Women and Persona Performance 3031331516, 9783031331510

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Women and Persona Performance

Kim Barbour

Women and Persona Performance

Kim Barbour

Women and Persona Performance

Kim Barbour Department of Media University of Adelaide Adelaide, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-33151-0    ISBN 978-3-031-33152-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Image © Samira and Nadia Esfahani This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

To all those who participated in the research presented here, I am grateful for your generosity in sharing experiences, perspectives and life stories. I learned something new from each interaction, and trust that many others will learn from you as well. Thank you all. I was able to undertake the research and writing of this book thanks to the support by the School of Humanities and the Faculty of Arts (now Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics) at the University of Adelaide. Substantive support in the form of two periods of research leave allowed me to conduct and write up my research alongside a number of small grants to employ research assistants. My colleagues in the Department of Media have been so supportive and encouraging; I am conscious of how lucky I am to be a member of this wonderful team. I have been aided by excellent research assistants whose contributions enabled me to sustain progress despite other responsibilities. Nazia Hussain, Freya Langley, Rachel Neef and Elinor Pryce, thank you. Rachel’s work observing online discussions of mothering, as part of her Adelaide Summer Research Scholarship, was particularly fruitful. I am excited to be finishing this manuscript at the same time that some pretty amazing scholars are finishing their theses. Caitlin Adams, Amy Brierley, Robbie Boucaut and Thanh Nguyen, as well as the rest of the Media Department HDR cohort, I have so enjoyed sharing the challenges and excitement of researching and writing in real time with you. Outside of the university system, I have the support of some incredible people. Tina, Briony and Zoë, thanks for all the friendship, wine, conversation and solidarity. My wonderful sisters Karen, Margaret and Julie v

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demonstrate strength and care and wisdom and generosity, setting professional and personal examples I continue to aspire to reach. My dad’s support is unwavering. My mom remains the best of us all. Thank you to my nieces Nadia and Samira for their assistance with the beautiful cover image. Richard continues to enable my life to function, finds my keys and my phone for me, and generally manages to keeps us healthy and fed in a demonstration of love and commitment that is real and valued. Thanks for sticking with me. Abigail, thank you for being such a wonderful kiddo, and for being so patient with me while I learn how to be your mum. There are so many things you can grow into being, and I can’t wait to see what they look like. Maybe you’ll find some ideas in here.

Contents

1 Women,  Personas and Experiences of Self  1 Who Counts as a Woman?   1 Personas and Their Production   4 The Woman Role   8 Women’s Personas in Context  12 References  14 2 Mothers 17 On Mothers  17 Research Methods and Ethical Considerations  22 The Mother-Persona  23 Mother as Identity  25 Mothering as Behaviour  28 Mothering as Situational  31 Mothering as Relational  32 Maternal Behaviour and Valuing Mothering  34 References  36 3 Hairdressers 39 Caring For and About Hair  41 Research Methodology  43 The Stylists  44 The Intimacy of Personal Care  46 Complexities of Expertise  47 vii

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Reading People  48 Sharing and Oversharing  52 Client Interactions  55 Hairdressing and Persona Performance  56 References  58 4 Software Engineers 63 A Persistent Minority  63 Software Engineering and Gender: A Short History  65 Software Engineering and the Place of Women  68 Becoming a Software Engineer: ‘It Was Always That the Entire Time’  71 Attractions and Rewards: ‘To Actually Sit There and Solve Problems for a Living’  74 Workplace Culture: ‘It’s Just the Vibe, This Modern Vibe That I Like’  76 Gender and the Workplace: ‘Not a Very Feminine Woman’  79 Persona Performance and Software Engineering  82 References  85 5 Activists 87 Imagining Activists  87 Online Activism  88 The Capacity to Be an Activist  93 Character Performances and Holistic Selves  95 Considering the Audience  97 Speaking Across Issues 100 Activism and Platform Specificities 102 Activist Personas 103 References 105 6 Online Community Managers107 Conceptualising Community 107 Pre-digital Community 108 Early Online Social Spaces 109 Facilitating Online Communities 111 Nadine: ‘Very Low-Key Lead by Example’ 112 ‘There Is Compassion Fatigue in Doing What We Do’ 114

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‘It’s Not Just Bad Guys and Good Guys’ 117 Heidi: ‘Get Rid of All the Chasers’ 118 ‘Learn from Me’ 120 Safer Group Experiences 121 Creating Spaces for Others to Flourish: The Admin Persona 123 References 125 7 Minecraft YouTubers127 Finding Minecraft YouTube 128 Theorising Minecraft Let’s Plays 130 Minecraft and Gender 133 Gendered Performances: Women on Minecraft 135 Being a Minecraft YouTuber: ‘There Are a Lot of Men in My Comments’ 141 References 146 8 Women’s Personas149 Positioning Women and Persona Performance 149 Persona Intersections 152 On Exhaustion and Hope 154 Index157

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Mother-persona matrix Author’s mother-persona matrix

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CHAPTER 1

Women, Personas and Experiences of Self

Who Counts as a Woman? Why women? And more than that, why women? Suppose it is an inherent component of humanity to categorise what we encounter. In that case, it is perhaps not surprising that our systems start with binary categories: day and night, us and other, man and woman. But it feels just as human to pick holes in these categories, to extend them, build them out and add subcategories and new distinctions—what of dusk and dawn? Morning, afternoon or evening? What of friends who are not family but feel like it? Those that look like us but are not us? What of those who slip between men and women, within these categories or simply aren’t? When we consider the category woman, who counts as a woman? For a long time (but not always), and in many places (but not all), there has been an established category of people understood as women. These people often (but not always) fulfilled roles related to childcare, keeping domestic environments and occupations considered nurturing. Of course, that is an oversimplification. Perhaps we need to start by considering gender and the understanding of the social, cultural and biological lines people draw between actions, behaviours and social roles based on gender. As a concept, gender is frequently understood as embodied—it connects to the physical and the psychological. Connell and Pearse (2015, 11) argue that gender ‘is the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring reproductive © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barbour, Women and Persona Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7_1

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distinctions between bodies into social processes’. To unpack this a little, they consider that gender is first and foremost about our socially constructed understanding of reproduction, about the continuation of the species. This continuation is then represented as a set of social processes that focus our attention on the physical attributes of others that enables reproduction. Connell and Pearse make it clear that they are not constraining their definition of gender to some form of biological essentialism. In their work, they identify a range of gender identities beyond the binaries of male and female sexes that are insufficient to describe the complexity of human biology. Increasingly, our attention to understanding gender has been on the social reproduction of gender performances, the ways people look, feel, live and enact elements of their lives that facilitate interpersonal interactions and social cohesion. Our understanding includes a growing rejection that reproductive organs and genitalia draw a line straight to gender identity. Trans people have ably demonstrated how complex the experience of gender can be for some. Intersex people have forever proved wrong the idea that human sex can be neatly divided into two categories. What does this mean for understanding women? How do we determine who counts as a woman if the XX/XY distinction is invalid or at least incomplete? As I write this manuscript, these are live arguments, and the loudly vocal minority who argue to exclude trans women from the definition of woman is increasingly virulent in expressing displeasure at more inclusive definitions. They fight for a fundamentally flawed definition of gender focused on biological difference, often framing their perspectives as feminist and invoking a fear for women’s safety as the reason to police boundaries and practise exclusion. That the ideas and arguments presented by scholars in the so-called gender critical space are subsequently taken up by conservative (regressive, bigoted) movements (Bassi and LaFleur 2022; Penny 2020; Vlahiotis 2022), to me exemplifies their faults. Exclusionary positioning seems located in fear, and exaggerates potential risks to a comparatively dominant group (cis women) while minimising or dismissing actual harms currently impacting a systemically marginalised minority of trans people. (See Briggle (2021) for a comprehensive unpacking of the central arguments of ‘gender critical’ scholars). As Connell and Pearse (2015, 11) note, ‘what is wrong with the common-sense definition [of gender] is not the attention to bodies, nor the concern with sexual reproduction, but the squeezing of biological complexity and adaptability into a stark dichotomy, and the idea that cultural patterns simply “express”

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bodily difference.’ Therefore, rather than focusing on biology and/or reproduction in this book, I focus instead on the cultural patterns and social relations that bring gender to life, that facilitate its performativity (Butler 1999). This focus facilitates exploration of the enactment of personas—those strategic performances of self that we each produce in different domains—by women as they engage with their lives. I do this by presenting a series of case studies built from interviews exploring the experiences of performing those personas. So, how did I determine who should be included in this book about women’s persona performances? I asked them. The sole criterion related to gender for who contributes to the case studies of women’s personas is that they identified as doing so. Even this is not as simple as it seems. Several times the category of women expanded—included are personas produced by gender queer, trans, non-binary and cisgender people—but the experience of feeling, living and being read as a woman is a unifying feature across life experiences. My intent was to produce an exploration of persona enactment that would engage with a breadth of experiences, opportunities, interpretations and expressions of being a woman. I do not ignore the complexity or weight of socially constructed expectations of how to be a woman, some of which are unpacked. Instead, I reflect on how these expectations can systemically limit what women are expected to achieve. As Connell and Pearse (2015, 51) remark, ‘there are almost no gender differences of any consequence in capacities to work in an industrial economy, apart from those created by different training, the treatment of pregnancy as a disability, or the gendered design of equipment.’ Yet, there are clearly ‘differences of consequence’ from the gendering of training and equipment design—along with discourses of reproduction—on women’s education, domestic lives and workplace participation. Similarly, although the experience of being a woman is shared between those whose personas are explored in this volume, other distinct differences inform how these personas are enacted based on race, sexuality, disability, neurodivergence, class, age and ethnicity. The layered complexity of women’s identities requires an intersectional approach. Intersectionality begins with an understanding that peoples’ lives and their experiences within our social and cultural environments ‘can seldom be understood as shaped by one factor’ (Collins and Birge 2016, p. 2). Instead, an intersectional approach acknowledges that ‘social divisions of class, race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and [dis]ability’ can all

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contribute to our identities, our interactions, our relative privilege or marginalisation in different ways (p.  2). Elements of our personhood—as expressed and experienced through our bodies, our neurology and our relationship to place and culture—impact on the opportunities and constraints we encounter during our lives. Recognising this allows us to challenge the hegemonic structures that result in disproportionate and systemic marginalisation. Throughout the case studies explored in this book, different factors contribute to the types of personas that are accessible and enacted by women. By engaging with the stories and experiences of specific people as shared through interview data, the case studies in the following chapters explicate the impact of these factors on the personas the interviewees enact.

Personas and Their Production In exploring how women enact personas in different domains, I consider personas as an element in a complex, multiple sense of self rather than a reflection of a coherent, inner truth. Personas are ‘a projection and a performance of individuality […] destined for some type of audience’ (Marshall et al. 2020, 3); therefore, they are social identity performances. Personas, produced by individuals, owe their ability to be meaningful to how their audience draws on sociocultural norms, stereotypes and tropes. The identity we habituate through interaction and our social environment is replicated through our performative persona production. In unpacking personas as performances of social roles, it is fruitful to start with Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical analogy of the self, particularly impression management and role-play. People enact different components of the roles that they draw from to produce their personas. The range of potential acts that make up the performance of a persona can be integrated into a performance that enacts a social role or construct that is intentional and allows for individuality. The individual adopts a social front necessary for the persona to be performed: ‘[a] collective representation [that has become] institutionalised in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on a meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks’ (Goffman 1959, 37). Goffman argues that no matter what type of role an individual might take, there is almost always an established front (37) with representational and practical components. While it might be possible to challenge some elements of the front in building a persona, I argue that entirely

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abandoning the front requires a shift to a different front or the production of something new. To successfully maintain a persona performance, one must perform the representative and practical elements the role requires in a way that the audience of the persona, which contributes to its production, will endorse. Personas can comprise various elements stemming from the expectations of the sociocultural space in which they are performed, and these elements are brought together in what Goffman (1959) terms impression management. Impression management comprises ‘the attributes that are required of a performer for the work of successfully staging a character’ (203). Goffman describes the work of impression management as utilising ‘the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual’ (32). It is made up of the setting—usually related to a room or space, or in terms of digital performances, the platform or website—and the ‘personal front’ for everything associated with the individual—appearance, speech, imagery, writing style, regularity of performance and so forth. Goffman believed that ‘fronts add “dramatic realization” to performances: they help performers to convey everything they wish to convey in any given interaction [act as a] “set of abstract, stereotyped expectations”’ (Manning 1992, 40). I argue that these abstract, stereotyped expectations, whether or not they are all enacted through a process of impression management, make up the persona. Along with impression management, audience selection is important in the study of persona and is enacted differently in physically and digitally networked spaces. Allowing one’s performance to be observed only or primarily by a select group minimises the chances of something going wrong or the performance being questioned. According to Goffman (1959, 113), ‘the circumspect performer will also attempt to select the kind of audience that will give the minimum of trouble in terms of the show the performer wants to put on and the show he does not want to have to put on.’ Audience selection is relatively straightforward when considered solely in terms of the physically present audience. Only so many people can be in a particular audience in a particular physical space at a specific time, and the person creating the persona can immediately perceive that audience. However, in our current highly mediatised environment, we must consider audiences that encounter our personas through digitally networked platforms such as social media sites.

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Online audiences can be more difficult to perceive or select than those we encounter in physical space and are often impossible to track. Litt and Hargittai (2016, 8) explored how people understand their potential audience for social media posting. They found two categories: ‘(1) an abstract imagined audience, which was vague and general and (2) a target imagined audience, which was more specific and directed, and comprised of personal, communal, professional, and/or phantasmal ties.’ These imagined audiences of persona performances still necessitate impression management; Goffman’s work on the presentation of the self is apparent in many studies of identity construction in online environments. In analysing college students’ use of Facebook, Zhao et al. (2008) examine how ‘nonymous’ online environments, such as Facebook, influence identity construction differently from anonymous sites. Unlike early studies of anonymous sites, they found individuals are less likely to ‘play-act at being someone else or to put on different online personae that differ from their “real life” identities’ (1818). Their most interesting claim is that students do not present their ‘true self’ or a ‘hidden self’. Students present ‘hoped-­ for possible selves’—a term they took from Yurchisin et  al. (2005)— defined as ‘socially desirable identities an individual would like to establish and believes they can [establish] given the right conditions’ (Zhao et al. 2008, 1819). The level of awareness of the performance provides insight into how online media can be used to present personas strategically for specific, if imagined, audiences. Pearson (2009) links Goffman’s (1959) performance ideas and dramaturgical analogies with Granovetter’s (1973) concept of social ties. Pearson (2009) uses the term glass bedroom, a ‘metaphoric construct that has been suggested informally’ by social networking site users, to describe interactions within social media. This metaphor acknowledges the ability of anyone nearby to see through the glass to the interactions of those in the bedroom, a highly personal and presumably private space. However, there is also some distance—people do not expect everyone who can see in will—or that everyone who is invited will participate. This relates to audience selection on the part of the person producing the persona; rather than excluding parts of the audience, the user ignores their presence or opts not to engage. To extend the metaphor, the user knows that anyone walking past can see in, but that does not mean everyone gets to sit on the bed. In her ethnography of camgirls, Senft (2008, 8) deals with the exposure of a personal space (specifically, a home) to a public audience. She

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observes that the creation of an online presence (or multiple presences) complicates our impression management strategies as follows: Although it is possible to compartmentalize online, it’s not easy—just ask anyone on Facebook who has agonized over blocking a ‘friends’ request. Online, our public persona is utterly integrated—we can present different selves to different audiences in private email, but each of these selves must somehow be consistent with the self we create for our LiveJournal, or our homepage, or our webcam, unless we decide to develop entirely new personae and accounts for each of our new ‘selves’.

The requirement for some consistency of identity across multiple platforms means that although identity play is possible, once a particular identity type has been established online, compartmentalising only permits degrees of impression management and audience segmentation. Given the dependency and necessary interrelationship of the digital persona with the physically present person creating it, there is also a requirement for consistency between the presentations of the self that a person enacts online and offline. The networks of strong and weak ties that operate through online social media require and support the development of this type of consistent, if often nuanced, impression management. As strategic performances of self, personas are representations, re-­ presentations of a sense of self, a component of complex, multiple identities. Representation and representational are contested terms in cultural studies, but trace their roots to the Latin repraesentare, ‘bring before, exhibit’. I use Hall’s (1997, 61) definition: ‘Representation is the process by which members of a culture use language (broadly defined as any system which deploys signs, any signifying system) to produce meaning.’ Presentation and representation exist along a continuum of meaning-­ making behaviour. When considering the practices in creating a persona, those that appear closer to the presentational category involve little mediation by other parties—the agent acts alone. By contrast, practices that appear closer to the representational category engage more directly with their systems of signification and mediation. In addition to these understandings of presentation and representation lies the conceptualisation of media cultures as representational or presentational. Marshall (2010) distinguishes between representational and presentational media forms based on the influence of the highly mediated, constructed notion of a public self in traditional media forms and the continually negotiated, less

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mediated public self in new media forms. Marshall comments that through social media, ‘individuals engage in an expression of the self that, like the celebrity discourse of the self, is not entirely interpersonal in nature nor is it entirely highly mediated or representational’ (35). Therefore, the key difference between presentation and representation lies in the perceived distance between the performer and the performance; the more immediate the connection, the closer to the presentational end of the spectrum the performance lies. The persona is a part or role played for an audience where the performer undertakes impression management, whether consciously or subconsciously. This persona does not necessarily reveal the ‘true selves’ of those who enact them, nor are they necessarily falsehoods. Likewise, the socially constructed role that informs the persona’s creation does not describe some essential truth of what it means to be a woman. Following Butler (1999), the performance of the persona is performative, not expressive. If acts or attributes or ‘the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no pre-­ existing identity by which an act or attribute might be measured [and a true identity] would be revealed as regulatory fiction’ (528). I view the presentational and representational practices of the women in this book as performances (i.e. engagements with their identity as active, engaged individuals). They create personas that performatively enact and contest sociocultural conceptualisations of what it means to be a woman in the early part of the twenty-first century. The Woman Role Given that personas are performances enacted for an audience, it is useful to consider the stories, norms, stereotypes, tropes and expectations that women draw from when enacting them. As the basic dictionary definition of an adult human female is woefully insufficient to encompass the diversity of experiences, it is perhaps more fruitful to identify key elements that make up different components of being a woman that have stood the test of time. The stories that different cultures, histories and societies tell guide how women are developed, contested and enacted in their context. There can be significant differences and challenges to discourses of what it means to be a woman. Despite this—and acknowledging that my monolingualism and life experiences constrain the conceptualisations of women I can access—there are some consistent understandings of the woman role.

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Research into gender stereotypes has characterised women as more communal, and men as more agentic; these qualities are ‘the two defining features of gender stereotypes’ (Hentschel et al. 2019, 2). Hentschel et al. (2) argue that the focus on the communal leads to (and depends on) the characterisation of women as more focused on relationships. Throughout history and across societies, this has led to women performing ‘routine domestic work and play[ing] the major caretaker role’ in domestic spaces and being ‘employed in people-oriented, service occupations’ in the workplace, as these roles are communal in their focus (2). This stereotype sees women ‘characterized as kind, helpful, sympathetic, and concerned about others’ (Heilman 2001, 658). In societies where domesticity, caring and relationships are valued less than ‘things-oriented, competitive occupations’ associated with agentic qualities and, therefore, manly (Hentschel et al. 2019, 2), stereotyping women as communal sees them valued less and placed in a secondary position. In their analysis of how social cognition operates (i.e. how people read and understand each other), Fiske et al. (2007) identify the two universal traits of warmth and competence. Although these traits influence how we read all people, they note that gender roles for women ‘emphasize communal (warmth) over agentic (competence) traits’ (79). Women are also more skilled at perceiving warmth in others. These ‘universal traits’, used essentially to judge whether other people are friends or foes, map onto the persistent qualities in stereotypes of women: ‘both what women are like (descriptive) and how they should behave (prescriptive)’ (Heilman 2001, 657). Haines et al. (2016, 360) note there has been ‘a surprising durability of basic stereotypes about women and men over the past three decades, not only in the global traits of agency and communion but in other domains such as physical characteristics, occupations, and gender roles’; this despite substantive social, cultural, economic and political change through much of the world. So how do these stereotypes of women play out? What are the roles women are expected and conditioned to play? With gender stereotypes playing a role in socialisation and upbringing from birth (and even before), the expectations placed on young girls reflect the emphasis on communion and warmth. Koenig (2018, 3, drawing on Martin 1995) explains that the stereotype presumes younger girls ‘should be gentle, neat/clean, sympathetic, eager to soothe hurt feelings, well-mannered, helpful around the house, and soft-spoken and avoid being noisy’. These traits can help build strong relationships, as they are focused on the comfort and

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enjoyment of others. While there is a significant push against this type of socialisation, and girls are increasingly brought up to be noisy, disruptive, bold, brave, adventurous, smart and possess other agentic traits, there is less focus on the flip side. Girls are encouraged to take on the high-status traits stereotypically associated with boys; however, boys are not routinely encouraged to take on the low-status traits stereotypically associated with girls. We can see the impact of these stereotypes on adults as well. Although there has been considerable attention on getting women into careers dominated by men, men are not encouraged to enter careers and industries dominated by women (e.g. caring professions such as nursing and early childhood education) (Block et  al. 2019). Block et  al. argue that ‘occupations where men are underrepresented […] are viewed as lower in status, and subsequently less deserving of attention and social action towards change than occupations where women are underrepresented’ (127). As a trait, communion is valued less than agency. Women are perceived and discursively constructed as strongly communion-focused and dominate the workforce in roles that require this trait. Therefore, these roles are less valued for requiring the less valued trait and being dominated by women. There have been gains in perceiving women as equally competent as men (Eagly et  al. 2020). However, the stereotype of women as inherently more caring and focused on relationships than agentic and focused on tasks continues to limit opportunities for all people to engage in their social, economic and political environments (Croft et al. 2021). Personas are enacted through communication and interaction; therefore, they involve psychological traits and representative elements such as physical presentation and behaviour. Consequently, gendered expectations of appearance influence how personas are performed through attention to body size and proportions, grooming, make-up, hair styling and clothing choices. Appearance can be used to manage the impression of an audience in performing a gender identity as part of what Goffman (1959) terms the ‘personal front’. The personal front enables women to be visually identifiable as a woman through ‘clothing; […] size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily gestures; and the like’ (34). This personal front can be adapted or manipulated (to a point) to create a particular impression, depending on the resources available. In doing so, women draw on, re-enact or contest the characters, stories and sociocultural expectations of the woman role for their context.

