the BODY.
REFERENCES - HARVARD STYLE
Proulx, Mikhel (2016) “Protocol and Performativity: Queer selfies and the coding of online identity”,
Performance Research, 21:5, PP. 114-118.