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There is a wide range of roles and characters to draw on, whether consciously or not, when developing a persona, including those encoded into media representations. The more reductive and disempowered stereotypes are being identified and called out within the film and television industry in a bid to diversify characters and reduce the replication of one-­dimensional protagonists. Antone et al. (2022, para. 2) summarise the concern that contrary to what decades of film would have us believe, women are so much more than whatever neat category men of one era or another have assigned them: the trophy wife, the ice queen, the manic pixie dream girl. When it comes to options for women of color, categories narrow even further: over and over, Black women are relegated to play the ‘sassy friend’, while Latina and Asian women have a history of being hypersexualized on screen.

These stereotyped characters are a mix of the descriptive and prescriptive in that they encapsulate roles that already exist for women (what women are) while also presenting what women should be through the way they are valued within the text. For example, a trophy girlfriend character—sexually objectified, valued solely for her appearance  and without agency in the story—when presented positively in a text, describes a type of woman and prescribes how that woman should be (i.e. highly decorative, passive and sexually available). By comparison, an ‘Angry Black Woman’ character, depicted as ‘aggressive, unfeminine, undesirable, overbearing, attitudinal, bitter, mean, and hell raising’ (Ashley, as cited in Abdurraqib 2017, 237), is presented negatively in media texts. Such texts are reductive in their descriptions, ignoring the cause of the character’s anger, and prescribe what is acceptable through negative framing. If angry Black women are to be interpreted negatively through the expression of their anger, a trait positively associated with agency and masculinity, then holding back anger and presenting as selfless, nurturing, compassionate, kind and quiet are traits prescribed as positively feminine. Many of the characters and tropes of media depictions of women can be understood as manifestations of Jungian archetypes: ‘powerful inner patterns or forces that influence what we do and how we feel [or] primordial images, myths, and evolutionary symbols that represent inborn and universal ways of perceiving and comprehending the world’ (Enns 1994, 127). Enns critiques Jung’s conceptualisation of archetypes as inherently sexist, arguing that they ‘are based on patriarchal myths that undervalue women’s experience and reinforce traditional visions of masculinity and

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femininity. A typical motif in fairy tales depicts the man as engaging in a heroic task, rescuing a woman, and sweeping her into an idyllic existence’ (128). Enns (1994, 128) argues it is necessary to rehabilitate the idea of archetypes and challenge the essentialism of the characters and stereotypes they have spawned. They should be reframed not as unchanging and universal but ‘as symbols that are embedded in the socialization and power dynamics of our culture’. In doing so, and continuing to call out the constraining, one-dimensional and reductive traits of the characters, tropes, stereotypes, roles and expectations that women draw from to performatively enact their personas, these traits can be unpacked, questioned for fit and kept or abandoned as necessary. Women’s Personas in Context While brief and necessarily incomplete—as is any exploration of gender and identity—the exploration of personas and how they are informed by what it means to be a woman provides a framework for exploring some forms of being a woman. Through this volume, I approach the production and performance of what it means to be a woman in six domains. First, the mother persona is explored, focusing on women who understand themselves first and foremost as mothers, despite the diversity of available roles that women can and have enacted. Rather than a statement of my belief in the primacy of the maternal over all other elements of being a woman, by beginning with mothers, I aim to reflect the continued emphasis on the maternal as the core of women’s identities, whether or not they are mothers. Although this approach risks reinscribing this emphasis, it provides a way forward and past the maternal in considering women’s role-play and the personas they enact. The chapter explores how mothering is conceptualised, privileged and demeaned. This context grounds the discussion of a mother persona matrix built from interviews with four mothers and data gathered from online discussions around mothering. The matrix presents the mother persona as a combination of four elements: mother as identity, mother as behavioural, mother as relational and mother as situational. The personas enacted by mothers draw on these elements to different degrees depending on their position relative to the archetypal mother as produced through discourse. The remaining case studies focus on women whose personas move beyond the domestic. The case study in Chap. 3 explores the professional

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personas produced in an industry dominated by women in terms of workers and clientele. Hairdressing is a domain where competence and communion are required in equal measure and which is highly feminised. By exploring how hairdressers understand their professional identity, the chapter highlights how femininity, expertise, care and connection necessitate that hairdressers enact highly intimate personas, engage in labour that goes beyond hair styling and fine-tune their performances to suit their clients. The chapter builds on the minimal literature on hairdressers and identity performance. It unpacks three hairdressers’ experiences in the role alongside data gathered through participant observation to consider the persona performance practices of hairdressers working in salons. While hairdressing (as distinct from barbering) may see women working predominantly with other women, software engineering is an industry where women are undoubtedly a minority. Chapter 4 examines the history of an industry with significant fluctuation of participation by women over time, roughly mapped onto the industry’s status as either clerical (therefore, appropriate for women) or technical (therefore, unsuitable for women). Decades of programmes designed to encourage women into what is currently conceptualised as a high-status technical role has failed to achieve progress towards equity in training and employment. Yet, being a software engineer can be highly rewarding for those women employed in the industry. Working through the experiences of five women software engineers (or in aligned positions with different names) gives insight into the challenges and opportunities for women in the industry and how their persona performances challenge understandings of software engineers and more traditional conceptualisations of women. Chapters 5–7 focus on the development of personas through digitally networked spaces. In Chap. 5, I explore the role of online personas in activism, foregrounding the experiences of ten women who use social media to raise awareness, educate and work to improve their social, political and economic environment. The themes emerging from the analysis of the participant interviews and social media activity consider the role of self-identification, audience interpretation, dialogue and content diversification in the production of their activist personas. Chapter 6 also deals with personas performed on social media but in the context of community management. Building on literature that explores what communities (and online communities) are, the work that two women undertake in managing safer online groups on Facebook is analysed to consider how they developed their admin personas. The community managers have a similar

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focus to the activists aiming to educate and support members of their communities. They also demonstrate a sense of purpose and commitment to others that is core to their successful deployment of the admin persona. The sixth case study, presented in Chap. 7, brings together ideas of character, mediatisation, technical skill, communion, digital networks and women inhabiting spaces dominated by men. In exploring how women who make Minecraft video content for YouTube enact their gender identity, the themes of the other case studies coalesce. After examining the literature on Minecraft and Let’s Play (LP) video content, the personas enacted by nine YouTubers are analysed. This textual analysis is complemented by a narrative analysis of an active creator whose YouTube persona and in-game character had developed over a decade as an interaction between her understanding of her identity and her audience’s expectations. The concluding chapter works through the complexities, overlaps and divergences of the personas enacted by the women featured in the case studies. I make no claims to presenting a unified theory of what makes someone a woman or even what constitutes a woman’s persona, nor do I believe such a task is possible or necessary. My intention is to highlight how women’s personas can incorporate substantively different elements and identity markers even within six case studies. Each chapter also considers the ongoing systemic marginalisation and discrimination that women face. I cannot believe that maintaining boundaries around what constitutes ‘a woman’ will reduce the systemic harms done to women, nor reduce the harms at the intersections of gender, race, age, class, ethnicity, disability or neurodiversity. Instead, the experiences of those who generously contributed to this volume illustrate the importance of openness, inclusion and celebrating the diversity of ways we each exist in the world.

References Abdurraqib, Samaa. 2017. “Just Another Monster”: Michonne and the Trope of the Angry Black Woman. In Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film, ed. Julie A.  Chappell and Mallory Young, 227–251. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­ 319-­47259-­1_12. Antone, Tiffany, Louisa Ballhaus and Delilah Gray. 2022. ‘30 Female Stereotypes in Movies That Need to Stop’. SheKnows (blog). 4 October. https://www. sheknows.com/entertainment/slideshow/810/female-­stereotypes-­in-­film-­ that-­make-­us-­yawn/.

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Bassi, Serena, and Greta LaFleur, eds. 2022. Trans-Exclusionary Feminisms and the Global New Right (Special Issue). TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 9 (3): 1. Block, Katharina, Alyssa Croft, Lucy De Souza, and Toni Schmader. 2019. Do People Care If Men Don’t Care about Caring? The Asymmetry in Support for Changing Gender Roles. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 83: 112–131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.03.013. Briggle, Adam. 2021. Which Reality? Whose Truth? A Review Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (11): 52–59. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-­6jf. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble Tenth Anniversary Edition. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Connell, Raewyn, and Rebecca Pearse. 2015. Gender: In World Perspective. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Croft, Alyssa, Ciara Atkinson, Gillian Sandstrom, Sheina Orbell, and Lara Aknin. 2021. Loosening the GRIP (Gender Roles Inhibiting Prosociality) to Promote Gender Equality. Personality and Social Psychology Review 25 (1): 66–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868320964615. Eagly, Alice H., Christa Nater, David I.  Miller, Michèle Kaufmann, and Sabine Sczesny. 2020. Gender Stereotypes Have Changed: A Cross-Temporal Meta-­ Analysis of U.S. Public Opinion Polls from 1946 to 2018. American Psychologist 75: 301–315. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000494. Enns, Carolyn Zerbe. 1994. Archetypes and Gender: Goddesses, Warriors, and Psychological Health. Journal of Counseling & Development 73 (2): 127–133. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-­6676.1994.tb01724.x. Fiske, Susan T., Amy J.C. Cuddy, and Peter Glick. 2007. Universal Dimensions of Social Cognition: Warmth and Competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2): 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.005. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–1380. Haines, Elizabeth L., Kay Deau, and Nicole Lofaro. 2016. The Times They Are A-Changing … or Are They Not? A Comparison of Gender Stereotypes, 1983–2014. Psychology of Women Quarterly 40 (3): 353–363. https://doi. org/10.1177/0361684316634081. Hall, Stuart, ed. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications in association with The Open University. Heilman, Madeline E. 2001. Description and Prescription: How Gender Stereotypes Prevent Women’s Ascent Up the Organizational Ladder. Journal of Social Issues 57 (4): 657–674. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-­4537.00234.

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Hentschel, Tanja, Madeline E. Heilman, and Claudia V. Peus. 2019. The Multiple Dimensions of Gender Stereotypes: A Current Look at Men’s and Women’s Characterizations of Others and Themselves. Frontiers in Psychology 10: Article 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00011. Koenig, Anne M. 2018. Comparing Prescriptive and Descriptive Gender Stereotypes About Children, Adults, and the Elderly. Frontiers in Psychology 9: Article 1086. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018. 01086. Litt, Eden, and Eszter Hargittai. 2016. The Imagined Audience on Social Network Sites. Social Media + Society 2 (1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 2056305116633482. Manning, Philip. 1992. Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Marshall, P. David. 2010. The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media. Celebrity Studies 1 (1): 35–48. https://doi. org/10.1080/19392390903519057. Marshall, P. David, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour. 2020. Persona Studies: An Introduction. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Pearson, Erika. 2009. All the World Wide Web’s a Stage: The Performance of Identity in Online Social Networks. First Monday 14 (2): 1. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127. Penny, Laurie. 2020. ‘TERF Wars: Why Transphobia Has No Place in Feminism’. Medium. June 16, 2020. https://pennyred.medium.com/terf-­wars-­why-­ transphobia-­has-­no-­place-­in-­feminism-­60d3156ad06e. Senft, Theresa M. 2008. Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Vlahiotis, Eleni. 2022. ‘It’s Time For The Feminist Movement To Leave TERFs Behind – Shameless Magazine’. Shameless. March 2, 2022. https://shamelessmag.com/blog/entr y/its-­t ime-­f or-­t he-­f eminist-­m ovement-­t o-­l eave-­ terfs-­behind. Yurchisin, Jennifer, Kittichai Watchravesringkan, and Deborah Brown McCabe. 2005. An Exploration of Identity Re-Creation in the Context of Internet Dating. Social Behavior & Personality 33 (8): 735–750. https://doi. org/10.2224/sbp.2005.33.8.735. Zhao, Shanyang, Sherri Grasmuck, and Jason Martin. 2008. Identity Construction on Facebook: Digital Empowerment in Anchored Relationships. Computers in Human Behavior 24 (5): 1816–1836. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb. 2008.02.012.

CHAPTER 2

Mothers

On Mothers The ways that women can understand and build their identities are growing in variety and depth. While some women have always worked, been educated or remained child-free, the opportunities to engage with these spaces (or choose not to) are increasingly open to most women. One of the most tightly constrained identity roles is the mother. Being a mother is constrained by the restrictions of biology (for those who birth children) or formal or informal adoption, fostering and kinship practices wherein women raise children birthed by others. Being a mother might be an intrinsic element of many women’s identities, but it is not always a central or core element. The experiences analysed in this chapter were shared by women who understand themselves as mothers first, while other aspects of their identities are subordinate. Considering the maternal as the centre of women’s identities provides the starting point for exploring those who build their identities in other ways (e.g. work or professional identities, rejecting social and cultural norms that privilege mothers, rejecting gender binaries and biological essentialism as core to women’s lives). As an area of study, motherhood and mothering have received considerable attention for many years (Smyth 2012). There have also been studies of those opting out of child-rearing and those unable to raise children (for many reasons) (Edwards 2016). However, as opportunities for women have increased, so too has the tacit understanding that although © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barbour, Women and Persona Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7_2

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motherhood is a worthy and important role, it should be conceptualised as one element of a woman’s identity, not the core. That is not to say that motherhood is an opt-in situation. As O’Reilly (2016, 65) argues, ‘in patriarchal motherhood it is assumed (and expected) that all women want to be mothers (essentialization), that maternal ability and motherlove are innate to all mothers (naturalization), and that all mothers find joy and purpose in motherhood (idealization).’ These three components of essentialisation, naturalisation and idealisation set up a social script that centres motherhood as a core component of women’s identities. At the same time, changing social norms, economic conditions and media representations broaden the scope of women’s potential beyond the domestic. For those living under neoliberal capitalism, an individual’s value lies in their contribution to the economy. On its own terms, motherhood is not understood as economically valuable, despite the necessity of reproduction and child-rearing to create more workers. Instead, women are encouraged to enter or return to the workforce, where their labour can translate into wages. If they have particular skills or aptitudes for caring for the young, those wages can be earned caring for other people’s children. Although this understanding of value centred on economic contribution is pervasive, some women resist this messaging and see their role as mothers as the core of their identities and selfhood, whether or not they are also employed in paid work (Rabuzzi 1988; Smyth 2012; Friedman 2013). Other elements of their identities are secondary to the role of the mother, whether relational (as partners, employees or employers, friends, children, siblings) or intersectional (race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, disability, neurodiversity). This chapter explores how motherhood is conceptualised as core, how it subsumes other identity considerations and how the women who understand themselves this way negotiate (and potentially resist) broader societal messaging about how they should represent themselves. Judith Stadtman Tucker (2010) argues that although opportunities for most women have increased significantly since the mid to late twentieth century, the challenges of mothering, as identified by mothers in online discussions, have remained largely static. She notes, ‘they still object to having sole or primary responsibility for child care, resent the isolation and invisibility of motherhood, decry the lack of social and practical support for the work of mothering, and grumble about the unsympathetic attitudes of fathers, co-workers, childless adults, and other mothers who seem insensitive to the unreasonable burdens of contemporary mothering’ (295). One potential contributing factor to the continued cultural and

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relational devaluing of motherhood as a role, an identity or an act stems from the widespread framing of mothering as a choice. Stadtman Tucker (2010, 297) describes this as the ‘choice mystique’, where being a mother is regarded as an agentic choice on the part of individual women, and the effects of mothering on individual women results from their choice. She notes that the framing of mothering as a choice implies what can be understood as a positive—women have choices as to be or not be mothers, and they have choices as to how they mother. This discourse acknowledges that these choices are a privilege. Women constrained by biological, social, economic or cultural factors from mothering as they choose ‘don’t have a choice’. In contrast, those lucky to have choices perhaps garner a sense of control over their lives by choosing from the options available: whether and when to return to work, preschool and schooling decisions, the number of children and so on. However, Stadtman Tucker argues that this idea of choice is particularly problematic, as it frames sociopolitical issues around motherhood as individual rather than structural. The illusion of choice may be false: ‘The quasi-feminist rhetoric of maternal choice is entwined with the concept of a free-market system in which the different choices mothers make are an accurate reflection of maternal preferences, rather than an accommodation to the scarcity of viable options’ (300). Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1994) identifies the role of social conditioning in how motherhood is constructed, with a particular focus on the North American context. Taking a social constructionist approach, she notes: ‘Mothering occurs within specific social contexts that vary in terms of material and cultural resources and constraints […]. Mothering is constructed through men’s and women’s actions within specific historical circumstances’ (3). This understanding of mothering as social construction allows us to unpack the role of race, cultural and historical background, economic reality and political environment in how mothers see themselves and are seen by others. Drawing on Ann Oakley (1974), Glenn critiques the three main beliefs that feed into ‘the myth of motherhood’: (1) that women need to be mothers, (2) that mothers need their children and (3) that children need their mothers (9). Glenn’s critique mirrors O’Reilly’s (2016) conceptualisation of patriarchal motherhood. Glenn (1994, 9–10) argues that this myth is detrimental in two ways. First, women may have children who otherwise would not if they perceived greater choice (because it is possible to ‘choose wrong’, as many child-free women have attested). Second, women may feel they have to take sole responsibility for children when they would have preferred or benefited from shared child-rearing

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(because needing or wanting to share child-rearing can be framed as selfish or irresponsible). However, some challenges to reconstructing what a mother could or should be come from inside the house. Women who are mothers may be reluctant to let go of the idea of motherhood as special, considering the ‘powerful bodily experiences, and the intense emotional attachment’ that can accompany pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding (25). It is interesting to consider the social changes and challenges to understanding gender, parenting and birth that have occurred over the three decades since Glenn (1994) wrote. Conceptualisations of motherhood have become increasingly complex as trans people have sought and gained visibility (if not full acceptance), as increasing numbers of queer people have raised children and as surrogacy becomes more visible through celebrity culture. News stories about trans men having babies also tend to disrupt the cisnormative thinking around pregnancy and birth. Although still relatively uncommon, 54 men gave birth to children in 2014 in Australia alone (Maiden 2014) and at least 22 in 2019 (Hook 2019). These small but significant numbers reflect challenges to birth care framed around women as the pregnant and birthing parent. Australia is one of the few jurisdictions that allows people to nominate sex and gender independent of sex or gender assigned at birth, including during pregnancy care. Narrowly framing motherhood as a women’s relationship to her biologically related children seems entirely inadequate considering the wider understandings of mothering stemming from blended families, step-­ parents, same-sex parents, adoption, fostering, egg donors, surrogacy, kinship and intergenerational parenting (among many other forms of family and parenting). Therefore, we can turn to mothering as something felt, claimed and done. We can acknowledge that the choice mystique gives some a sense of control over whether women will be or can be mothers while providing space for the idea that those are not choices for other women. We can also consider that for some, being a mother is a component of their identity, an element of who they are and what they do, while for others, it is all-­ consuming, intense and intensive. Many scholars of colour writing on mothers, as well as some White scholars, have flagged that the capacity or desire to engage in ‘intensive mothering’—where the mother’s identity centres on her role as ‘ever-nurturing and unselfish’ (Gibson 2019, 2)—is most prominent and normalised in White families. However, the general Whiteness of many popular media and the dominance of White voices in the online discourses of mothering (in terms of ‘mommy blogging’ and

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social media posts) means that this conceptualisation of mothers centred on the experiences of White middle-class, cishet women is drowning out other approaches to understanding motherhood. Patricia Hill Collins (1994, 57) suggests that ‘racial ethnic women’s motherwork reflects the tensions inherent in trying to foster a meaningful racial identity in a society that denigrates people of color’.1 The negatively coded stereotypes associated with girls of colour mean that ‘girls of all groups are told that their lives cannot be complete without a male partner, and that their educational and career aspirations must always be subordinated to their family obligations’ (57). Although this suggests that intensive mothering would be a validating way to highlight and celebrate the labour of mothering or motherwork, this does not appear to be the case. There are, of course, exceptions. Stereotypes such as the ‘Tiger Mom’— associated with highly involved East Asian mothers invested in their children’s success (Xie and Li 2019)—seem to indicate that some non-White mothers identify with intensive mothering similar to online and popular media constructions of White mothers. However, Gibson (2019, 6) notes that blogs by mothers of colour may be deemed ‘too political’ to meet the criteria of the mommy blogging genre and that ‘for non-White bloggers, then, motherhood is implicated in racial and class politics in a way in which the privilege of whiteness can ignore’ (6). White intensive mothers have the privilege of concentrating solely on their mothering. In contrast, for women of colour, mothering is an intrinsically politicised act, as is any form of speech or action in a world that centres whiteness. I now consider the qualitative research that explores how a ‘mum first’ identity is understood and enacted. The data contributing to this chapter was gathered through semi-structured interviews and online observation; it is not intended to be definitive or generalisable. Instead, the data allow the exploration of different ways of understanding mothering as the primary identifier for the women whose views contributed to the analysis.

1  Collins (1994, 47–48) uses the terms ‘racial ethnic women’ and ‘women of color’ interchangeably, noting that neither is perfect or complete. She also uses the term ‘motherwork’ ‘to soften the existing dichotomies in feminist theorising about motherhood that posit rigid distinctions between private and public, family and work, the individual and the collective, identity as individual autonomy and identity growing from the collective self-determination of one’s group’.

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Research Methods and Ethical Considerations First, I conducted semi-structured interviews with Adelaide-based women who saw being a mother as the central core of their identity. These discussions provide a deep understanding of the role of mothering in each woman’s life. The insights include a relationship to pre-child identities, relational or intersectional components of identity and how these women noticed and expected to see changes in their identities over time. Participant recruitment for the interviews was conducted by posting to Adelaide-based Facebook communities for mothers and placing flyers in cafés and public libraries. Recruitment was most successful in a Facebook group centred around homeschooling; an additional participant was recruited when she responded to a flyer in a public library. Passive snowball sampling from interviewees was encouraged but did not result in other participants. Four interviews were conducted between January and March 2022, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. Although small, this sample was never intended to represent women’s understanding of mothering but to explore how women who identify as mothers before all else understand their identities. The small number of responses may also reflect that many women see mothering as important but not core to understanding their identities. Two interview participants chose to be identified by their first names, while the others elected to use pseudonyms. To provide an additional layer of protection, I have not indicated which names are pseudonyms and which are the participants’ legal first names. The second dataset was drawn from online discussions about mothering. These discussions were found on Reddit and Mumsnet in threads where mothers talk, share ideas and swap resources. Within these online spaces, women explore what it means to be a mother, either in focused discussion or through describing their lived experiences of mothering in threads focusing on other parenting topics. Although these groups are publicly accessible without login, participants utilised pseudonyms that allowed them to contribute with fewer concerns about their views being connected to them in other domains. This approach was expected to increase the candour with which people approached the discussion space. A field notes strategy was used  by a research assistant to collect the online discussion data, which allowed the identification of common and outlier themes and discourses from threads and discussions without screenshotting or downloading the threads. This strategy, which draws from

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older forms of physically emplaced ethnography and non-participant observation, protects community members from being surfaced or identified through their involvement in discussions. After all, when posting online, most people do not assume their words will become part of an academic research project, even when posting in publicly accessible online spaces. I decided to include common and outlier perspectives to capture a range of views. Focusing only on norms ignores the role of those whose contrary perspectives might influence a change in understanding or behaviour. As with all online research, there is always the risk of people misrepresenting themselves or their views when posting, particularly as participants were not connected to a ‘real name’ or legal identity that would allow verification of their posted experiences. However, those posts still constitute part of the discourse in online spaces surrounding mothering and women’s identities. They could influence others, regardless of their relationship to any individual’s lived experience. Additionally, the data were analysed to identify overarching themes rather than specific truths. Therefore, the incidental inclusion of misleading or inaccurate material in the project was considered unproblematic within this context. The interview and online datasets were analysed discursively and thematically. The themes and discourses identified within each set were compared, and areas of alignment and divergence were noted. The themes and discourses were then considered in light of the literature on mothering. I developed the mother-persona matrix from this analysis to conceptualise how mothers understand and enact their identity.

The Mother-Persona In conceptualising how mothering was understood across the online discussions and interview data, I identified persona enactment shifting across and between four schemas: Mothering as an identity (e.g. ‘I’m a mum, 100 per cent’) Mothering as a behaviour (e.g. ‘I do mum stuff’) Mothering as situational (e.g. ‘At home, I’m a mum, but at work, I’m not’) Mothering as relational (e.g. ‘I was the mum–friend before I had my kids’).

Fig. 2.1 shows the mother-persona as a matrix, while Fig. 2.2 roughly plots my relationship to each of these concepts onto the matrix as an

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Fig. 2.1  Mother-persona matrix

example. The matrix was designed as a qualitative visualisation of the interdependence of different elements of identity rather than a quantitative graphing tool. My matrix (Fig. 2.2) illustrates that although I see myself as a mother, this stems largely from the relational, behavioural and situational realities of my life rather than mothering as a core defining feature of my identity. I am a mother (I have a child), and I do mothering of my child and other people in situations where mothering is needed. Therefore, a part of my identity is tied to this role. However, mothering is one component of many that form who I am rather than central to how I understand myself. The shape that emerges from the mother-persona matrix illustrates the emphasis a person puts on how they understand mothering, which is distinct from registers of persona performance between which people slip when enacting their identities (Barbour 2015; Marshall et al. 2020). A tall narrow triangle would show that mothering is a persistent identity that exists irrespective of where the mother is, who they are with or what they are doing.

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Fig. 2.2  Author’s mother-persona matrix

The recruitment of interview participants for this project explicitly targeted women who plot themselves further along the identity axis of the matrix than the other three dimensions. Despite this, all interviewees referred to elements of mothering that could be understood as relational, situational or behavioural. In contrast to the identity-heavy narrow triangle (or very pointy diamond where behaviour is also heavily weighted), a boxier shape might indicate motherhood conceptualised as more conditional (i.e. drawing on the mother’s context the mother and reflecting their activities, interactions and location). This matrix was built from the themes that emerged from the interview and online data analysis. Mother as Identity Interviewees who valued mothering as an identity category most highly— as something they are as opposed to something they do—at times still felt motherhood stifled other components of their identities. However, this was not understood as a constraint because they identified as mothers first and foremost. In other words, they would not change their position

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because they valued their role as a mother above any other concerns. Providing they felt that their identity as a mother was strong, the other elements of their identity were necessarily subservient. For example, when interviewee Clare discussed taking on new activities to get out of the house in the evenings and to look after her mental health, she made it clear the activities were to ensure she could be a ‘better mother’. She needed to look after herself so her children would benefit from her improved well-­ being. Similarly, in a 2017 discussion on Reddit, women who described their mother identity as ‘100 per cent’ of who they were, regardless of whether they were in paid employment or not, saw their work or other activities as in service to being a mum. Of the four interviewees, Melissa described most clearly that ‘mum’ became her central identity marker through pregnancy and birthing her two children. She said, ‘I feel like my life didn’t really start properly until I had kids. I feel like I didn’t have a sense of identity at all.’ Although she had studied, had a job in community mental health that she enjoyed and had a strong relationship, she believed that becoming a mother was her ‘main purpose [in life] not as an obligation, but as a good experience. I feel like my main purpose is to be with my children.’ Melissa’s response to this changed sense of identity drove her to dedicate all her time to raising her children, including homeschooling them. She shrugged off expectations from family and friends who pushed her to rejoin the workforce or extend her focus beyond being ‘just’ a mother. Part of this she ascribed to her autism diagnosis, something she saw as the other most important identity factor for her: ‘There’s nothing else besides mothering that makes me feel more of a person [than autism]. There are some people that might feel that about their career or other things. I just feel like [mothering and autism] make me more of a person.’ However, Melissa also attributed her understanding of her identity as a mother to post-traumatic stress disorder from a significant car accident during the first trimester of her first pregnancy. Bedbound as she recovered, she turned inward: ‘It set me on the path of being appreciative of continuing to be pregnant, which has then snowballed into the parenting. […] I think it just sort of triggered me to have a look of different ways of being.’ Interestingly, Daniela responded differently to her transformative experience of birthing a child. She realised early on that although being a mother was now the central element of her identity, she needed other activities to mother as she wanted and be happy.

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When I had my first daughter, I wasn’t working, and I felt that would be great, but as soon as I became a mum, I knew I just needed to work, needed to do something else, so it’s tricky for me because I don’t want to be ‘just mum’. […] I had to look very realistically to myself as a mum because it was somebody different than I was before. […] For me, being a mum is just having a balance between my mum life, a wife life, a professional life, and a myself life. I just need to balance all of those things, even though being a mum just takes over pretty much everything.

In this purposive sample of women who saw themselves as ‘mum first’, it was not surprising to hear descriptions of lives and approaches to parenting that aligned with intensive mothering. Interviewees also mentioned attachment parenting as a philosophy. The mothers explained a desire to be continuously available for their children; they described extended breastfeeding (past two years) and extended co-sleeping. While these approaches to parenting are widespread in some cultures and communities, in contemporary (White) Australia, extended breastfeeding and co-­ sleeping beyond babyhood are still considered unusual. In some cases, the children had additional needs that required a more time- and attention-­ intensive approach to parenting. However, the child’s other parent was generally not discussed as participating in this care; instead, the full responsibility fell to the primary caregiver—the mother. Even for Melissa, whose partner was also a woman (therefore, also a mother), childbearing and caregiving were heavily weighted towards intensive mothering by Melissa. She described the household split as one that mirrored traditional gender roles: she took the child and home-focused mother role, and her partner was responsible for financial support and ‘doing the fun stuff’ with their two children. This situation mimicked the ongoing heterosexual relationships in the mix, supporting Melissa’s view that her family reflected long-­ standing divisions of labour and identity within families. For example, Clare’s and Daniela’s husbands had full-time jobs requiring significant travel and time away from the household, which set up expectations that the mothers were responsible for the care and organisation of the children, even when both parents were present. Clare was a stay-at-home mother who homeschooled four children (one still a toddler). She struggled to imagine what her life would look like once her children were grown, given she had approximately 20 years remaining until they were likely to be fully independent.

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The long-term nature of intensive mothering, often matched with clear divisions in labour, responsibility and identity between parents, reflected the women’s commitment to being mothers first and foremost. They prioritised their children’s needs and supporting their children’s growth and development. Co-parents in these relationships were less involved in everyday home life due to their responsibilities for supporting the family financially through full-time work. These divisions are beginning to shift within Australia. Still, research continues to reflect a lived reality where most mothers take on a disproportionate amount of the household, parenting and emotional load, whether or not they are members of the paid workforce (for an exploration of the division of labour in Australian households, see Baxter 2015; Lass 2018; Sales et al. 2021). It is undoubtedly possible to engage in the activities of intensive mothering without shifting a sense of identity to foreground mothering as the core. Equally, intensive mothering was observed in women like Daniela, who work outside the home, use child care and send their children to mainstream schools, and women like Amanda, Clare and Melissa, who homeschool and either were not in paid work or work from home. However, when the challenges and rewards of mothering fully consume time and attention, it is perhaps inevitable that mothering becomes a heavily weighted component of identity. Mothering as Behaviour Mothering can also be conceptualised as existing in the doing. The act of mothering became the focus, rather than (or in addition to) an identity characteristic. Mother was principally understood as a verb rather than a noun when the focus is on behaviour. The women interviewed often described intensive mothering behaviour, where the act of caring for children became the focus, often to the exclusion of everything else in their lives. They described choosing to spend their time raising their children rather than doing other things, walking away from jobs, careers and other activities to devote their time and energy to their family, drawing on the discourses of the ‘choice mystique’ (Stadtman Tucker 2010). For example, Clare tried to remind herself, ‘I will never regret spending more time with my children.’ However, she also detailed a time when her husband was away for work for several months. She was left in sole charge of their four children, which required all her time and attention: ‘There was a point where I was pretty much getting up at 6:00 a.m., with the kids all day, eight o’clock they went to bed, then I was planning for their

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homeschooling the next day and sorting the house, then prepping for the next day, then I was going to bed at 11:00 or 12:00 p.m., and doing it all again. And that was just a reoccurring role, daily.’ For Clare, mothering was something felt—‘being a mum is my number one priority’ (my emphasis)—and something that she did. Mothering was an activity that consumed an immense amount of time and energy through preparation (of the house, of herself, parenting and homeschooling books) and action. The decision to become a mother was one Daniela was committed to and felt deeply grateful for. She recognised the reality of childbearing was time-sensitive for her: I have one stage in my life when I married my husband, and we were just dealing with moving to another city, and I had my career, I had my professional life, and he had his, and I got to a point that I had to choose between my professional life and having a family, being a mum. And then I just realised that this was something I definitely wanted, and if I didn’t make that decision at that time, probably I wouldn’t be able to do it later.

Daniela remembered she explained her increasing desire to have children to her husband: ‘This job, I might have another one, I might do something different, […] but this is something I don’t want to give up. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life just thinking, “what if I had?”’ If mothering is understood as something you do, Daniela was willing to put aside other activities to focus on the doing of mothering. She organised the other elements of her life, including her paid work, to allow her to do the work of mothering. For Amanda, the choice to be an intensively involved mother was partly driven by her children’s additional needs. This situation, combined with the realities of parenting, led to her rethinking her relationship to her planned career as an engineer: ‘I thought I could have a highflying career and be a really good mum and do everything, and the reality is that that’s just not the way it works if you want to be the type of mum I wanted to be.’ However, Amanda also recognised that allowing herself space to be ‘not a mum’ or allowing other elements of her identity to come forth, to do other things, was central to her well-being. She said during her children’s toddler years, ‘I needed to be my own self and not be a food source or an incubator or whatever. I needed to get back to being me.’ Feeling consumed wholly by mothering was alienating for Amanda, particularly

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regarding her sense of bodily autonomy. She needed some physical separation from her children to regain her identity. Although her life was in service to her children, she retained a sense of a more inclusive self by doing other things as well. Melissa was particularly scathing about how mothering is framed as a series of actions or behaviours: ‘It’s like you’re this taxi driver, this person who takes the kids from A to B and drops them at school and picks them up and cooks them dinner and cleans. And it’s like, cooking and cleaning is part of being an adult, not being a mother. Do you know what I mean? I’d be doing these things whether I had kids or not.’ Despite dismissing the more visible, practical tasks culturally ascribed to mothers, Melissa understood some of her mothering in behavioural terms: ‘I’ve never used my brain so much as I do to learn how to be a mother, how to parent and how to learn to cope healthily with life.’ Although she followed her instincts for the most part when making decisions regarding her mothering, something she ascribed to the lack of social drive from being autistic, she commented that in her relationship, ‘I’m the one doing 90–95 per cent of everything’. The behavioural components of mothering were resoundingly her responsibility. Her lack of social drive and being the principal decision-maker for parenting in her household gave her security and allowed her to trust in her capacity to choose sound mothering behaviour: ‘I think I’ve been so lucky because I watch other people sometimes struggle between what they should do and what society tells them they should do, and what they want to do, whereas I’ve never based my self-esteem or my decisions on what everyone is doing.’ One interesting finding from the online research was that many women described guilty feelings and a sense of being a ‘bad mum’ if their work or other commitments took them away from the active doing or behavioural components of motherhood. Discussions between mothers on Reddit and Mumsnet often included responses validating the original poster’s feelings, with demonstrations of solidarity in their shared experiences of this guilt. The flip side was concern from stay-at-home mums feeling guilty that they were not contributing financially to the family. In that case, respondents pointed out that stay-at-home mothers were often taking on household tasks that helped, in their mind, balance the contributions between partners. In both instances, the activity and the doing of mothering were the central focus, based on how much time and energy the mother devoted to family life.

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Mothering as Situational Being a mother can be considered a situational identity. Certainly, within the women’s movement, this is a core concern: women with children should be understood as mothers only as it is appropriate to their context. In the workplace, for example, one’s role (or lack of role) as a mother should not have a bearing on whether someone is considered capable, available, promotable or even employable, where there is no direct connection between the role as mother and that as an employee. Equally, some mothers may see mothering as something that happens in the home but not in public. This perception might be the case once children have grown into adults and occasionally fall back onto older mother–child dynamics in private spaces. However, they find new ways to interact with mother figures when outsiders can observe them. Goffman (1959, 22) argued that the setting of an identity performance would guide its reception: ‘Those who would use a particular setting as part of their performance cannot begin their act until they have brought themselves to the appropriate place.’ For professional identities, these settings are most often the workplace (or during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and working from home, worktime). Women’s roles are necessarily guided by the settings in which they are enacted. Many women have pushed hard for a long time to ensure that mothering is understood as contextually and situationally bound, and that their ‘mum life’ does not bleed into their interaction and treatment in the workplace in undesired ways. Amanda had worked from home for several years, balancing caring for and homeschooling her children with employment. She found her work during her children’s early years created space and time to step away from the situational demands of mothering. When her children were in childcare or at school in their early years, she could relax from the pressures of mothering: ‘My work was my respite because my real job was being a mum, and when I went to work, I got a break from that.’ The sense of being ‘always on’ as a mother outside work time or when working from home was not something that Amanda regretted or felt overwhelmed by—after all, she wanted to be a mum. However, she experienced the break from the demands for her time, attention, physical body and mental energy due to the changed workplace situation as a welcome respite. Daniela felt similarly when she rejoined the workforce after her children were born; she recognised that she needed to work to maintain balance in her life. Some online threads showed women allocating percentages to their identities based on where they were. At home, being mum made up

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most (if not all) of their identity, while at work, their identity shifted to minimise their role as a mother. Two interviewees discussed their understanding of the situational nature of mothering as temporal rather than locational. Melissa explained she never imagined herself as a mother before deciding to have children. It was only after realising her chances of birthing children were lower than many due to polycystic ovary syndrome that she felt a pressing need to become pregnant and raise children. Clare expected her identity to shift away from a ‘full-time mother’ once her children were independent and no longer needed her close care and attention. Clare’s perception differed from Melissa’s temporal understanding of mothering, as Clare always wanted to have children and be a stay-at-home mother, even as a child. However, like Melissa, Clare felt a deep commitment to being available for her children whenever they need her. Things that could affect her availability, such as employment, were regarded as impositions that interfered with her ability to be a mother on her own terms. However, Clare knew that there would come a time when her children would be less demanding on her time and energy: ‘There will be a point where that will change, where the children won’t need me, and then I won’t be a full-time mum because actually, my identity will probably change, because the children won’t see me as that. They’ll have their own lives. They’ll move on. They’ll do their own thing.’ Whether the situational components of mothering are temporal (across a day or a lifetime) or geographic (i.e. dependent on the performance setting), it is important to recognise that this schema puts constraints around mothering that allow other roles and identity performances to come to the fore. Not in itself a controversial statement, it is necessary to explicitly note that those who value a situational understanding of mothering over, for example, a behavioural or identity-based understanding may feel quite differently about how and when they are ‘read’ as mothers. Mothering as Relational Finally, being a mother can be understood as relational. This framing differs from the discussion of situational mothering. Rather than being about where (or when) the mother is, relational mothering is about the connection to other people, most often a child or children. Interestingly, mothering does not seem to be a relational identity to a partner—mothers are mothers because they have children (in whatever form that takes), not

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because there are other parents. My data suggests this is the case regardless of whether the mother is partnered. For example, the interviews included two women married to men, a woman divorced from her children’s father and a woman in a long-term, committed relationship with a woman. All the interviewees touched on their relationship with the other parent and alluded to the other parent’s relationship with the children. However, this was not explored when defining their mothering; the other parent’s relationship with their children was not explored in depth (except in the negative for the divorced woman). The currently partnered women were supported by their partners in their choice to be intensive mothers but in the form of validating a choice already made rather than setting up an expectation of a particular relationship dynamic to which the women felt they needed to conform. Clare spoke most about how her relationship with each of her four children guided her understanding of mothering. In line with her understanding of the situational temporality of her identity, she saw her relationship with mothering as relational. When her children start to separate themselves from her—a natural and healthy component of human development—the focus on being a mum first would necessarily drop away. Clare did not know what would take the place of mothering but had watched her mother-in-law navigate that identity shift, ‘figuring out what they’re going to do with their life’ after the relationship with young children was gradually replaced by a relationship with adult offspring. For Clare, building a strong relationship with her children was paramount. She felt the relationship with her mother, who worked out of the home throughout Clare’s childhood, was lacking: ‘I didn’t see my mum that much, and I have a quite different relationship with her. So for me, it was more important to be a present mum, and I wanted the kids to know that I’m always around.’ Amanda also saw an end point to her understanding of herself as a mum first and foremost. She looked forward to it: ‘Obviously, I will always be a mum, but I do look forward to having my own life because, in a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve given my life to my kids.’ The situational and relational components of identity performance are closely intertwined, as are the identity and behavioural components. It was clear from the reflections of the interview participants that although women who see themselves as mothers do not stop being mothers, there are times and places when being a mother becomes less central to their identities. As Amanda noted poignantly and importantly, being a mother continues even for those who have lost children; Amanda had experienced

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a stillbirth and dealt with the rejection by an adult step-child she had raised from toddlerhood.

Maternal Behaviour and Valuing Mothering Changes in the prioritisation of mothering for women might occur across the course of the day (where a change of setting leads to a role change), across a lifetime (when independent offspring no longer need or want mothering) or between people (when mothers take on the care and nurturing of others in mother-like relationships). The latter is observed in the stereotypical mum–friend—the woman who nurtures and cares for those around her in a motherly fashion, dispensing snacks, first aid and life advice in an enactment of the mothering as behaviour schema, and through extended care networks within and beyond families. Mothering happens in the workplace, too, where women take on informal caring responsibilities for colleagues and the ‘domestic’ duties, such as social planning and interpersonal support. In educational environments, students are more likely to seek and expect general well-being support from women teachers, lecturers and administrators than from men in equivalent positions (Ashencaen Crabtree and Shiel 2019; Winnington and Cook 2021). Maternal behaviour is not only directed towards or expected by children—mothering can be experienced broadly. There is often an ‘invisibilised’ form of mothering that is naturalised for and expected of women without considering the skill and expertise necessary to do it well. Instead, the maternal is subsumed under the sociocultural norms of women’s behaviour, some of which actively resist the maternal framing of identity, behaviour and relationships. Although motherhood is socioculturally naturalised for women (O’Reilly 2016), each interviewee strenuously argued that mothering was undervalued, much more difficult, complex, involved and rewarding than is recognised by the broader society, and that media representations insufficiently presented the challenging realities of mothering. Although Clare was excited to see women in a range of leading (professional) roles in television shows and on film, she felt that this minimised the importance of mothers. She thought this was particularly the case when matched with government programmes encouraging or supporting women back into the workforce through subsidised childcare and tax incentives. Clare experienced this expectation that mothers should also work in her interactions with others, particularly when meeting someone new:

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If it’s people I’m meeting […] I’m trying to word it nicely […] I feel like I’m maybe not seen as important. So, if someone asked me what I was doing, and I didn’t give them a profession, and I say, ‘Oh, I’m at home with the kids’, then it almost feels like, ‘Oh, okay ….’ It’s almost like the conversation will stop, or they’ll look at me, and I can feel it, I know, and I’ve had it a few times, ‘Oh, how many kids you got? Four! Blimey! Do you work?’ Then I kind of do—just me being English—I do a sarcastic ‘No, I just sit at home all day!’

Melissa equated the minimisation of mothering with the devaluing of children, saying: I don’t feel like children exist as beings [to most people] until they get to a certain age, and I feel like by the time that age has come, it’s kind of too late for people to decide that they’re going to start treating their children as people. […] If there’s no value on children, then there’s no value on the people that have to look after children or choose to look after children.

The women also noted that mothering was undervalued and underappreciated even by their children’s other parent, arguably the person best placed to recognise the level of involvement, intensity and transformation for the mother. Daniela described a conversation with her husband where he complained about the number of things he had to deal with for work. She replied, I don’t have a target. I don’t have anything where if I do it, I get a bonus. The things I spend my life doing, I will probably only know I have done good or bad years ahead. And nobody will ever be able to tell me if I have done a good job or a bad job, and there is no manual, there is no procedure. There is no right or wrong. And on top of that, it’s your child. You can’t mess it up. You can’t give up. You can’t quit the job.

The lack of targets and standards of success against which a mother can judge her achievements means that the mother-persona is produced and reproduced through action, interaction and identification. It is performative (Butler 1999), created through the repeated enactment of social performance that draws on archetypes and discourses such as intensive mothering. One’s status as a mother can be considered permanent once achieved—one either is or is not a mother. It can also be in flux, as its emphasis, value and connection to others shifts over time and space. For

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many, it is an important component of personal identity, a contributor to a sense of self, a role that is inhabited and informs relationships and behaviours. For others, including the women whose experiences were explored in this chapter, it is the defining element of identity. As Amanda said, ‘All of my decisions about everything revolve around my role as a mother. That’s my number one role.’

References Ashencaen Crabtree, Sara, and Chris Shiel. 2019. “Playing Mother”: Channeled Careers and the Construction of Gender in Academia. SAGE Open 9 (3): 1. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019876285. Barbour, Kim. 2015. Registers of Performance: Negotiating the Professional, Personal and Intimate in Online Persona Creation. In Media, Margins and Popular Culture, ed. Heather Savigny, Jenny Alexander, Daniel Jackson, and Einar Thorsen, 57–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Baxter, Jennifer. 2015. Gender Role Attitudes within Couples, and Parents’ Time in Paid Work, Child Care and Housework. In The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children Annual Statistical Report 2014, ed. Katherine Day and Lan Wang, 39–62. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies. https:// growingupinaustralia.gov.au/sites/default/files/asr2014.pdf. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble Tenth Anniversary Edition. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1994. Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorising about Motherhood. In Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, 56–74. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, Natalie. 2016. Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-­ Mothering in French. Vol. 3 of Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Friedman, May. 2013. Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gibson, Charity L. 2019. Enacting Motherhood Online: How Facebook and Mommy Blogs Reinforce White Ideologies of the New Momism. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 3 (1–2): Article 6. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/5912. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1994. Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview. In Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, 1–29. New  York, NY: Routledge.

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Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Hook, Chris. 2019. ‘Dozens of Australian Men Are Now Giving Birth, Medicare Figures Show’. 7NEWS, 8 August. https://7news.com.au/news/social/ medicare-­figures-­show-­dozens-­of-­australian-­men-­are-­now-­giving-­birth-­every-­ year-­c-­389349. Lass, Inga. 2018. ‘Who Is Doing What on the Homefront?’ Pursuit, 31 July. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/who-­i s-­d oing-­w hat-­o n-­t he-­ homefront. Maiden, Samantha. 2014. ‘The Aussie Blokes Who Have given Birth’. Daily Telegraph. 15 November. https://dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/ pregnant-­men-­new-­statistics-­r eveal-­men-­have-­given-­birth-­to-­54-­babies-­in-­ australia/news-­story/ed8a56f4b906d20a4093c82562173c8e. Marshall, P. David, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour. 2020. Persona Studies: An Introduction. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. O’Reilly, Andrea. 2016. We Need to Talk about Patriarchal Motherhood: Essentialization, Naturalization and Idealization in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement 7 (1): 64–81. https://jarm.journals.yorku.ca/index. php/jarm/article/view/40323. Rabuzzi, Kathryn Allen. 1988. Motherself: A Mythic Analysis of Motherhood. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sales, Leigh, Laura Francis and Kirsten Robb. 2021. ‘Women Are Still Doing Most of the Housework’. ABC News, 30 August. https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2021-­08-­31/division-­of-­domestic-­labour-­continues-­to-­land-­heavily-­ on-­women/100418942. Smyth, Lisa. 2012. The Demands of Motherhood. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010254. Stadtman Tucker, Judith. 2010. From ‘Choice’ to Change: Rewriting the Script of Motherhood as Maternal Activism. In Twenty-First-Century Motherhood: Experience, Identity, Policy, Agency, ed. Andrea O’Reilly, 293–309. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Winnington, Rhona, and Catherine Cook. 2021. The Gendered Role of Pastoral Care within Tertiary Education Institutions: An Autoethnographic Reflection during COVID-19. Nursing Praxis in Aotearoa New Zealand 37 (3): 37–40. https://doi.org/10.36951/27034542.2021.033. Xie, Sha, and Hui Li. 2019. “Tiger Mom, Panda Dad”: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Parenting Profiles. Early Child Development and Care 189 (2): 284–300. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2017.1318870.

CHAPTER 3

Hairdressers

It’s 2019, a Saturday morning. I enter my local hair salon, a short walk from home, a little after 10:00 a.m. As I enter, I’m greeted by the manager (the sole man in the salon), who glances up and smiles as he finishes a phone call. My usual hairdresser is finishing up with her previous client but looks my way and says, ‘hi’—she’s expecting me. Two clients are at the basins—one is sitting looking at her phone, probably waiting for a treatment to be rinsed out. A second older woman is at the basin tucked behind the reception desk. The client is sobbing, not loudly, but noticeably. Her hair is being washed by one of the newer apprentices, who looks a little uncomfortable but not upset. It is clear the apprentice is not the cause of the woman’s tears. Unusually, the head stylist (also the owner) perches on the arm of the client’s chair, holding her hand and soothing her, listening as she spills out a story that I can’t quite hear over the running water, the music and the hairdryers in the salon. The manager finishes the call and greets me by name, whisking me off to a styling station where he seats me, offers me a coffee and then hurries off to get it. I settled in, slightly on edge, wondering what was happening. The familiar rhythms take over: greeting my regular stylist and her colleagues, being draped in a cape, chatting through what I want that day. As I wait for my colour to be mixed, the crying woman is escorted back to the styling chair. It’s behind me and off to one side, but the mirrors extend across the walls, and I can see her reflection, giving me a clear view of her despite having our backs to one another. The head stylist dries, trims and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barbour, Women and Persona Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7_3

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styles her short, greying hair before beginning a full face of make-up. This last is uncommon at this salon—and I discretely watched, occasionally eavesdropping and peeking in the mirrors while my colour was being applied and processed. The cause of the tears, the make-up and the hair becomes clear as the two women chat. It is the client’s daughter’s wedding day, and she is at the salon to prepare for this event. She feels safe in spilling out her hopes, fears and dreams for her daughter’s future to the senior stylist in the relative anonymity of the salon, unloading the emotions of the day. She leaves before I do, hugging the stylist, who promptly reminds her not to cry again or she’ll ruin the make-up. They laugh together and disappear around the wall that separates the styling chairs from the reception and basin area as they settle the account.

My experience that Saturday morning consolidated what I had observed and thought about while people-watching at the hair salon. My desire for heavily coloured hair means my appointments generally run for at least three hours. Although I take work, books or other entertainment with me, I spend a lot of time listening to conversations and watching the stylists and apprentices interact with their clients. The labour of hairdressing is far more than is demonstrated by the cutting, colouring and styling of hair; it is about care for people. That makes the fact that hairdressing became an unexpected flashpoint during 2020 more understandable—people wanted to be cared for at a time when the world seemed so out of control. Hairdressers are an established community who could undertake that care. The absence of hair care became a shared commiseration on video calls as the lack of regular professional care became increasingly apparent. A visit to the salon was the priority for many, a celebration of freedom when lockdown measures were lifted, marked by photos shared on social media of masked faces reflected in salon mirrors. Hairdressers have always sat in a liminal space as listeners and counsellors. They keep children’s names and interests, parent and pet illnesses, special occasions and major worries in their heads to pull out and ask about at the client’s next visit. This role is well beyond the scope of their professional skills with scissors, treatments and dyes—they advise with tact and discretion to support clients to feel happy and confident in their appearance. Some would say that is a shallow goal. However, that opinion dismisses the importance of appearance in our society and of feeling comfortable in your skin to mental and physical well-being.

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So, hairdressers do more for our communities than cut, colour and style. But how does this group, predominantly women and young, negotiate the competing demands of their profession? How do they present a caring persona to clients who can be demanding, indecisive or frustratingly silent? This case study explored the role of hairdressers as experienced professionals, considering the literature before drawing on interviews with hairdressers working in suburban salons in Adelaide, Australia. I spoke to stylists whose time in the industry ranged from 15 to 43 years, exploring how they engaged with their clients and peers to provide this layered experience.

Caring For and About Hair Why is hair such a flashpoint? Our crowning glory, hair is a malleable site of embodied identity performance. It allows us to fit in, stand out and indicate allegiance to particular ideological positions. Hair styling is a central component of cultures around the world. The keeping, growing, exposing, covering, dressing or removing of hair has received considerable religious, political and scholarly attention. After all, ‘hair is perhaps our most powerful symbol of individual and group identity—powerful first because it is physical and therefore extremely personal, and second because, although personal, it is also public rather than private’ (Synnott 1987, 381). Hair is powerful. Yet, hairdressing and hairdressers, the industry and people who guide and benefit from the symbolism behind hair are understudied. David Schroder (1973, 1) noted in his doctoral study of gender and hairdressing that many people considered hairdressing nothing more than ‘froth and nonsense’. It appears little has changed in the intervening 50 years. Hannah McCann (2019, 83) attributes the lack of scholarly attention to salon visits being considered ‘as a treat, a place to relax, be pampered’, although being rebranded as an ‘essential investment’ in self-care. Scholarly research on hairdressing as a profession in Australia is limited. Health scientists have done the most research, concentrating on skin conditions like contact dermatitis from chemical exposure. Industry research tends to focus on business opportunities, training and employment. However, there was growing interest as I researched and wrote this book. McCann (University of Melbourne) led an Australian Research

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Council-­funded research project called ‘Beyond Skin-Deep: Emotional Work in Hair and Beauty Salons’ (2020–2023), and Stacey Page (University of Adelaide) was completing her psychology PhD exploring hairdressers’ informal caregiver function. Every decade or so, a few papers exploring the White, middle-class salon experience in the United States (US), Canada, England or similar countries are released (Schroder 1973; Cowen et al. 1979; Wiesenfeld and Weis 1979; Milne and Mullin 1987; Eayrs 1993; Gimlin 1996; Lee et al. 2005; Lee et al. 2007; Chugh and Hancock 2009; Garzaniti et al. 2011; Yeadon-Lee et al. 2011; Shortt and Warren 2012; Oshima 2014; Hanson 2019; McCann and Myers 2021; Page et al. 2021). These studies explore class status for hairdressers, the role of hairdressing in providing mental health and social support, the emotional effects of hairdressers’ carer role and the potential for hairdressers to recognise and support clients at risk, or victims, of domestic violence. A similar body of work explores the experience of Black American beauty salon culture. This literature emphasises the politics of hair for minority Black people in a White society, hairdressers and salon workers as informal social and health care support workers, and the role of beauty salons in building and supporting community (Candelario 2000; Majors 2001; Jacobs-Huey 2006; Linnan and Ferguson 2007; Babou 2008; Wilson et al. 2008; Stenson 2012; Gill 2015; Majors 2015; Randle 2015; Mbilishaka 2018; Jenkins 2019; Palmer et al. 2021). The research supports the contention that the skilled trade element of hairdressing (i.e. cutting, colouring and treating) is only one element of why hairdressing is important. The self-care component of going to the hairdresser includes, somewhat contradictorily, putting yourself in someone else’s care and giving them the responsibility for making you feel good about yourself. Eayrs (1993, 23) describes this as hairdressers seeking ‘not so much to make people “beautiful”, but to make them “feel good”’. The role of hairdressers and other salon workers in caring for and supporting clients is a consistent theme in research on hairdressing and beauty salons across cultures. Salons are considered safe spaces for clients to unburden themselves and share their worries and fears with a friendly, non-­ judgmental, confidential ear. Salon workers have been identified as important social support workers in informal care systems. They may possibly be intermediaries between clients and formal support services in areas such as health care, family violence, addiction and aged care. The intimacy of the role, where physical touch is necessary, leads to a degree of trust usually reserved for long-term intimates or medical professionals such as doctors.

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This intimacy encourages sharing within the perceived safety of the salon, speaking with people who are typically distant from those social relationships. In their study, Wiesenfeld and Weis (1979, 786) found ‘approximately one-third of the time hairdressers spent talking to customers was devoted to discussion of moderate-to-serious problems’. Similarly, Cowen et  al. (1979, 636) argue that ‘women’s contacts with hairdressers tend both to be regular and to involve sizable conversational time units. Understandably, if a woman sees her hairdresser as competent, trustworthy, and likeable, she may be willing to discuss personal matters with him or her.’ This layered conceptualisation of hairdressers’ roles means that hairdressers must craft a persona of a friendly, caring, trustworthy and competent woman, capable of interpreting client desires and demands, putting aside personal preferences and styles, in the service of the identity they are contributing to for their client. Eayrs (1993, 34) argues that hairdressers ‘create and maintain the “appearance”, to wit, the selves [my emphasis] of their customers, which the customers either cannot or choose not to create for themselves’. Hair, as a central component in physical appearance, is here reconceptualised as ‘self’ and ‘identity’. Shaping that appearance by hairdressers allows us to see them as persona creation workers, producing, through their labour, a new version of their client. To hand over that power for persona production—personal and public power (Synnott 1987)—possibly while sharing intimate details of one’s life, is a moment of vulnerability that deserves greater and more serious attention. Eayrs (1993, 31) argues that ‘sociologists have not seen hairdressers as professionals despite their possession of the traditional criteria, including training, entry by examination for licensure, exclusionary associations, and a formal code of ethics’. This project contributes to the growing literature highlighting the opportunities and constraints inherent in skilled service professions that rely, at least partly, on personality and persona.

Research Methodology This case study used a qualitative methodology, drawing on autoethnographic observation and key informant interviews to obtain in-depth, descriptive data. Informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis, it explored hairdressers’ experiences performing a caring persona in the salon and how they balance their needs and professional experience with the client’s wishes. Three experienced hairdressers were interviewed—one

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in her late twenties, another in her late 40s and another in her late 50s— allowing comparison between interactions and performances at different points in a stylist’s career. The stylists are referred to by pseudonyms. Qualitative thematic analysis, informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis, was used to code and analyse the data for recurring and outlier performance themes. At the same time, persona narratives provided personalised stories about the participants’ experiences.

The Stylists Darcy was a senior stylist at a popular, relatively high-end suburban salon. In her late twenties, she had worked in the same salon for most of her career, specialising in colour work, particularly lightening to blonde. Her style was edgy and sharp. The salon’s stylists tended to wear exclusively black (fairly common in Australia, presumably to avoid staining from chemicals and dyes). However, Darcy had several black leather pieces and sharply defined crop tops that were part of her regular rotation; her bare arms and stomach displayed small fine line tattoos. Her dyed blonde hair was regularly tinted with pale pinks, trimmed into classic bobs, lengthened with extensions or sculpted into careful curls. She was clearly made up even on busy days and had regular eyelash extensions. Before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down travel and industry events, Darcy was a frequent competitor in colouring and styling competitions. The salon windows included displays of trophies won over the past decade by the stylists, including many engraved with Darcy’s name. In the salon, Darcy was friendly without gushing; she tended towards being brisk and direct in her interactions, although without sacrificing warmth. As a senior stylist, she often jumped between clients with overlapping appointments and directed the juniors and apprentices to apply colour and wash or dry her clients’ hair. She alone cuts her client’s hair, focusing fully on the style with little chatter outside checking in with the client about length and progress. Ash was a stylist with decades of experience. When we spoke, she was in the process of finding a new salon after leaving the one where I had previously observed her working. She hoped to take on her own business after working for others for many years. A bubbly middle-aged woman, Ash had a warm and friendly demeanour. She preferred bright, colourful clothing at work and found the black-clothes-only standard constrained her style. When required to meet this standard, she played with texture and

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structure, wearing black lace, ruffles and tops with statement collars. Tall block heels, often ankle boots, augmented her small stature. Her hair was tightly curled and brightly coloured—the kind of red-bronze colour that could be natural but likely isn’t—and pulled back with elaborate clips and headbands. Despite the obvious care taken with her presentation, Ash seemed natural and in her element in the salon. She had confidence drawn from decades of work and a deeply felt self-knowledge. In interactions with clients, Ash was generous in conversation, laughing along and sometimes engaging with multiple people at once, drawing them together in a larger conversation. She moved through the salon space and her tasks with conviction, a lack of fuss and an economy of movement. At the same time, she gave the contradictory impression of being something of a whirlwind, constantly in motion and conversation. Lee has been working as a hairdresser for 43 years, although it took her some time to realise that it had been that long. She said she had stopped counting after 30 years in the industry. Lee started training in her country town’s salon at 15, did a year’s work in a central London salon at 19 and bought her salon in central Adelaide at 23. Since then, she has been self-­ employed, worked according to her preferences and gathered a loyal client base who stayed with her as she shifted locations. An energetic and naturally friendly woman, Lee appeared at least a decade younger than her age. She favoured sharp yet comfortable-looking trousers and tops and wore her wavy blonde hair just below her shoulders. Although Lee felt she was nearing the end of her hairdressing career—she had outlasted many others in the industry but was concerned about the long-term impacts of the pandemic on business—she recognised that her business had grown and developed with her. She had closed her books, as her existing clientele filled the three long days she worked each week without advertising or accepting new clients. However, she would make an exception for someone recommended by an existing client, recognising that they sought her expertise and fresh perspective on their style. Darcy and Ash spoke with me on their days off from work in January 2022. Darcy met me at the salon where she worked, having ducked out early from a training session to participate in the interview. Ash and I met at a local pub one afternoon. Lee made time before her first appointment of the day in late April 2022, and we chatted in the salon over a coffee. The interviews lasted a little over an hour, were recorded on my smartphone and then transcribed. Although I used an interview guide for

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comparability between the interviews, the discussions ranged beyond the common starting points.

The Intimacy of Personal Care Hairdressers provide an intimate service. They touch, stroke, scratch and pull, adjusting their clients’ heads, shoulders, bodies and arms to do their jobs. A hairdresser’s job requires many forms of touch: a gentle push on the side of the head to encourage a client to tilt, a nudge to a chin to lift the face, the scrape of fingers while sectioning, deep pressure on the scalp during a post-shampoo massage, the press of a towel wrapped finger on ears to remove drips of water, the squeezing of hair in the towel, the brisk brush of hands against a neck following a trim and the repositioning of arms and legs to ensure a balanced cut or easy access. Despite the necessity of touch to allow hairdressers to do their jobs, neither Ash nor Darcy mentioned the intimacies of laying their hands on another person. I found this omission deeply intriguing—it demonstrates the requirement for touch normalises physical interactions for hairdressers in a way that could be problematic in other professions. The physical component involves hours standing and sore arms, hips and knees, as Ash noted: ‘I suffer from carpal tunnel. I also have a bung knee at the moment. I need to get a knee replacement, but because I’m too young to get a knee replacement [shrugs].’ The impact of their work on the hairdressers’ bodies is significant. The wear and tear of repetitive physical movements, along with years of standing, takes its toll, even if the job is largely sedentary. Although not discussed by the interviewees, Lyons et al. (2013, 1) argue that ‘hairdressing is one of the most hazardous occupations for the skin’. Occupational contact dermatitis (allergic and irritant) is commonplace, caused by inadequate safety precautions such as gloves around chemicals and during ‘wet work’—washing and styling wet hair. The tactile nature of the technical side of the job, where hair condition is felt and observed, amplifies the importance of a hairdresser caring for their hands. Gloves interfere with their work—you receive less information through gloved fingers than bare skin. Lee mentioned the importance of touch when interacting with clients, although not the normalised touch involved in hairstyling. Instead, she brought attention to using touch to signal care and understanding when a

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client was impacted by life events: ‘You put your hands on their shoulders and go “I know how you feel, I understand how you feel.”’ Lee signalled her care and understanding of the client’s frustrations and concerns through her touch and words. She utilised touch to extend reassurance and comfort to her client. She also used the tactility of hair, its condition and feel, to identify changes in how a client might be feeling or experiencing the world. She described a ‘clammy oily build-up that gets on the hair’ during menopause as aiding her in identifying the cause of her clients’ behavioural changes. Identifying these changes with her hands allowed her to start conversations and provide support and understanding (conveyed through talk and touch) for women who were finding the experience challenging.

Complexities of Expertise Ash, Darcy and Lee were highly trained, skilled and experienced hairdressers. They upskilled in new techniques and products, trained the next generation of apprentices and demonstrated their capacities for their peers. Their technical skills were excellent, and they continued training to keep their skills fresh. Technical skills do not automatically confer success in hairdressing, nor do all successful hairdressers hold the same degree of expertise as the three interviewees. Rather, being successful and maintaining longevity in the industry, as Lee and Ash managed and as Darcy hoped to achieve, requires technical skill, physical resilience and mental strength. Ash believed that those who dropped out of the industry did so because one or more of these factors was overwhelming: There’s the physical component, and then the mental component too, and then the creativity, right, just running out. I guess if you don’t have that capacity to move beyond those base-level skills, then your opportunities for advancement and stuff, that’s minimal. Honestly, I think most people, if they don’t want to strive to be better, they’re not going to be.

Ash also noted that not wanting to listen, engage and support clients interpersonally was common among hairdressers who chose to leave the industry (or potentially should): ‘Here’s the thing with hairdressers: you don’t see a lot of hairdressers doing it for 27 years. You get ten years. Most hairdressers have ten years, and then they’re done. They’re done because

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they can’t be bothered listening to people anymore, and they have no empathy.’ Running out of capacity to manage the emotional load that comes with hairdressing complicated the discussion about expertise as a hairdresser. The technical skills will allow for a decade of work. However, if hairdressers do not focus on the interpersonal aspect, they will burn out from interactions with clients and taking responsibility for clients’ physical appearances and emotional well-being. For Darcy, the key to success for hairdressers was consistency and client focus as follows: But then a lot of hairdressing is like when you’re learning something, or coming up as an apprentice, that whatever’s going on in your life to leave it at the door, because it’s not about you anymore, it’s about the client. And I think the minute that that’s gone, it’s like, ‘Why would I come to see you if you don’t care about me that much?’ You have to have that consistency all the time.

Hairdressers must put their own lives aside to focus intently on clients who are largely strangers. Clients give hairdressers authority over their (the client’s) appearance and may share surprising, uncomfortable or confronting details of their lives. Yet, hairdressers must maintain a professional persona and execute technical skills, which requires carefully balancing their attention and mood. Reading People Of all the ‘soft skills’ a hairdresser develops over time, the capacity to read a person’s body language and non-verbal communication was central. Matching hairstyle, colour and length to a client’s personality was key to developing a happy, loyal clientele. Because Lee had known her clients for so long—decades, in most cases—she expected them to trust her and follow her lead when she suggested styles and colours. That is not to say that she ignored the client’s desires or followed the same style each time. However, she felt that having booked in with a professional, the client deserved to benefit from her experience and skill to create something that worked for them.

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Lee recounted an experience with a client early on in her career that she used as a learning experience. She felt she let the client down by not listening to their desires: I can remember a scenario perfectly when I was younger. I was probably 25, and this client might have been closer to 50. I remember her coming in and saying, ‘I want something really like [gestures a funky modern style]’, and I said, ‘Oh, don’t, maybe do something else. I think this is not gonna work for you’, which was really arrogant when I was young. That client has always stuck in my head […] I always remember that scenario, and I’ve always thought, ‘Oh my God, she just wanted something really on trend.’ It could have still been [appropriate for] her age, but because of that age gap, I just thought I can’t do a young person’s haircut on this older woman, which was which was a terrible, terrible thing to do.

Having learnt early that her preferences must match the client’s needs, Lee worked to balance her technical ability and creativity in offering the client options and change. She also thought back to styles that she might have used for that client years earlier to see if they could be adapted and modernised in a flattering way. She aimed to have her clients leave ‘on a high note’, noting that ‘everybody wants to be on trend’. Having gotten the relationship and trust-building aspects of the client–hairdresser interactions out of the way so long ago, Lee focused on providing a reliable service and time for her clients to relax and be nurtured. This last aspect became a particular focus with the pandemic. She adjusted her booking schedule to allow additional time for care in the salon: ‘Especially since COVID, that’s one thing we’ve really wanted to focus on. I’m pretty busy, so we’ve tried to actually back off on the amount of appointments that I take so that we’ve got a bit more nurture time with people. It’s pretty needed.’ As someone still in the early stages of building the relationships that Lee had established, Darcy’s approach to client interactions was to dedicate the first half an hour of the appointment to clarifying what the client wanted. She spent that time asking questions, judging responses to suggestions and determining what was required from a technical perspective. Darcy focused on bringing clients out of their shells, helping them become comfortable in sharing their desires, and then managing expectations about the possible outcomes for their hair. She wanted clients to feel

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comfortable and trust her to attend to their needs in terms of her professional and technical skills. She put it this way: I always try for like my first half an hour to get out of you what you want from the service and to try and deliver it on the same level. So, like, a trim to me and a trim to you are two different things. Let’s get into that a little bit more. But then I feel when a client is sitting in the salon that it shouldn’t be like, ‘Am I going to have a treatment? Are they gonna sell me a shampoo?’ So, let’s talk about what we have to talk about for the first half an hour, and then let’s just enjoy the time here and make it about you but not about your hair, about like your experiences or whatever it is you want to talk about.

By determining early on in the discussion what the client wanted for their hair, Darcy freed up the space in the remainder of the appointment for a more general discussion. She gave her clients the time to focus on themselves without worrying about the details of the colour, cut, treatment or styling process. After all, the intermediate stages of hairstyling require the client trusts the process: when their hair is full of foils, when trapped at a basin waiting for a toner to process, or when the cut is only half completed. While Darcy could envisage the final product and the steps to reach that point, the client might not. Knowing that Darcy was working towards an outcome determined at the beginning of the appointment helped the client to trust in her expertise. Darcy foregrounded her proficiency and professionalism by leading with the technical dimensions of the client’s visit rather than the interpersonal. By starting her interactions with ‘Okay, what are we doing today?’ Darcy invited her client to collaborate and allowed them to draw on the expertise she brought to the appointment. She did not ask, ‘What would you like me to do?’ or ‘What do you want to do with your hair?’ Instead, the ‘we’ in her initial interaction made it clear that the visit was a negotiation between the client and the stylist. There was balance in this process. The client brought their vision, personality, style and capacity for between-­ appointment maintenance. Darcy brought her knowledge of the process, product and possibilities; she guided the client away from damaging or potentially unflattering cuts or colour treatments and towards flattering and manageable styles.

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Darcy found most challenging when the collaborative process broke down due to insufficient guidance regarding what the client wanted to happen. She reflected on this at some length in our discussion as follows: I feel like [the hardest thing is] just the clients that give you nothing […] which means you’re not getting enough from your client and you’re not asking enough questions, and so when you give me nothing back, I’m at a dead end. And then you don’t even get the kind of personality from them because they’re giving you nothing. So, you can’t even go one way or the other; you just have to go by the way that they look and be like, ‘Okay, well, you’ve got a quite an outgoing hairdo. Do you want to go more this way or that way?’ But then they give you nothing, so you’re like, ‘Should we look at some photos? Tell me what you like.’

Because Darcy focused on the client’s comfort and happiness with their hair at the end of the appointment and liked to set clear expectations from the outset, a lack of communication was challenging. Without input from the client on their taste or personality, she could not match the style to suit the client. Although she could rely on her technical skills to provide a genuinely good haircut to uncommunicative clients, she was not fully satisfied with the interaction because she could not determine if the client received what they wanted. For Ash, reading people and their needs began as soon as they arrived in the salon. Like Lee, Ash was much less guarded than Darcy about leading the interaction with clients to encourage them to follow her vision. She said, ‘I’m a really visual person. As soon as I see someone, I get a flick of colour or whatever that I think that they should have in my head straight away. And I just tell them, “This is what I think we should do.” If they don’t want to do it, or they feel uncomfortable with it, then obviously I won’t do it. We might try and find something softer.’ While determining a style was still a collaborative process for Ash, she was clearer in her desire to lead the discussion; she made recommendations first and waited for the client to respond positively or negatively to her suggestions. Ash was upfront in making recommendations partly because of the length and breadth of her experience in the industry. Another aspect was her confidence in her ability to read her clients. While drawing on clothing and body language to determine how to approach a client, Ash also described her professional interpersonal interactions as guided by the auras she saw around her clients. This visioning gave her

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information beyond that gained during discussions, and operated as a feedback mechanism as to client satisfaction: ‘You can see that they’re drained when they come in. They’re just grey; there is no brightness to them. Seeing that turn around, seeing them walk out in a much better, lighter, brighter, glowing manner, no amount of money can fix that and make it feel better for me. It’s just that—making them feel amazing.’ The shift in how her clients appeared to her at the end of the appointment and the feeling that she contributed to lifting them up and improving their mood and outlook on life, drove Ash to remain in the industry more than three times longer than she regarded as standard. However, Ash mirrored Darcy’s struggles when there was no feedback from her clients, including when she could not shift what she perceived as a dark or colourless aura. She endeavoured not to take responsibility for that person’s experience, remarking that the flip side is when you can’t do that [change]. You’ve done the technical side, you’ve done the personal interaction, you’ve done all of that, and it doesn’t shift. When it doesn’t shift, I need to know not to take that on board. That happens very infrequently for me, and that is more about that person has got a lot of issues, and it’s just time. It takes time. That person has so many walls built up that it is a time thing. You have to wait.

Sharing and Oversharing Ash’s reflections on not being able to shift a persistent sense of negativity or worry in a client connected with the part of the role that all the stylists discussed: how clients use the salon—the hairdresser’s workspace—to share private or intimate details of their lives. This observation was congruent with the sociological research showing that hairdressers are often treated as informal counsellors, providing social, emotional and health support for their clients. Darcy believed people shared troubling information with her when they were looking for reassurance. She tried hard to reassure them and to allow them the space to feel good about themselves at the end of the appointment: I just have some clients, where some of the stuff that they would share with me, I probably wouldn’t share with people, if you know what I mean? But

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then I’m like, I kind of love that about them because it’s just that you’re such an individual person. And the whole salon’s laughing when they’re here because they’re just like, ‘Why is this lady telling you everything?’ But then it just makes for that type of person; it’s different. It’s a different interaction.

It can create tension in the salon when clients step over boundaries that Darcy herself would not break. Luckily, this was not the case for most of her interactions. Instead, she found the humour in learning intimate details about her clients’ lives. Lee also mentioned ‘having a giggle’ when learning secrets in her clients’ lives. Lee worked to maintain a space free of judgement where her clients could feel free to unburden themselves. Navigating complex health issues with clients was more challenging; these were handled case by case. Darcy recollected a client who came to have hairpieces added after cancer treatment. The client did not disclose the treatment and kept her interactions completely impersonal. By contrast, a regular male client updated Darcy on his equally serious health condition, using his situation as a reminder for the team at the salon to focus on their strengths. In return, Darcy worked hard during the appointment to raise his spirits. She provided care and joy while giving him space to reflect on his experiences in a non-clinical environment: ‘Like if someone’s oversharing with you, they probably want to have you tell them it’s going to be okay. Whereas if they don’t, like that lady that I had done the hairpieces for, she didn’t want to be seen as a cancer victim, or she didn’t want anyone to rub her back and tell her she was going to be okay, so she didn’t acknowledge it at all.’ Reading client interactions and interpreting the level of client comfort and personal reserve complements the technical skills that hairdressers require. Ash and Darcy indicated that apprentices receive some formal training in interpersonal interaction, but most learnings in this space occurred through experience and watching more senior stylists interact with clients. For Lee, growing older with her clients allowed her to develop insight into their needs and life stages, and she also benefited from their advice and tips gathered. Lee preferred working with older women: ‘I’ve enjoyed working with women that are in  that 40–70 age bracket much, much more than the young ones.’ However, she had a newfound appreciation for women in menopause after navigating those changes herself. She observed:

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I have so much more sympathy and empathy for women at that stage, and sometimes that can be your big barrier with getting their hair right. Menopausal women are feeling really, really low and freaking cranky. So, we’ve got to try and break that barrier, and it’s no different to being a young hormonal woman. The similarities now that I see, you actually do build that wisdom to go, ‘Okay, now I actually really understand how you feel’ because that gritting of the teeth […] like it’s really got nothing to do with her hair.

Drawing on her own experiences in life allowed Lee to negotiate her interactions with clients. At the same time, she gained wisdom from the advice of older women on forthcoming life changes. Sharing women’s knowledge and common experiences was one of the most rewarding aspects of the interpersonal domain of Lee’s career. As someone open about the trauma in her own life, Ash found she could listen without judgement or fear to the challenging experiences of others. She felt that the flip side of the trauma she dealt with was a capacity to compartmentalise disclosures, allowing her to hear and respond in the moment without the disclosures staying with her in unhelpful ways. Ash regarded this capacity as complementing her technical skills. When making recommendations for their hair, she considered if someone disclosed that they were having a hard time: If they’re having a really hard time personally, you do not give them a hair change, okay? There is no hair changing. They’ll come in, and they’ll say they want a hair change, you don’t do it […]. It’s the ‘let’s cut my hair off!’, and I have definitely done that, not realising the behind the scenes situations. So, for me, it’s really important to have a chat, really make sure that I pick up on body language, how they’re feeling, what their eyes look like, what their facial expressions are like.

Ash was conscious that sometimes, the advice she gave in response to some client disclosures was likely better provided by counsellors or someone with more training. She tried to balance that by recommending that clients seek additional professional help, whether it be mental health support or even the police. Lee took a similar approach; she drew on previous discussions to make general recommendations to clients to seek support services such as GPs, or to try different activities to help with specific issues: ‘I gain knowledge from what other clients’ experiences are that I can sort of pass on, whether it be directing them to a good doctor, a good

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GP, or whether it’s directing them to a life coach, or maybe “You need to do yoga,” or “Pilates is supposed to be really good for chronic back pain.”’ Although Lee and Ash had heard more significant concerns than Darcy in their longer careers, they both explained that most clients wanted a friendly ear to unload their everyday concerns onto. According to these industry veterans, clients saw hairdressers as a more socially acceptable alternative to formal counselling or other mental health support. Therefore, providing a space where this interaction is possible has become a part of the hairdresser’s role.

Client Interactions Part of creating a welcoming and nurturing space in a salon was balancing one-on-one interactions with the client with the reality of a busy salon where multiple clients (and other salon staff) could see and hear those interactions. This balancing required a version of code switching: curating how the hairdresser interacts with clients to suit their personalities and needs. Ash’s approach was to focus entirely on the client in front of her, creating what she described as a bubble. As Ash shifted from one client to another (e.g. completing a cut on one client while another waited in a chair for their colour to develop), the bubble reformed around the new client. She explained how this process works in relation to a type of client she designated an ‘owl’—a client who takes a comparatively long time to relax, open up or share anything of themselves with Ash. These clients tend to sit quietly, observing the salon or reading a magazine, but not engaging with others. With these clients, the bubble becomes a safety zone: ‘Lots of people will only open up to you if they feel safe and comfortable and know that you’re going to tell them the truth […]. Slowly but surely. And it probably takes maybe 15 minutes for them to really relax and know that it’s just them and myself in our little bubble with no one else listening.’ Within the space that Ash created—an imagined intimate zone within the larger, busy salon—the client could relax their boundaries in preparation for the intimacy of the hairdressing encounter. For some, that intimacy was purely in service of the hairstyling process, while for others, it involved sharing deeply personal experiences, concerns and views. While there may be a single client at the centre of the interaction, Ash noted that sometimes her bubbles expanded to incorporate others:

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My bubbles end up getting bigger, and then everyone starts having a conversation about everything that’s going on in their life. So, it’s not just myself and that person—it could be four or five people in the same conversation about this person’s issues that she’s got going on. It’s the gift is about being able to help people to open up and not be judgmental.

Lee’s more intimate salon—she only had one other stylist working with her—gave her more control over the number and type of interactions in her space. She reported: I don’t know if it’s because I own the business that I probably am a little bit more switched on to try and make it right for everybody, make it the right place for everybody. So, if somebody’s a bit loud, you tend to perhaps try and talk them down a little bit, not say to them directly, ‘Stop having fun! You’re obviously having a great life.’ You respond a little bit more quietly […] I’m quite aware of every conversation going […], and you’re like, ‘okay, maybe we just need to put that subject down a little bit.’

Managing the topics, volume and enthusiasm of discussions within a small space enabled Lee to maintain that welcoming and nurturing environment she preferred, where her clients felt relaxed. Lee saw her ability to manage interactions with different types of people as resulting from the adaptability of hairdressers. She thought hairdressers are good at reading people and determining who wants to chat and who wants to sit quietly and read. What was not addressed here was Lee’s preferences. It was clear throughout our discussion that in adapting to her clients, Lee changed her interaction style to meet her clients’ needs, privileging others’ preferences above her own.

Hairdressing and Persona Performance While this chapter mostly focuses on what hairdressers do, it also provides some significant insights into how the profession shapes the persona performances of those working within it. While style and taste are expected in hairdressing, friendly and approachable personalities help build a loyal clientele, and technical skills are key to achieving promised results, the persona enacted by hairdressers is always in service of the client. Unlike many of the other personas in this book, the hairdresser’s persona is not mediatised in terms of the interactions with clients in the hair salon. Hairdressing is

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embodied, and hairdressers are necessarily grounded in the physical. Their work exists in the realm of skin, touch, water, chemicals, scissors, dryers, clips, ties and capes. The hairdresser’s client engagement is scheduled, based on appointments, and billed by time and expertise. Often, the hairdresser’s personality is sublimated to the salon style, expressed through dress codes (though not uniforms) and norms of behaviour around communication and presentation. There is a sense in some spaces of flattening the hairdresser’s persona, smoothing the surface to allow the client a safe and trusted, even interchangeable, service encounter. Persona flattening seems contradictory in the context of high-end salons’ edgy, trendy, individualistic presentation with their highly differentiated billing rates and expensive salon-exclusive product lines. Returning to Darcy’s argument that a hairdresser’s success is built on consistent client experiences, knowing that the friendly, somewhat chatty, black-clad, trendy young woman hairdresser is remarkably similar to any number of others allows for the trust built in one situation to transfer to another (at least partly). This consistency may also allay the client’s fears about the hairdresser’s ability level based on age. In an industry where new staff begin training while in high school and may be qualified by 20 years of age (more than half of the hairdressers in Australia are under 35 [National Skills Commission 2021]), the flattened persona— what Ash described as ‘one-dimensional’—could make it easier for clients to move between salons and stylists with minimal disruption. By contrast, for established hairdressers, whether working for others or running their own businesses, the capacity to draw on the wealth of previous experiences allows these women to, in Lee’s words, adapt to their clients. If early career hairdressers sometimes appear one-dimensional, those who persevere in the industry may build deep and abiding relationships with their clientele. The hairdresser’s creativity and technical skills remain, but the persona performances shift to reflect something akin to a friendship, where the interaction is dialogical, and personalities become more complex. Lee commented, ‘it’s that beautiful familiarity with people, it’s like having a bunch of friends [who] keep food on the table.’ This tension between friendship and payment was partly mitigated by the hairdresser’s continued focus on the professional encounter. The hairdresser’s principal goal is to create a great style for the client, and they work hard throughout the appointment to achieve this outcome. The process of creating that outcome includes interpersonal interactions to some extent. Even when the interpersonal interactions fall away, when the client or the

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hairdresser is cranky or non-communicative, or the relationship is in its early stages, the hairdresser’s technical skills and creativity allow that principal goal to be achieved. However, it is through interpersonal communication that the persona of the hairdresser is developed and enacted. Collaborative in their very nature, personas are strategic versions of the self that are enacted for a specific audience. Personas fall flat and fail to maintain the relationship between audience and performer when the audience does not contribute to their legitimacy through interaction. Hairdressers manage their interactions with clients—they provide care, support and a non-judgmental space for sharing, in addition to the paid professional service. In marketing terms, the persona adds value (and, in many cases, financial cost) for the client, and clients expect more from the interaction than a higher quality style at higher price points. By contrast, salons specialising in quick, basic cuts and styling are likely to minimise the depth of the persona encounter, providing little engagement, perfunctory service and dissuading deeper relationship building. Both styles serve a market and a purpose. In the final stages of each interview, I asked Ash, Darcy and Lee to unpack what they thought made some people successful hairdressers. All three reflected on creativity, persistence and the capacity to adjust to different types of people. However, Lee most clearly summarised her perspective on what led to her longevity and success in the industry, saying, ‘There’s no secret to it actually. It’s really just about being kind.’

References Babou, Cheikh Anta. 2008. Migration and Cultural Change: Money, “Caste,” Gender, and Social Status among Senegalese Female Hair Braiders in the United States. Africa Today 55 (2): 3–22. Candelario, Ginetta. 2000. Hair Race-Ing: Dominican Beauty Culture and Identity Production. Meridians 1 (1): 128–156. https://doi.org/10.121 5/15366936-­1.1.128. Chugh, Shalene, and Philip Hancock. 2009. Networks of Aestheticization: The Architecture, Artefacts and Embodiment of Hairdressing Salons. Work, Employment and Society 23 (3): 460–476. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0950017009337060. Cowen, Emory L., Ellis L. Gesten, Mary Boike, Pennie Norton, Alice B. Wilson, and Michael A. DeStefano. 1979. Hairdressers as Caregivers. I. A Descriptive Profile of Interpersonal Help-Giving Involvements. American Journal of

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Community Psychology 7 (6): 633–648. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF00891967. Eayrs, Michele A. 1993. Time, Trust and Hazard: Hairdressers’ Symbolic Roles. Symbolic Interaction 16 (1): 19–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/si. 1993.16.1.19. Garzaniti, Ivana, Glenn Pearce, and John Stanton. 2011. Building Friendships and Relationships: The Role of Conversation in Hairdressing Service Encounters. Managing Service Quality: An International Journal 21 (6): 667–687. https:// doi.org/10.1108/09604521111185646. Gill, Tiffany M. 2015. #TeamNatural: Black Hair and the Politics of Community in Digital Media. Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 37: 70–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-­3339739. Gimlin, Debra. 1996. Pamela’s Place: Power and Negotiation in the Hair Salon. Gender and Society 10 (5): 505–526. Hanson, Katherine. 2019. Beauty “Therapy”: The Emotional Labor of Commercialized Listening in the Salon Industry. International Journal of Listening 33 (3): 148–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2019. 1634572. Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. 2006. From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women’s Hair Care. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Nicole Dezrea. 2019. Contested Identities: African Diaspora and Identity Making in a Hair Braiding Salon. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 48 (6): 806–835. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241619829210. Lee, Tracey, David Ashton, Dan Bishop, Alan Felstead, Alison Fuller, Nick Jewson and Lorna Unwin. 2005. ‘Cutting It: Learning and Work Performance in Hairdressing Salons’. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Researching Work, Sydney, Australia, December. https://www.rwlconferences.org/conferences-­events/rwl4-­sydney-­australia-­2005. Lee, Tracey, Nick Jewson, Dan Bishop, Alan Felstead, Alison Fuller, Konstantinos Kakavelakis and Lorna Unwin. 2007. ‘“There’s A Lot More To It Than Just Cutting Hair, You Know”: Managerial Controls, Work Practices and Identity Narratives Among Hair Stylists’. Working Paper, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield. https://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/5585. Linnan, Laura A., and Yvonne Owens Ferguson. 2007. Beauty Salons: A Promising Health Promotion Setting for Reaching and Promoting Health Among African American Women. Health Education & Behavior 34 (3): 517–530. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1090198106295531. Lyons, Georgina, Hugh Roberts, Amanda Palmer, Melanie Matheson, and Rosemary Nixon. 2013. Hairdressers Presenting to an Occupational Dermatology Clinic in Melbourne, Australia. Contact Dermatitis 68 (5): 300–306. https://doi.org/10.1111/cod.12016.

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Majors, Yolanda J. 2001. Passing Mirrors: Subjectivity in a Midwestern Hair Salon. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 32 (1): 116–130. ———. 2015. Shoptalk: Lessons in Teaching from an African American Hair Salon. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Mbilishaka, Afiya. 2018. PsychoHairapy: Using Hair as an Entry Point into Black Women’s Spiritual and Mental Health. Meridians 16 (2): 382–392. https:// doi.org/10.2979/meridians.16.2.19. McCann, Hannah. 2019. Look Good, Feel Good: On Treatment in the Beauty Salon. Overland 237: 82–87. https://doi.org/10.3316/informit.03247 7287529495. McCann, Hannah, and Kali Myers. 2021. Addressing the Silence: Utilising Salon Workers to Respond to Family Violence. Journal of Sociology. https://doi. org/10.1177/14407833211031005. Milne, Derek, and Mary Mullin. 1987. Is a Problem Shared a Problem Shaved? An Evaluation of Hairdressers and Social Support. British Journal of Clinical Psychology 26 (1): 69–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-­8260.1987. tb00729.x. National Skills Commission. 2021. ‘Hairdressers: ANZSCO ID 3911’. Labour Market Insights. Last modified 10 September. https://labourmarketinsights. gov.au/occupation-­p r ofile/hairdr essers?occupationCode=3911#a geAndGender. Oshima, Sae. 2014. Balancing Multiple Roles through Consensus: Making Revisions in Haircutting Sessions. Text & Talk 34 (6): 713–736. https://doi. org/10.1515/text-­2014-­0024. Page, Stacey M., Anna Chur-Hansen, and Paul H. Delfabbro. 2021. Hairdressers as a Source of Social Support: A Qualitative Study on Client Disclosures from Australian Hairdressers’ Perspectives. Health & Social Care in the Community 30 (5): 1735–1742. https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.13553. Palmer, Kelly N.B., Patrick S.  Rivers, Forest L.  Melton, D.  Jean McClelland, Jennifer Hatcher, David G.  Marrero, Cynthia A.  Thomson, and David O.  Garcia. 2021. Health Promotion Interventions for African Americans Delivered in U.S.  Barbershops and Hair Salons—a Systematic Review. BMC Public Health 21 (1): Article 1553. https://doi.org/10.1186/ s12889-­021-­11584-­0. Randle, Brenda A. 2015. I Am Not My Hair; African American Women and Their Struggles with Embracing Natural Hair! Race, Gender & Class 22 (1–2): 114–121. Schroder, David John. 1973. ‘Engagement in the Mirror: Hairdressers and Their Work’. PhD thesis, Northwestern University, Illinois. ProQuest (AAT 302699892).

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Shortt, Harriet, and Sam Warren. 2012. Fringe Benefits: Valuing the Visual in Narratives of Hairdressers’ Identities at Work. Visual Studies 27 (1): 18–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2012.642955. Stenson, Farmer L. 2012. A Model for Hair Care Flow in Salons in the Black Community. In Community-Based Operations Research: Decision Modeling for Local Impact and Diverse Populations. International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, ed. Michael P. Johnson, vol. 167, 191–211. New York, NY: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­1-­4614-­0806-­2_8. Synnott, Anthony. 1987. Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair. British Journal of Sociology 38 (3): 381–413. https://doi.org/10.2307/590695. Wiesenfeld, Alan R., and Herbert M.  Weis. 1979. Hairdressers and Helping: Influencing the Behavior of Informal Caregivers. Professional Psychology 10 (6): 786–792. Wilson, Tracey E., Marilyn Fraser-White, Ruth Browne, Joseph Feldman, Marlene Price, Peter Homel, Stacey Wright, et  al. 2008. Hair Salon Stylists as Breast Cancer Prevention Lay Health Advisors for African American and Afro-­ Caribbean Women. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 19 (1): 216–226. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2008.0017. Yeadon-Lee, Tracey, Nick Jewson, Alan Felstead, Alison Fuller, and Lorna Unwin. 2011. Bringing in the Customers: Regulation, Discretion and Customer Service Narratives in Upmarket Hair Salons. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 6 (3): 101–114.

CHAPTER 4

Software Engineers

A Persistent Minority Software engineering is a career with low numbers of women. It is not the most extreme in terms of its gender balance; that distinction goes to sheet metal workers in Australia (Tilley 2018) and lumberjacks in the US (Becker 2016), both with less than 10 per cent of women employees. However, the number of women in software engineering is not increasing despite ongoing efforts, including decades of programmes encouraging girls and young women to learn to code and become enthusiastic about computing. The literature provides various explanations for why women are not pursuing a career that is highly rewarding, creative, stable and lucrative for some. Persistent gendered expectations around interests and capabilities mean that despite evidence to the contrary, girls are not expected to excel at mathematics and are, therefore, expected to ‘naturally’ avoid many technical subjects. The expectation that girls are better at caring for others and prefer to work with people also drives explanations of self-selection bias; the day-to-day work of coding and computer science, generally, is regarded as isolated and insular. Movies and television shows about hackers and coders that depict people working alone in darkened rooms, furiously typing hunched over a computer, help to cement this stereotype. People can be employed under many job titles in software engineering and this makes it difficult to see who is actually doing this type of work. These images of software © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barbour, Women and Persona Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7_4

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engineering mean that the pipeline to working in the industry has serious leaks even before tertiary learning begins. Women are outnumbered in university computer science degrees. Women make up 18 per cent of graduates in the US (ComputerScience.org 2022) and 20 per cent in Australia (Dickinson 2018). The experiences of women who persevere within those programmes can also be problematic, with students describing sexism from peers and teaching staff (Cohoon et al. 2009; Falkner et al. 2015; McCurdy 2020). While it would be nice to say that the software engineering industry has succeeded where education has not in ensuring that women feel supported, encouraged and valued in their work, this is not the case for many women. Instead, they face ongoing issues, such as being overlooked when opportunities to develop new skills and capacities are available, leading to stagnation and limited progression in their chosen career (Maji and Dixit 2020b). For others, the pipeline diverges, with women encouraged into lower-status specialities that are difficult to move on from (Campero 2021). Presumptions about a women’s willingness or ability to work during a ‘crunch’—periods of unsustainably long work days near the end of product design periods, common in game design as timelines blow out— lead employers to avoid putting women on projects where a crunch is expected. When women resist these exploitative work conditions, employers may view all women as ‘unfit’ for the role rather than looking at the causes of the resistance (i.e. unreasonable employer expectations). Speaking out in the technology industry, whether about work conditions or discrimination and harassment, can lead to being targeted for ongoing abuse, as was painfully apparent to women who spoke up about Gamergate (Massanari 2017). Silence feels like complicity (Maji and Dixit 2020a). More women leave their positions searching for more sustainable, rewarding and safe work environments. So much, so awful. But then there are approximately 25 per cent of women who persist despite cultural expectations, possibly hostile learning environments and fewer work opportunities. Some women stay in the industry as a reaction to the conditions of their work and education, a way to prove wrong the naysayers who argue women cannot succeed in this industry. Others follow their passion, finding that doing what they love compensates for the downsides. A few are supported, encouraged, promoted and valued throughout education and employment; they have a different experience from most women and are less affected by the systemic constraints that poke holes in the pipe. Many women speak out,

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sharing the challenges and rewards of their roles and encouraging other women to pursue a career in computing. These women support, mentor and sponsor emerging talent to enable the culture to change and be more rewarding and sustainable for those who come after them. In this chapter, it is these women who contribute their stories. This chapter explores women’s stories of pursuing software engineering by drawing from scholarly literature and interviews. First, I unpack the role of gender in how these women understand their relationship towards work, including how being women has affected their careers and opportunities. Second, I consider how being a software engineer has impacted the women’s understanding of being women—how the challenges and opportunities of their careers helped them understand their gender identity.

Software Engineering and Gender: A Short History A woman is credited with developing the first computer ‘program’: Lady Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, better known as Ava Lovelace (Stein 1985; Baum 1986). Lovelace was an English aristocrat, the daughter of Lady Annabella Byron, a highly educated mathematician, and Lord Byron, the notorious Romantic poet, although her parents separated shortly after her birth. To help Ada avoid following her father’s footsteps into notoriety and apparent madness, Lady Byron ensured that Ada received an education well beyond most of her peers, emphasising mathematics and science. Ada’s intellect was recognised as exceptional in her own time. As described by Hollings et  al. (2017), her education was expansive, with her most widely remembered achievement the English translation and expansion of an Italian scholar’s paper on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a machine designed to perform automatic computation. Although working in the theoretical, Lovelace extended the work through a notes section that included what many now understand as the first computer program.1 She also proposed ways to expand the capabilities of Babbage’s Analytical Engine to perform more than basic mathematical computation (Hollings et al. 2017).

1  There are conflicting understandings of what Lovelace actually contributed, including whether her Notes include what can be understood as a computer program, and if so, whether she was the first to do so (Stein 1985). However, Lovelace is most commonly remembered as writing the ‘world’s first computer programmer’ (Misa 2015, 12).

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Several other women have been recognised as having made significant contributions to computer science and software engineering, although those most renowned internationally are all from the US. A few found a degree of public renown through online and popular media. There is the image of a youthful and excited Margaret Hamilton, photographed in 1969, standing next to a stack of papers representing the code she and her team wrote for the Apollo Project (Matthews 2015). This photograph resurfaced in late 2014, doing the internet rounds partly to show how long women have contributed to the field. Through both the book (Shetterly 2016) and the film (Melfi 2016), the story told in Hidden Figures brought to light the history of Black women in NASA by focusing on the overlapping stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson. These women’s important contribution to computation and the integration of computing technologies (among other roles) in an organisation whose only public figures were, for the longest time, White men, was more widely acknowledged. More recently, in 2021, a story of NASA aerospace engineer Judith Love Cohen came to light (Kasprak 2021). In 1969, Cohen (then Judith Love Black) took the code she had been correcting with her to the hospital while in labour with her fourth child. She finished the problem on her maternity bed and submitted it to her office shortly before giving birth. The punchline is that the birth was of actor and musician Jack Black. The story that circulated is adapted from an obituary written in 2016 by her eldest son Neil Siegel (himself an eminent computer scientist). It was posted first to the subreddit r/todayilearned, reposted across several Reddit threads, and shared as an image meme on other platforms. While the focus of interest in the story is most closely tied to Jack Black’s celebrity status, the integral role of women in aerospace engineering is brought to light (arguably alongside the abysmal parental leave allowances in the US). Of course, aerospace engineering is only one area of software engineering—admittedly one of the more glamourous given the status of space exploration in the public consciousness. Although the codes developed by Hamilton and Cohen, along with the calculations performed by the mathematicians depicted in Hidden Figures, are impressive, the history of software engineering (broadly understood) as a gendered space has undergone some significant shifts over time. As a series of calculations done manually for a long time before the development of computing technologies, computing was considered clerical or administrative work.

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For example, the task of identifying and making calculations that traced the movement of stars and planets in astronomy was considered a support role even by those who depended on the work. One group of women doing this work at Harvard College Observatory between 1877 and 1919 were known as the ‘Harvard Computers’, but also given the pejorative ‘Pickering’s Harem’ after their employer Edward Pickering (Geiling 2013, para. 2). The group of women were restricted to repetitive, laborious work producing statistical data sets for their male employers. Despite their deep familiarity with the data, these women were not allowed to engage in analysis or theorisation (Geiling 2013). Similarly, early software development was dominated by women who made the machines function, whether performing calculations, determining code or deploying the punch cards and cables. However, as computing became more popular and shifted from a minority concern to a tool and technology used in workplaces and homes, the importance of software development increased, as did the financial rewards associated with the role. The improved status of coders and engineers began to attract more men and boys. The social construction of the role became masculinised as technical and complicated, requiring an advanced understanding of circuits, mathematics and reasoning. Ensmenger (2010, 2) is blunt in his description as follows: The stereotype of the scruffy, bearded, long-haired programmer wearing (inappropriately) sandals and a T-shirt has been a staple of popular culture since at least the early 1960s. He (always a he, at least in the stereotype) is usually curt, antisocial, and more concerned with maintaining the integrity of the ‘system’ than in being truly helpful to the end user.

Joyce Currie Little (1999) traced the history of women in computing at the turn of the twenty-first century: a technology is developed requiring repetitive labour, minimised as less challenging or valuable than the ‘important’ work built from the results of that labour. Women are employed to do the less valued work, with men in supervisory roles. The technology develops, the repetitive work becomes recognised as valuable in its own right, or the repetitive elements are automated, and men replace women in the now more valued role. Little’s explanation of the introduction of personal computers, which occurred when mainframe computers provided employment for men, shows this rhythm in action: ‘It is well known that during the early days of personal computing, information

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systems managers (mostly men) considered the personal computer a toy, suitable for children rather than the professional workplace’ (203). Therefore, the women of computing took up personal computers, providing support for users or starting small home businesses offering services such as ‘desk-top publishing and software development for education’ (203). However, as personal computing became integrated into business and personal life, and particularly as networked computers became the norm in workplaces, ‘information systems managers had no choice but to assume some responsibility for their use’ (203). So, women’s roles were once again minimised. The process of reframing the software engineer role as technical and complicated, rather than clerical, diminished spaces for women. The role became one that seemed self-evidently masculine, and victors rewrote the history in their favour—an easy task given how few women were publicly acknowledged as involved. Little (1999) notes that women ‘have been instrumental in carrying out computer programming and support services tasks for a century of information processing [and that] there is no reason to believe the lack of an equal distribution of women among the inventors, the industrialists, and the technical innovators is the fault of the women’ (204; my emphasis). Instead, Little argues we need to examine the stereotypes of people in computing and other structural and systemic causes of exclusion to identify where change can be made to improve women’s participation.

Software Engineering and the Place of Women Women’s participation in computing generally, and software engineering specifically, has ebbed and flowed in a way quite distinct from other industries. Misa (2010, 7) argues that ‘no other profession has seen the upswing and downturn of women that is strikingly evident in computing’. University computer science undergraduate and postgraduate programmes have been studied extensively to determine the swings in women’s participation. Despite women’s participation in computer science and information technology (IT) programmes being low (and dropping), the environment for women students can still be welcoming and supportive. For example, Anna O’Connor (2014, 3) considered students’ views of programmes, their interactions with peers and faculty and their early careers following graduation in a longitudinal study of women students in

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a four-year undergraduate computer science degree in the US. Although the students noted some incidents of sexist behaviour, and O’Connor also noted some during class observations, the women overwhelmingly felt supported, safe and comfortable in their studies. This perception was reinforced by their successes and interviews with teaching faculty who were cognisant of their women students’ challenges and worked to counter these. By contrast, Cohoon et al. (2011) determined that women postgraduate students rejected the idea that there was an issue with sexism in their programmes, despite frequently reporting incidents from peers and faculty easily identified as sexist. They note that ‘when the sexism is too blatant to deny, some women label the incident as an exception, or justify it as an individual personality defect’ (4). This strategy may make it easier for women to continue to focus on their studies; however, it also means that a culture of sexist behaviour continues to be unacknowledged and unaddressed. The persistent stereotype of computing and software as inherently masculine and that men are naturally more competent and successful, undoubtedly contributes to the lack of women in the field. This stereotype emerged in response to the increased participation of women in computing as a way to distinguish technical (therefore, masculine) roles from those that might be considered clerical (therefore, feminine), such as data entry. With the stereotype entrenched, women who elect to enter the field push against an exclusionary role. This affects women’s self-efficacy, ‘the extent or strength in an individual's beliefs in their capability of successfully completing a task and goal’ (Falkner et al. 2015, 112, drawing on Bandura 1994). Katrina Falkner and her colleagues determined that women’s perceptions that computer science came more naturally to men informed their belief that things were harder for women and that women were less competent. Women struggle with confidence and believe their male peers have an inherent advantage in understanding the material and succeeding in the field. Although Falkner et  al. spoke with highly competent postgraduate women students, the women ‘will always view themselves as outsiders, both through their own thoughts, but also through the actions of others’ (115). This sense of outsider status directly contributes to women leaving postgraduate study in computing before completing their programmes, a significant loss to the field given their level of expertise and the time and energy invested into their training before their premature departure.

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Multiple studies have identified that one approach women use to feel more at home within technical fields has been the rejection of traditional markers of femininity to fit in and ‘be one of the guys’ (Cohoon et  al. 2011; Ensmenger 2011; Maji and Dixit 2020). Rejecting more feminine styles of clothing—skirts and dresses, styled hair, high heels, make-up or nail polish—is one way that women have adopted a more masculine, or at least gender-neutral, persona. Similarly, finding or exploiting interest in sports allows women to participate in group discussions. Some women have taken this further by participating in the objectification of other women by joining in discussions of their appearance (Cohoon et al. 2011). While fitting into workplace cultures is not necessarily problematic, the rejection of feminine identity markers could require women to sacrifice of parts their identities they would otherwise prefer to enact. Additionally, learning and enacting desirable masculine traits in order to fit in involves labour not undertaken by most men in education or employment environments. Despite this phenomenon, some women do find workplaces where they feel included and happy in their roles. Several women who participated in O’Connor’s (2014) longitudinal study of women studying computer science, who were generally happy and comfortable with the culture of their university environment, identified that the professionalism encountered in the workplace following graduation enhanced their sense of inclusion. Several participants noted that their work colleagues were better communicators and ‘less geeky’ than they experienced at university, which could be translated as less focused on ‘geek masculinity’ (Salter and Blodgett 2017) and more open to working with women. One possible reason is that workplaces are unlikely to consist solely of technical staff, with people working in roles such as finance, management, marketing and human resources. While software engineering teams will likely remain male-­ dominated, the diversity of people software engineers encounter in their workplace may change the expectations and norms of behaviour that prove challenging for women in educational spaces. While there are positive experiences of inclusive and welcoming workplaces for women in software engineering, most studies identify hostile cultures that lead to women’s early departure from technical work. In the next section, I explore the experiences of four women who trained and worked as software engineers and one woman looking to transition into this field from an adjacent position. They shared their experiences in

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interviews conducted by me on Zoom between June and August 2022.2 The interview transcripts were coded using an inductive approach and compared to identify both shared experiences and perspectives and key differences between participants. The experiences of the five women are not intended to represent the broader experiences of women in software engineering and related technical positions. However, some emergent themes speak to the existing literature on gender and computing and give insight into how personas are enacted. In unpacking the attractions, rewards, realities and challenges that these women shared, I worked towards understanding how their work impacted how their gender identity was enacted and how their gender identity impacted their work. Becoming a Software Engineer: ‘It Was Always That the Entire Time’ The pathways into software engineering for the women in this study came from two directions. Three of the women were encouraged, either explicitly or implicitly, to pursue computing as a career. The other two shifted their focus to follow a path into software engineering while studying at university. Sara, a Hispanic American woman working in New Zealand and the most senior of the five interviewees, was explicitly supported to pursue a career in computing from her teens. Having tested third in her state in a standardised technology literacy course in her early years of high school in the US, she and another female classmate were encouraged into computing and technical classes, which were taught by a woman at her high school. They were supported with additional training and mentorship and encouraged to pursue university-level training. Sara was the first in her family to pursue tertiary education. Mentoring through high school was key to her involvement, particularly as personal computers were uncommon and her exposure was limited to the school environment. Sara’s career focus was cemented during high school, and she continued to thrive in higher education: ‘When I entered the four-year school

2  As part of the Human Research Ethics informed consent process for this project (approval number H-2022-063), participants could choose whether to be identified by their first name or a pseudonym. Two chose to use their first name, and the other three requested pseudonyms. The analysis does not identify which of the participants are pseudonymised.

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[university], it was still computer science […]. It was always that the entire time, so that was how I got into the field.’ A couple of decades later, Natalia—a young Asian Australian woman— followed her uncle’s footsteps into programming. She noted that it started off as an interest when I was probably 12 or 13. My uncle used to work as a software engineer, and I would ask him, ‘What do you do?’ The thing that got me was he was going on a study tour or something in Japan, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool!’ Then he showed me all the different languages and stuff. And I was like, this is pretty interesting. I played a lot of games as a kid […], and I found it very interesting to be able to actually create one, so I thought, ‘Okay, this is great; maybe I’m interested in computer science.’

Like Sara, Natalia built on her early interest through high school, learning basic programming: ‘a bit of Python, just out of curiosity’. After completing her secondary education, Natalia wanted to discover what the job was like before committing to further study. She got an internship she had applied for at a small Japanese web server company straight out of high school. Although the language and cultural barriers in Japan were significant, as was the shift to full-time work, she realised that the work suited her. Natalia enjoyed that programming ‘keeps my brain working a little harder than it wants to’ and enrolled in a computer science degree after her internship to obtain the training and qualification she needed to build her career. Leanne, a middle-aged White Australian woman, was also encouraged to study computing-related topics. Her mother taught computing courses for women, so she had a ready role model for this work. Leanne decided to leave school early and enrolled in a half-year certificate-level qualification in the fundamentals of software, hardware and networks through a technical training institution (technical and further education [TAFE] in Australia). She did not immediately use this training but gained work in administration roles. Leanne’s interest in computing remained even though she actively resisted employment that capitalised on that interest. She was an active member of many early online communities (e.g. those on LiveJournal); computing became a way to socialise in her downtime and a tool for her work time. However, Leanne’s familiarity and competence with computing technology meant she often found herself in an IT support role by default. She was increasingly frustrated at what she

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considered giving her expertise away for free. After 20 years in the workforce, Leanne returned to study for an undergraduate degree in IT. At the time of the interview, she was employed as a business analyst, performing a translation role between the end user and the software engineers who made the tools the users needed. Having been chided on several occasions for doing too much of the software engineer’s role while documenting user needs, she was planning a career shift to transition formally into software engineering. This shift may see another return to study to ensure she has the skills to succeed. Sara, Natalia and Leanne were encouraged into careers in computing and technology by those around them who recognised their interests and abilities. However, Victoria and Alina found a different way into the field. Both pragmatically chose to study software engineering at university to take advantage of their talents while providing a viable career path, despite no prior experience with programming. Victoria, a young White Australian woman, knew she needed to choose a degree to get a job, which meant moving beyond a pure mathematics programme: I really wanted to do a maths degree, but I was also aware that that’s not the best field for employability. Maths and computer science is a combined degree, and it looked pretty flexible, so I thought, ‘What the heck, I’ll try this.’ […] I don’t come from a background where you can just go and do a degree for fun. I was very lucky to get the opportunity at all, and I wanted to have a job at the end of the three years.

As she learnt more about computer science, she fell in love with programming: ‘That would soon eclipse the maths side of it completely.’ Victoria’s pragmatic choice when entering university was replicated in a more structured way by the fifth woman in this study. Alina, a London-­ based Eastern European woman, had worked in the technology sector for six years. She graduated with a degree in computational statistics and machine learning after switching from the economics and finance degree she had started after high school. Alina admitted she had felt ‘completely clueless’ about possible careers after leaving high school. She quickly determined that the investment banking culture was unappealing, particularly the very long work hours and the high expectations of personal presentation. After visiting career fairs and researching jobs in her first year of study, Alina set up a spreadsheet to assess her options: ‘I entered the industry by making a very cold calculation that I want to be able to work

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remotely. I want to be able to wear a hoodie to work, and there [needed to be] lots of employment opportunities.’ While neither Victoria nor Alina had software engineering experience before their tertiary studies, nor were they encouraged to enter the field by family or mentors, they both had a love for and a facility with mathematics that provided a way into the discipline. It was mathematics that Victoria was most interested in exploring at university, and Alina had won competitions in mathematics while in high school. This foundation mirrored the development of computing, with its deep links with mathematics. Attractions and Rewards: ‘To Actually Sit There and Solve Problems for a Living’ The five women who contributed to this study enjoyed their work. While each identified various reasons for liking their roles, the reward for solving problems was central, which they argued compensated for some of the less rewarding aspects of their work. Natalia described problematic, sometimes hostile and discriminatory, workplace experiences but valued her role, enabling her to continue despite the day-to-day challenges of her work environment. She argued that the rewards came from the creative challenges she faced and knowing that there would always be more to learn: I find it so good to get a small piece of work and then put it into another big piece of work, and everything just collaborates, almost effortlessly sometimes […]. Having the ability or the privilege to actually sit there and solve problems for a living is probably what’s going to keep me going because, throughout the years, there’s going to be new software developments and different tools I need to learn. So, the idea that I’ll never be able to learn enough is going to keep me going.

Victoria found reward in working through a programming problem, seeing a project come to fruition and making things happen through her day-to-day work: ‘You create an entire piece of software basically out of thin air. It’s like magic.’ The attraction of writing code to solve problems was such that Victoria admitted, ‘I would do if I wasn’t even getting paid for it, probably, although maybe not for eight hours a day.’ Similarly, Sara noted that the attraction to software engineering, in the early stages and on an ongoing basis, was tied to problem-solving: ‘It was the problem-solving aspect that I really enjoyed. That also aligns with how

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I got into the visual effects (VFX) industry because they recognised my strong problem-solving skills.’ Having shifted from educational software design to the VFX industry while studying for a Master’s degree, Sara took on new challenges in the film industry, working with computer-generated imagery and visual effects artists to problem-solve for animation and live action movies. Similarly, in pursuing her ‘struggle against the code’ that comprised approximately 70 per cent of her role, Alina found value and reward in developing better machine learning solutions; ‘I think the problems that I solve at work are real, are interesting, are useful.’ Contributing to solving the problems made her job better than she expected. Being able to create solutions to problems drove Leanne to consider changing her career path. Her role as the translator between the end user and engineer did not allow her to build the necessary artefact, despite having a clear idea of what it needed to be. There was a sense of frustration as Leanne spoke about working as a business analyst, where her role stopped at the point where the solutions took shape. Leanne was also clear that she had no interest in playing a support role by fixing other people’s problems, regardless of how often she had been informally imposed upon to troubleshoot. She hoped that moving into a software engineering position would allow her to focus on programming solutions rather than function as a helpdesk for her colleagues. The women identified other rewards beyond their core function of solving problems that kept them engaged, some of which enticed them into the field, particularly for Alina and Victoria. Alina mirrored the variety of job opportunities in the field that Victoria identified. Alina also emphasised that the mobility offered by software engineering was part of the attraction—she was employable worldwide and could move between industries rather than be fixed by specialisation or accreditation. Alina’s desire for mobility was not because she wanted to travel the world for adventure; rather, she saw that mobility represented the search for security and financial independence by women from countries with high levels of gender discrimination and violence: Especially in Eastern Europe, I think there’s still a lot of poverty. [There are countries where] abortion is completely banned, there is no acceptance for LGBT, and I think the world is just a more dangerous place. Because of that, you’re more fiercely aware that you have be safe, you have to make yourself safe, support yourself. You have to always be able to pack your bags and run away, and have enough money to be able to do it.

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With the training and experience required for a sought-after financially rewarding career, Alina felt less vulnerable, knowing that if her situation changed, she could continue providing for herself. The ability to shift industries was appealing, and she argued that ‘I don’t think I’m saving the world, I’m making certain things slightly more convenient for people.’ Workplace Culture: ‘It’s Just the Vibe, This Modern Vibe That I Like’ Sara had recently returned to the software engineering industry after working as a researcher and lecturer in the university sector. She was pleased to be at a point in her career where she could work largely autonomously and also lead teams and build culture. She made the following observations: With this position, I feel that I’m able to help establish good practices because part of my role is to make sure that there’s tools and process and workflows in place to help people deliver high-quality software […]. This role allows me to do this because I’m part of the leadership team that kind of drives what that looks like […]. My manager is really good. He just says, ‘Go forth and do this’, and he has this trust in me that I can go ahead and do it.

Sara was working to build a positive, inclusive workplace culture in her new role. This focus was important given her many experiences in the industry and the education sector that emphasised the importance of companies valuing staff well-being. Positive early career experiences of working in diverse teams were not replicated when she shifted to the film industry, and Sara endeavoured to do what she could to disrupt the problematic norms within the industry. The benefits of a positive workplace culture were evident in Alina’s workplace, which was supportive, welcoming and proactive in encouraging women into technical positions. Its policies and values were designed to make the workplace equitable and to counteract what she described as a ‘hyperawareness that men apply if they meet 60 per cent of the job ad requirements, where women have to feel like they have to meet 100 per cent’. Similarly, a company-wide ‘Women in Technology’ online discussion space allowed women to raise concerns or ask for colleagues’ advice.

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Alina saw this as powerful in assisting the women to ensure that their workplace remained a positive space. Although she had very few negative experiences in her workplace, likely due to the company’s focus on inclusion, Alina remained alert to the potential for ‘bullshit’ behaviour from others—especially men—to avoid being surprised or startled into silence. She admitted that constant vigilance could be exhausting, that I know that I have to maintain a level of pressure, awareness, alertness, stress, to never be like, ‘Oh whatever, I’ll let this one go’ […]. There always has to be a real reaction, a consequence, and I always need to be there for other women and be like, ‘No, you’ve been treated unfairly, and we have to address this’, ad nauseam if things happen […] I’m in a good place, and I should acknowledge that, but there’s an exhaustion that you can never take it for granted.

The legacy of communism in Alina’s home country meant that gender separation in the workforce was less significant than she had observed in the United Kingdom, even if other types of gender discrimination were more significant. She reflected, ‘when it comes to professions, I think I inherited a bit less baggage.’ However, she fiercely protected the standards that allowed her workplace to be a safe and welcoming space and to maintain the ‘positive vibe’ that she valued. Alina knew other women had very different experiences when pursuing careers as software engineers. Victoria and Natalia faced challenges in workplace culture at the beginning of their careers. Workplace culture was a factor in Victoria’s shifting from a large organisation to the start-up she worked at the time of our interview. Her first position was as a C++ developer in augmented reality, an area that she found interesting, particularly as the field was growing in prominence. Although she enjoyed that position and the work, she found some of the more senior staff condescending and struggled to identify the cause of these interactions. She commented: I had this manager previously who would over-explain everything to me to the point of being ridiculous. And I was never sure whether that was because I was young, because he just loved over-explaining himself, or because I was a woman. You don’t want to be the boy that cried wolf and call sexism when it’s not really happening, but I spent a lot of time second-guessing myself.

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Although the company she was in was large, with women in technical and management positions, Victoria’s mentor was male. She appeared to have had nobody to speak with to help her unpick what was happening with her manager. She mused that having an outside opinion would have helped her to determine ‘yes, he’s being sexist, or no, he’s not [because she’d] lost so much sleep over it’. Victoria’s new role was as an Android developer at a start-up. She was much happier and better supported in the smaller organisation and found her colleagues shared her interests and values more than she had experienced elsewhere: I guess it’s a sense of belonging, like they’re all […]. It tends to be sort of stereotypically nerdy people, or more sort of introverts maybe or […] I don’t know how to describe it, but I just have a sense that this is a whole room full of people with a similar personality type to myself […]. Especially I think in general society, it’s kind of hard to find people with that nature, or stereotypically the nerds are the outcasts, so it’s a whole group of people who’ve been an outcast, really.

The difficulty Victoria experienced in articulating what was different about this workplace reflected that the less tangible aspects of culture make the difference in many cases. Understanding workplace culture as ‘the accumulation of informal, customary values and rules that workers create through practice’ (Erickson 2004, 550, drawing on Benson 1986) lets us see that shared values and interests in Victoria’s second position provided the foundation for a positive workplace culture to thrive. Working in a ‘whole room’ of what she termed introverts and nerds, their shared histories of exclusion were a bonding tool, producing what Victoria experienced as a sense of solidarity and understanding. Having decided to accept the first job she was offered to have steady employment, Natalia started as a database analyst for a start-up in the mining industry. While she still worked for the same company—which had grown considerably from the six employees she was one of in the early days—she had transitioned into a software engineering role. Despite the company’s support of her shifting into a more technical role (one that she was trained for), Natalia’s experiences in the organisation were mixed. Some of her peers were unwilling to accept her position as the sole woman employee.

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The idea that women would be treated differently in the workplace shocked Natalia—she felt this was not discussed at school or university or addressed in her family. She often prefaced stories with ‘I don’t know if it’s just me […]’, to the point where I needed to explain that the interactions she described were all too common for many women. Being the only woman in her workplace meant she had to largely negotiate such experiences alone and develop strategies for interacting with her peers. Natalia believed she did more work than men in similar positions, although her additional labour was not rewarded: ‘You almost have to work twice as hard to be able to basically get acknowledged, or sometimes you don’t even.’ Some of her colleagues struggled or refused to take advice or guidance from her, even though she had the expertise they needed. On a more practical level, the challenges of being the only woman in the company included dealing with her colleagues’ bathroom habits. Although the company had moved to larger offices, she shared a single bathroom with the six others when she first started. Her boss informed her proudly that they had bought a rubbish bin to sit beside the toilet at the request of a previous woman employee, something that Natalia was somewhat shocked to discover was noteworthy. Natalia found the culture where she was regularly excluded from meetings—excused by comments such as ‘Oh, I forgot to invite you’— and subject to emotional outbursts from angry colleagues, which affected her workflow, challenging. She struggled to build interpersonal relationships with her peers beyond the professional, as social interactions revolved around sports and drinking. Natalia often minimised familiar (to me) stories of workplace sexism, saying, ‘You just have to find a place that you get accepted’, ‘It’s such a small thing’, ‘It’s just the cards that you’ve been dealt’ and ‘It’s all right, you just have to navigate through it’. Her technical position in the company within the hyper-masculine mining world meant that the usual office politics and interpersonal communication challenges were elevated. Without other women in the business, Natalia was left to navigate through her first experience of these challenges largely alone. Gender and the Workplace: ‘Not a Very Feminine Woman’ When considering how gender informed their work, the women interviewed reflected on the internal and external dimensions of their

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identity. For example, although Victoria did not like the term tomboy, she used it to describe herself as being at the ‘more masculine end of the spectrum for a woman’. In her workplace, she felt affirmed: ‘I can be feminine, and I am a woman in this space, but I also enjoy being good at a thing that’s sort of a men’s thing.’ She saw this approach to her experience of her gender reflected by the other women she encountered in software engineering or technology, who she described as ‘not hyperfeminine’. Victoria found this quality in others reassuring: ‘It can often feel like I’m not good enough for being not a very feminine woman in more typically feminine spaces. But that kind of comparison, I do not feel it at work.’ In the start-up, Victoria found people who took her as she was and shared her interests and experience of being slightly nerdy and outside the mainstream. Women in the start-up did not value or perform traditional femininity in ways that made her feel excluded. Alina acknowledged that her upbringing and personality contributed to her fit within the technology industry. She had further adapted and changed herself to meet professional norms: ‘I think it’s fair to say that we consciously sculpt ourselves as we enter this line of work, this industry. It does change you, although the story I tell myself is that I already was like this before.’ The ‘super low-key’ persona she performed in the workplace felt coherent to her because she also presented that way outside work. She admitted to deepening her voice in meetings but argued, ‘Why would you have such an effective tool to have people listen to you and take you seriously and not use it?’ Alina also realised that she judged other women based on how they presented themselves. She shared the following reflections on challenging her biases: I think I would have to consciously work against my own biases if a candidate showed up and they had acrylic nails, and they had a higher-pitched voice, and the certain inflection. I know I’m better than that, and I would be like, ‘No, it’s the content; it’s the work that matters’, but I would need to work against my own biases against certain heavily feminine presenting women. And it’s fucked up. It’s weird. But I know I need to consciously fight my biases.

Sara observed women take various approaches to personal presentation in the workplace; appearance was a topic of discussion across her career. One colleague chose a deliberately feminine dress style to disrupt expectations by emphasising that she was a woman. Another took a more

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androgynous approach, ‘a bit more hipster’, to blend in with her colleagues. Sara acknowledged that she elected to dress in ways that allowed her colleagues to see her but not be ‘distracted’. She commented that ‘there are certain aspects of my body that I just don’t want to show […] so that is something that they don’t focus on’. Leanne did not reflect on her physical presentation in the workplace. However, like Alina, she felt that her personality had a lot to do with her comfort in pursuing a career in a male-dominated field: ‘I think it’s hard as well for my personality [to understand why more women don’t work in software engineering] because I don’t let myself get forgotten […]. I feel like if I had a different personality, things will be very different for me, and if I was quieter […] you probably get a little forgotten.’ As well as being comfortable speaking up and pushing back in the workplace—skills hard learnt in a series of often challenging workplaces— Leanne saw herself as a ‘doer’, someone who acts rather than talks or leads. She had admired other women in her studies and jobs who she described as doers. However, she acknowledged that ‘when you’re a woman in an office, you do more than men’ while being passed over for promotion or new roles. Again, this drove her move into further education to position herself as equal to (or superior to) her male colleagues. Of all the women featured here, Natalia was clearest about how being a software engineer informed her understanding of herself as a woman. She observed: It’s unfortunately made me realise that being a woman in the world probably has some kind of disadvantage. I love being a female, I love the many options I have in terms of dressing, how I voice things, but it made me realise sometimes things are stacked against you. For example, now things are stacked against me because I’m a female, and some people just don’t view me as equally as I wish them to. That’s the most prevalent one. I’m sure as I get older and if I choose to have kids or anything, it’s going to be stacked against me even more, but at the moment, it is very much, you have to work a little bit harder, just so you’re in the same position as your male counterpart.

Natalia loved her job despite feeling disadvantaged in the world in ways she did not anticipate before entering the workforce. She avoided emphasising her femininity in the workplace but acknowledged that, like the other women, traditional femininity was not a significant component of her life outside work. Natalia said of software engineering, ‘I would do it

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for the next 10, 20 years without a problem. I find it so interesting.’ However, she clearly distinguished between her role and the environment she worked in. In terms of her current position, she was waiting for stock options to mature before she moved on, noting, ‘I know it’s not forever.’

Persona Performance and Software Engineering Some consistent themes, and some interesting outliers, were identified in the experiences of working in software engineering shared by the interview participants and in the scholarly literature that spans decades and countries. Women’s work in the field is rarely fully visible or recognised, whether in a history of computing that erases their contribution or in education settings or workplaces where women report working harder and doing more than their colleagues. The shift from categorising the work as clerical (feminine) to technical (masculine) recontextualised programming and software engineering. The profession was masculinised and attracted a hike in status. As roles within the field became more tightly differentiated, women were corralled into the more routine or people-focused positions such as bug testing, release engineering and project management. Meanwhile, the more plentiful and rewarding roles in coding and design remain dominated by men. The stereotypes of women as relationship-driven, less technically competent or technically inclined persist. However, women work in these roles, building successful and rewarding careers. The women who participated in the interviews had two commonalities aligned with the broader literature and history of software engineering: (1) a highly pragmatic approach to their work lives and (2) a lack of engagement with traditional markers of femininity. Pragmatism was apparent in the narratives of all the women interviewed. Natalia’s efforts to minimise the impact of the sexism she faced in her workplace functioned as a pragmatic approach to coping with a difficult situation. By acknowledging the practical reality of being the only woman in her company, she was able to set aside these challenges and focus on the benefits of her role: interesting, rewarding work that allowed her to continue to learn new things and solve new problems. Victoria and Alina entered university courses in computing without previous experience with coding or software design because their research indicated great job prospects that would give them financial and personal security. Leanne’s desire to shift into software engineering was based on her already doing a

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large part of the role. By retraining, she could avoid ‘giving it away for free’ and be more recognised for her contributions. Sara’s pragmatism was the least pronounced, as her time in the industry drove her a different way forward. Sara was less willing to accept or maintain the status quo; instead, she pushed for change through her academic work and leadership in establishing a positive work culture in her industry role. Perhaps the women’s persona performances make sense if being pragmatic consists of ‘solving problems in a sensible way that suits the conditions that really exist now, rather than obeying fixed theories, ideas, or rules’ (Cambridge Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘pragmatic’, accessed 28 December 2022, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ pragmatic). After all, all five  interviewees indicated that problem-solving was central to enjoying software engineering. Problem-solving, finding a solution, working things out, making real things and creating something from nothing ‘like magic’ (as Victoria described it) required the pragmatic use of the skills and tools they had. Pragmatism translated into other elements of their lives, such as the conceptualisation of their workplaces or their approaches to how they presented themselves as working professionals. The second component that connected the personas of these five women and reflected the literature was that women in software engineering often (although not uniformly) tend not to present themselves as what is colloquially known as ‘girly’. Alina weighed the fact that women were not expected to conform to traditionally feminine presentational styles when choosing to pursue software engineering over finance. She saw finance as requiring a high level of presentational polish, imposing a significant time and money burden on women. Maintaining that polish would require regular visits to hairdressers and nail salons and the investment of time and money in make-up and clothing. Alina was not alone in her disinterest in that side of corporate life. Victoria similarly recognised that she always felt disengaged from girly femininity. Observing other women who were equally uninvested in presenting as feminine allowed her to feel as though she fitted—her gender was validated in the software engineering industry in ways she struggled to find in other parts of her life. Victoria was comfortable varying her presentational style—wearing dresses, putting on make-up or trying out new hairstyles—because there was no pressure to conform to a particular way of looking like a woman in her workplace. This freedom was not reflected in Natalia’s experience, where she worked to minimise her femininity, including avoiding more feminine clothing such as skirts and dresses. As

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Alina recognised, adapting to the culture of the workplace through adopting particular styles of self-presentation was hardly unique to software engineering. However, what was interesting in the persona performances presented here is that most of the women saw the adaptation as a natural extension of their personal preferences and personality. Finally, for Natalia and Alina, biology played a part in how they saw their persona performances changing into the future. Both were concerned about possible repercussions of future children on their engagement in the workplace although for different reasons. Natalia felt that becoming a mother would alter how her colleagues regarded her. She feared that to maintain her position after having a child (let alone progress in her career), she would need to do even more than she already did, despite having documented that she regularly carried a higher workload than male colleagues. Alina feared that future children might affect her concentration, as she considered her ability to focus a key to her success. While she could work around a couple of days of menstruation-related disruption each month, Alina nursed a deep fear of and resentment towards the expected long-term effects of menopause, saying, ‘I’m going to be the first one at the doctor’s asking for hormone replacement.’ The effect of hormonal change on the brain was central to Alina’s concerns, and her frustration was directed at her body for letting her down in ways that cis men’s bodies do not. For Sara and Leanne, challenging expectations of women involved speaking out in the workplace—not in a disruptive sense, but in meeting their colleagues on equal terms and pushing back against stereotypes of women as nurturing, compliant and passive. Sara provided an intersectional lens: ‘In addition to being a woman, I’m also a Hispanic woman, and we do challenge, we have a lot more arguments. We’re okay with that. We think it’s healthy to have those types of things, whereas overall, people are not comfortable with disagreements.’ These personas, enacted variously as defence mechanisms, explorations and extensions of self, and pragmatic responses to lived experience, allowed these women to carve out a relationship to gender that enabled them to pursue the job they loved doing. They could work in a field that has been characterised as masculine without rejecting their understanding of themselves as women.

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References Baum, Joan. 1986. The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron. Hamden, Conn: Archon Books. Becker, Sam. 2016. ‘7 Types of Jobs That Hire More Men Than Women’. Wall St. Watchdog (blog). 28 March 28. https://www.wallstwatchdog.com/ uncategorized/7-­types-­of-­jobs-­that-­hire-­more-­men-­than-­women/. Campero, Santiago. 2021. Hiring and Intra-Occupational Gender Segregation in Software Engineering. American Sociological Review 86 (1): 60–92. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0003122420971805. Cohoon, J.  McGrath, Monica Nable, and Paul Boucher. 2011. Conflicted Identities and Sexism in Computing Graduate Programs. In Proceedings of 2011 Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), ed. IEEE, S1H-1–S1H-5. New York, NY: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2011.6142915. Cohoon, J. McGrath, Wu Zhen, and Jie Chao. 2009. Sexism: Toxic to Women’s Persistence in CSE Doctoral Programs. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin 41 (1): 158–162. https://doi.org/10.1145/1539024.1508924. ComputerScience.org. 2022. ‘Women in Computer Science: Getting Involved in STEM’. Updated 22 December. https://www.computerscience.org/ resources/women-­in-­computer-­science/. Currie Little, Joyce. 1999. The Role of Women in the History of Computing. In Proceedings of 1999 International Symposium on Technology and Society—Women and Technology: Historical, Societal, and Professional Perspectives. Networking the World (Cat. No.99CH37005), ed. IEEE, 202–205. New  York, NY: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISTAS.1999.787332. Dickinson, Eleanor. 2018. ‘Only a Fifth of Australia’s IT Graduates Are Women’. ARN, 23 November. https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/649976/ australian-­male-­students-­outnumber-­their-­female-­counterparts-­by-­fifth/. Ensmenger, Nathan L. 2011. Making Programming Masculine. In Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing, 115–142. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ———. 2010. The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Erickson, Karla. 2004. To Invest or Detach? Coping Strategies and Workplace Culture in Service Work. Symbolic Interaction 27 (4): 549–572. https://doi. org/10.1525/si.2004.27.4.549. Falkner, Katrina, Claudia Szabo, Dee Michell, Anna Szorenyi, and Shantel Thyer. 2015. Gender Gap in Academia: Perceptions of Female Computer Science Academics. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, 111–116. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 2729094.2742595. Geiling, Natasha. 2013. ‘The Women Who Mapped the Universe and Still Couldn’t Get Any Respect’. Smithsonian Magazine, 18 September. https://

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CHAPTER 5

Activists

Imagining Activists When you imagine an activist, does an image of someone holding a sign and shouting in the streets, leading a protest march or picketing an event come to mind? Perhaps you imagine more recent actions of those who glue themselves to art gallery walls or chain themselves to mining company headquarters. Growing up in New Zealand, the word meant two things to me. First, I think of the anti-apartheid protesters marching and storming the rugby ground during the South African Springbok tour in 1981 (before my time, but deeply felt in the New Zealand cultural memory).1 Second, the word invoked an imagined person suspended high in a tree, protecting native forests from commercial logging.2 These are two different visions of activism: the first is collective action, while the second is more individualistic. However, both incorporate an element of putting one’s body on the line in a way that requires absolute commitment to their cause. 1  New Zealanders were split on whether to support a rugby tour from apartheid South Africa, and had been for decades. In the end, the tour went forward, but the impact of the protests that mobilised over 150,000 people was significant, and long-lasting (Ministry for Culture and Heritage 2020). 2  I presume this image came from media representations of activists protecting native forestry, either in New Zealand or abroad, but had no specific point of reference—it was an imagining.

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The idea of showing up and putting your body on the line remains central to how many regard an activist. However, the definitions have expanded alongside our communication technologies. Like other elements of our social, political and economic lives, activism has adapted to digital networks, although not without critique. Social media activism, in particular, has attracted much flak over the years. It is derided as ‘clicktivism’ or ‘slacktivism’ in one moment; in the next moment, it is lauded for bringing about (with varying degrees of success) the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter and MeToo, alongside other political changes. Social media activism is also contrasted against ‘real’ marching in the street activism. Online activism has opened up opportunities for people who face challenges to participating in street activism, whether because of geographical location, health, disability or resources. Many of those who fit into these categories are women. This chapter explores activism and the role of women in feminist activism from a scholarly perspective alongside the experiences of ten interviewees who participated in social media activism or are understood by their audience in those terms. Each was interviewed either in person or via video conference in 2019, with follow-up discussions occurring with some interviewees in late 2022. Interview data were supplemented with long-­term online listening through to 2022: following their accounts and observing their posts and interactions as they developed their personas. I have integrated the participants’ perspectives, as the experts in their own experience, alongside the scholarly literature on activism and my analysis of their online personas to create a grounded, holistic exploration of the personas of online activists.

Online Activism Some people who do activism online have dedicated accounts solely focused on the cause or causes they are speaking about. Others take a more holistic approach to engagement with online spaces, using social media platforms both socially and politically. Some slip easily from one voice—one ‘register’—to another, occasionally hiding activist messages in ostensibly personal posts or using different writing styles to make their intended or imagined audience apparent to the reader. Moreover, for some people, what is read as activism by their followers and fans is deeply personal, a lived, embodied experience. It cannot be put aside into a different box, any more than they could put aside their race, skin, sexuality,

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disability or gender. For some communities living, loving and succeeding by any measure can be read as activism; sharing concerns for those around them is read as activism. So how do we understand what people are doing when they are online calling for change, rallying support or raising awareness? As Luke Pearson (2017, para. 6) notes, ‘if you're Indigenous, it appears you only need voice an opinion to be labelled an “Aboriginal activist.”’ If some groups are read as activists for the nearly ubiquitous sharing of the self through social media, how does this complicate what counts as activism and who does or does not count as an activist? In distributed, international movements that sometimes coalesce for a day or two, other times for months or years, change can come more quickly in some places than others. Change can push towards different outcomes and be more desperately needed in some places than others. Some causes, such as the climate emergency, require global action to achieve the aims of the various aligned movements. There can be a disconnect between celebrating incremental change and local success while being aware that these changes and successes may be considered radically insufficient when judged against the goals and achievements of peers. Activists negotiate the complexity of using highly commercial social networking software with centralised ownership to call for social, political and economic change and the decentralisation of power. This chapter attempts to investigate some of these questions and ideas and learn a little about how women work towards challenging and changing the status quo. Duarte (2017, 2) argues that online activism and social movements that use online tools fall into three categories: ‘collective action, collective action with connective capacity, and connective action’. The first category sees a predominantly offline organisational system, and the second, a mix of offline actions and digital tools such as online petitions alongside communications about upcoming physical events. The third category primarily sees digital engagements, networks and activities. Many social movements and activist groups that have grown in size and visibility in recent years are largely decentralised in their organisational structures. Trott (2018) reiterates Freeman’s (1972) warnings of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ wherein a deliberate lack of formalised structure can significantly affect how individuals engage with each other from outside and inside the groups. Trott notes for ‘informally structured movements, digital media platforms provided power and authority to individual activists

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who had curated a substantial public profile regardless of how accurately or (un)intentionally they represented a movement’ (127). Those profiled in this chapter were often involved in campaigns and movements in a way that suggested connective action as an appropriate framing for their work. However, the human desire to find spokespeople, leaders and ‘celebrities’ within these movements can lead to a focus on particular people, whether or not they are leaders in the informally constructed online groups that emerge around specific issues. At times, leadership is attributed to an interviewee by the media. For example, Nadine von Cohen’s visibility on Twitter made her the principal face of Hope for Nauru.3 However, she is one of a tight-knit team that works collaboratively on the project. At other times this mantle comes from within the community, for example, when Nyadol Nyuen spoke out against the racist rhetoric of ‘African gangs’ in Melbourne.4 Sometimes, recognition of leadership and labour is desired but not always achieved, as with Asher Wolf’s work in the #Robodebt movement.5 Asher was acknowledged by many of those involved as a key figure from the outset. She brought awareness to and raised concerns about the flaws in the automated data-­matching process and the impact on those who received false, inflated or outdated debt notices. However, her work was publicly overshadowed by high-­ profile media figures who claimed or were attributed with credit for the investigation. A different structure of understanding online activism can be found in the framing of digital activism. Hutchinson (2019, 3) argues that, although often techno-deterministic, digital activism research is usually focused on 3  The nation of Nauru, one of the world’s smallest independent countries, hosts the Nauru Regional Processing Centre, a refugee and asylum seeker detention centre that, at its height, detained more than 1200 refugees, including women and children, in line with bilateral government policy that no refugee or asylum seeker who arrives by boat will be granted permanent residency in Australia. 4  Responding to a spate of violence in Melbourne in 2016, a number of Australian politicians and news media outlets framed this as a problem caused by ‘African gangs’, effectively collapsing distinctions between the multiplicity of migrants to Australia from the continent, dehumanising young people and fanning racist sentiment. 5  Determined to be illegal in 2021  in the federal court, the automated debt assessment programme known as Robodebt was launched in 2016. It aimed to identify overpayment of government benefits using data-matching with Australian tax records, and reclaim funds from those the system determined had been overpaid. The system was fundamentally flawed, had a significant human cost and is subject to a Royal Commission investigation that will report in 2023.

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‘protest, visibility, mobilization, and activity’. Protest and visibility refer to activities intended to achieve political change through methods like hashtag activism. More extreme methods like Distributed Denial-of-­ Service (DDoS) attacks or hacktivism comprise the mobilisation and activity components. Networking capacities facilitated by social media increase the capacity to mobilise larger numbers of participants, allowing movements to reach critical mass while allowing for information distribution and self-organisation of activists (Hutchinson 2019). Considering the changes in the focus of large-scale digital activism between the early days of the public internet and 2013, Hutchison notes that ‘while social media plays a significant role, it is deeply representative of the political, economic and social contexts in which digital activism emerged’ (4). Like the research findings of social movement studies, digital activism research finds social media a tool—useful, innovative and substantive, to be sure, but the tool does not drive the activism—activists do. Whether those I interviewed were activists and whether what they did was activism was a regular point of discussion from our first contact. In reaching out to possible interviewees, I noted that I was looking for women involved in online activism. At least half of those who responded to my first query stated that they were not activists or that what they did online was not activism. These issues of identification and labelling tie in with Chris Bobel’s (2007) work; when interrogating these distinctions, Bobel concludes that ‘one can “do activism” without “being activist”’ (149). Bobel argues that the standards for being able to claim the title of activist become insurmountable obstacles in some cases, and only the most dedicated are comfortable claiming that title. This finding gels with the responses I received. One person comfortable with the label was independent journalist Asher Wolf, who came closest to meeting what Bobel calls the ‘perfect standard’ for activism, where ‘an activist is valued for the level of unyielding sacrifice s/he brings to her social change efforts’ (153). Bobel (2007, 156) queries the perfect activist standard as follows: Who, exactly, does satisfy the criteria for activist? Who can afford to devote nearly every waking hour to their chosen cause? And while this mythic activist is off doing the good work, who, after all, is caring for the children, preparing meals, washing laundry, paying the bills? The idea of constant, relentless dedication obviously sets an incredibly high standard, a standard of constancy and commitment that few even self-described activists could satisfy, especially those who do the work of publishing, teaching and other

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movement work that challenges dominant conceptions of ‘in your face’ and ‘on-the-street’ activism.

Despite being relentlessly involved in activism for decades—online and elsewhere—Asher (who is queer, disabled, ethnically Jewish and a single parent) pushed back at the idea that she or anyone should be held to the standards of the perfect activist. She argued, ‘I am a messy bitch. I’m not a hero and wouldn’t want to be one. I’m just trying to do the best I can— and when I fuck up, I’ll apologise. Because everyone makes mistakes and anyone who claims they don’t is an activist to avoid.’ Another person who sees themself as an activist is Ruby Montford.6 They began their public activism during the marriage equality campaign in 2017, although Ruby had been engaged in interpersonal online activism during the height of the Gamergate controversy, calling out sexist and misogynist behaviour through Twitter and Tumblr, as well as during online gaming sessions. Ruby’s public activism was driven by their discomfort with the lack of visibility of people like them: bisexual and gender queer, but also autistic and with ADHD. Ruby, who is White, noted, ‘I think most of my [LGBTIQ+] community were all turning into activists. We didn’t have a choice. It became this habit of living your life very openly to try and humanise yourself over and over again.’ For someone involved in activism due to a referendum on whether their relationships (and therefore, humanity) could receive the same legality and recognition as those in mixed-gender relationships, being visible and living openly was a form of activism alongside involvement in in-person and online public campaigns. Roj Amedi provided an alternative perspective on what constitutes activism. Roj had worked for several professional campaigns and organisations and used her profile to speak to causes she considers important. For Roj, as a Kurdish refugee, being an activist was less about a consistent and relentless dedication; rather, ‘activism can be a daily practise. It can evolve, and it can be responsive. And it can also go through the ebbs and flows of your life.’ Activism as a daily practice concurs with Jane Caro’s conceptualisation of her involvement in public causes, which she regarded as a ‘lifelong conversation with the society in which I live, about what I think is fair and reasonable and what I think is unjust, unfair and 6  Ruby is nonbinary. However, they understand they are most often read as a woman by those they encounter. ‘Woman’ is what they term their ‘grocery store gender’, and these experiences influence the ways they exist in the world.

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unreasonable’. As an established media figure, a regular contributor to television panel shows on politics and current affairs with multiple published books, Jane is perhaps best understood as a public commentator. However, she used her high-profile position to agitate for social and political issues such as properly funding public schools; these actions are activist, although her public profile was established through other means. The definitions of what constitutes an activist are not settled, even by those read this way or who adopt those labels. However, these women’s online personas are intercommunicatively (Marshall 2015) and communally constructed as activists. Their posts around causes and political movements are read as activism.

The Capacity to Be an Activist Some people are considered activists regardless of their behaviour when elements of identity mean that ‘any expression or perspective that stems from that identity is seen as activism’ (Pearson 2017, para. 27). However, those I spoke to acknowledged that ‘the ebbs and flows of life’ affected their capacity to pursue social and political change. For example, Roj said, ‘I would never engage in kind of political campaigning or anything like that unless I felt financially and structurally secure.’ Although she had been involved in volunteering and community work before speaking out publicly, she found the capacity to do more when she had ‘material stability’: ‘I was able to then think about myself and think about expending that energy because I suddenly had it because I was materially more well off. That’s when I started to become a little bit more public and investing that time. Prior to that moment, it’s literally just survival.’ Similarly, Karlie Alinta Noon (an astronomer, author and Gamilaraay woman) noted there were times when she was more active in activism. However, she recognised she needed to step back sometimes to protect her health and well-being: There are times where you are an active activist, and there are times where you are not, and I think this feeds into self-care as well. This space is incredibly emotionally taxing. There are some times when people need to take a break for their own personal well-being. I think that I probably would consider myself an activist. Not in a technical sense that I’m going to demonstrations regularly or I’m helping to organise them. I’ve become less involved in that. I guess I’m trying to embrace where my skill set is, embrace where

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I am in terms of my career and my position and the privilege I have in that space and use that.

Here, Karlie distinguished between her understanding of herself as an activist and another category of activists who organise and attend demonstrations. Karlie had been involved in on-the-ground work but felt that her current position enabled her to take a different approach. Noongar woman and award-winning author Claire Coleman told a similar story. Claire distinguished between the activism she engaged in through student politics while at university and the activist activities she was presently engaged in through social media. However, she was clear that she may need to return to on-the-street activism to defend the self-determination and rights of First Nations peoples across the continent from the continued impacts of colonisation. Reflecting on the rise of the far-right in Australian politics, Claire commented that I don’t think the far-right utopia can exist without the killing of the Aboriginal people like me, so it doesn’t matter what I do. At some point, my body is going to be on the line whether I want it to be or not, to be honest. I think that’s true of a lot of women activists, a lot of feminists. There’s a certain point where if you don’t resist, your body’s on the line anyway.

As someone who had been involved in online activism for decades, Asher emphasised the need for activists to build boundaries and ensure they have space for life outside activism. As a mother, she was conscious that her child’s health and well-being came before the work and that if your activism is public, that mothering also has to be public. She observed that your child always comes first. He gets fed first, his bedtime has to come first, his health and well-being has to come first. The world can wait. Because they will not let you be an activist if you cannot show that you’re the perfect mother first. You post pictures of cupcakes not only to prove you’re a good mother but also to soften your image as an activist. All elements of public identity become weaponised when you are a dissident.

Being highly visible, Asher worked to build a persona that is strategically comprehensive, cutting across a number of social, technological, systemic, and personal concerns. Asher engaged in what she describes as ‘identity curation’: ‘I was careful about how I presented myself, to reduce risks to

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myself and my family, while still being very public as an activist.’ Her persona also makes visible the time, energy and care that goes into putting her child first in her life, while protecting her and her child’s legal identities to shield them from those who disagree with her activist work. This shielding also included reducing the discoverability of her public presence from new audiences, for example, by locking her Twitter account. Roj, Claire, Karlie and Asher spoke of the challenges of participating in activist work due to systemic barriers. Jane felt a responsibility to use her platform to raise awareness and move towards change on social and political issues: ‘I think that part came from the feeling of being very privileged, in the sense that with privilege comes an extra level of safety. Therefore, […] it’s what you owe in terms of that privilege to actually use that level of safety take more risks.’ Jane had the capacity and the platform to speak out, so she did. She was willing to take risks in advocating for concerns and issues because she was conscious of coming from a position of security and ‘material stability’.

Character Performances and Holistic Selves The women interviewed took different approaches to building their personas. For Nadine, a refugee rights activist, ethnically Jewish woman, writer and fundraiser, her Nadine von Cohen persona was a character, an exaggerated performance that she described as existing on Twitter primarily to entertain her. She tweeted in all caps, without punctuation, and each tweet started ‘FUCK YEAH’. The Nadine von Cohen character may have shared causes and politics with her creator, but there were many divergences. Nadine noted that elements of her personal life, such as relationships, were absent from her Twitter persona. Although the profile picture is of her, it is nearly 20 years old, and her appearance has changed significantly. There were other differences, too. She laughed as she realised she talked about the character in the third person: ‘There are whole storylines that I’ve just made up. I think she’s like me, unfiltered. But also, she’s very sexual, and she’s very confident, which in terms of dating and romance and stuff, I am not. But then she’s also very clumsy and stupid and puts her foot in her mouth all the time, which I don’t do as much.’ Nadine acknowledged that while the persona drew on her personality—her unfiltered self—in exaggerating confidence, sexuality and clumsiness, Nadine von Cohen became someone different.

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For Claire, it was not so much that she deliberately created a character online but that her interactions with others gave an impression of ‘an angry, aggressive, horrible person’. A confident and forthright comment from Claire can be read as angry and confrontational, as her presence as Bla(c)k woman is interpreted through the lens of the ‘Angry Black Woman’ trope (Abdurraqib 2017). Warm and genuine in person, Claire was aware that people see her online persona as confident to the point of arrogance. However, she noted, ‘I don’t think any of us are our real selves online anyway, so I don’t think there’s any issue with being a slightly different version of myself online.’ Distinct from Nadine’s character, Claire regarded her online persona as a version of self that perhaps emphasised different elements than were enacted in person but were coherent with her overall sense of who she was. Lee Constable is a science communicator who has hosted a nationwide children’s science television show and worked in social media management. She had plenty of experience refining her role to fit that performance’s mediated context. In building her online persona, Lee initially worked through ideas around creating a personal brand that would allow a tightly focused message but shifted her approach to represent herself as ‘a three-dimensional person who’s larger than a couple of [activist causes]’. While her activism focused on social equity and climate justice (and the intersections between those two areas), she also incorporated humour and ‘shower thoughts’ along with the more mundane elements of her life to construct a holistic persona. However, she was conscious of her audience as she built her persona, knowing that her work in children’s television— and her book on climate science for kids—meant she would attract younger followers as well as her peers. Lee commented, ‘I definitely went through a stage when I started as a TV presenter where I was like looking back through old tweets being like “Can I say this? Can I not say this? Am I even allowed to say the f-word?”’ Her holistic approach incorporated discussion of social equity issues alongside climate science, extending her persona to become more multifaceted. Similarly, Jane opened her life to her audience to extend the sharing she had done in her legacy media writing. With two memoirs published and widely available, Jane saw sharing all elements of herself with the public as a form of protection. She argued, ‘My experience has been that if you are actually very open, it’s very hard for people to fuck with you because you already put it out there. Everybody knows that I’ve had an abortion; I’ve

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written about it a number of times. If you don’t have secrets, they can’t be leveraged against you.’ A number of the women I spoke with discussed working to protect their families from the impact of their activism or choosing not to share particular elements of their lives through their activist personas. However, for Jane and Lee, sharing the breadth of their lives enabled them to connect with their audiences and provide a sense of their whole lives, which helped them develop a more convincing activist message. Considering the Audience Experiencing personally (or seeing images of) large-scale in-person protests, such as those in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement against racist and violent policing, can impress upon you the scale of uprising around a social cause. However, individual voices are necessarily absorbed into the whole—this is an effective mechanism: marching and chanting in unison gives participants a sense of shared values, community and solidarity. Social media finds a different way to demonstrate this same sense of unity through the individual narratives of shared experience. Multiple perspectives on a campaign are important, as shown by Bonilla and Rosa’s (2015) examination of #Ferguson on Twitter after the police shooting of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown. So, too, Baer’s (2016) analysis of German tweets about the #YesAllWomen campaign that spread worldwide, telling stories of women’s experiences of sexual harassment and violence. The hashtags function as a shortened digital equivalent of the chant in the street, a communal shouting of the important point. However, the detail of the posts accompanying those hashtags allows each person’s view and lived experience to be shared. The combination of elements transforms the unity of voice into multivocal agreement. For Ruby, that multivocal agreement can provide a point of connection for people who are undecided about an issue. Finding a middle ground with that group was about ensuring that similarities between people were emphasised over differences, as follows: The most powerful kind of activism I’ve learnt is finding a relatable personal story to move the flexible middle. You’ve got rusted-on supporters, rusted­on opponents, everyone else in the middle. And it’s when they feel like they

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can relate, they go, ‘Oh, you’re just like me’, and then they care because the insider-outsider bias is very strong.

Beyond allowing people to share their own lived experiences is the capacity to engage in dialogue with others. For many of the women who contributed to this chapter, the work did not happen through posts around hashtag campaigns. Instead, it was about building dialogue, unpacking and debunking misinformation, or disputing popular discourse. Although this process might result in the equivalent of a screaming match in the street (particularly on Twitter), it could be an opportunity for people to hear each other’s perspectives, offer support (practical and emotional) and find solace in talking through shared experiences in relative safety. As Bonilla and Rosa (2015, 10) argue, ‘although Twitter activism is said to be fleeting in nature, it is also inherently aggregative.’ The aggregative nature is why Twitter worked so well for many in this group.7 The aggregation provides people with public profile support and a degree of safety (several women mentioned that they had benefited from followers defending them when they were confronted with aggressive behaviour). At the same time, they could also speak out more directly to amplify others and contribute to the public discourse. A recurring theme in discussions with Claire, Lee, Ruby and Jane was the advice not to engage in online arguments with ‘trolls and bots’—the popular shorthand for accounts that operate specifically to disrupt progressive voices. Each chose to strategically ignore this advice by engaging directly with the account that was provoking them, quote retweeting or screenshotting and responding to the provocation less directly. They took this approach for two key reasons: first, to challenge or debunk misinformation and second, to speak to a wider audience than the single provoking voice. Claire discussed this at length in the context of engaging with those on the political far-right, something she explicitly framed as activism. Concerning those who often took issue with her perspectives on the impact of colonisation on Indigenous peoples, Claire made the following observations: One reason I do activism online is if nobody challenges the far-right voice online, then everyone will think that the far-right have got the only logic, 7  Whether Twitter remains a useful site for activism moving forward remains to be seen, given the transformation of the site since its purchase in 2022 by Elon Musk.

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because the far-right believe their statement are logical. So, if you can rip the logic out of a far-right person’s politics until they back away, run away— which I generally do, I’ll stay on someone until they’re gone—they might not learn anything, but another 1,000 people might. They might see the faults in the logic, and that’s the main reason I do those long, long ripping into someone’s threads, dismantling every argument because it’s the only way to make sure that the people watching aren’t fooled by their politics […]. I’ve had to explain that to people before, that what I’m doing isn’t for the bot or for the idiot fifteen-year-old. It’s for all their followers because every time they lose, their followers see them lose, and that’s what it’s about.

Like Claire, Ruby’s approach to online engagement involved speaking to an imagined audience that went well beyond anyone who might engage with a post with a reaction or comment. While more active on Facebook than Twitter, there was still a sense that their post or comment would travel and be seen by those beyond a specific circle of followers whose views were most likely aligned with theirs. Sometimes Ruby had direct feedback that this was the case: ‘People who are not friends—or who are on Facebook who I don’t really know—have messaged me being like “Just so you know, I’ve been reading your stuff like over a year, and it’s really given me a lot to think about and had a pretty big impact on me.”’ Similarly, Lee was conscious that her main audience on Twitter largely supported many of her views on climate change or social equity. She saw her engagement with detractors as an opportunity to spread her message in other ways. However, some questioned why she continued messaging via that platform: ‘Twitter is preaching to the choir, but there are people within that choir that give you the opportunity to preach on the streets. I think some people want to actually be smug about it, like, “Did you know actually you’re just talking to your own people?”’ Lee’s profile on Twitter led to opportunities such as speaking engagements in offline spaces. Her diverse content meant that people who connected with her based on one topic could extend their knowledge in other areas: ‘People come out of the woodwork sometimes and tell you that you changed their mind on something, or that because they were interested in science, they’ve learnt so much more about feminism or the other way around.’ Social media platforms afforded cross-fertilisation of followers for those like Lee, who deliberately enacted a holistic persona style. Although Jane debunked misinformation and joined discussions with those who disagreed with her perspectives, she worked to amplify the

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aggregative effects of Twitter by retweeting those who supported and agreed with her. She regarded this as a straightforward way to bring to light the support and consensus on her views and showed that despite what her detractor might believe, ‘these are not minority opinions’. Jane’s approach was an interesting extension of speaking directly to argumentative ‘trolls and bots’. She argued, ‘It’s also worth saying to them, “Look mate, I’m not the only person who thinks this; there’s a whole lot of people out there thinking this.”’ As with Claire, Jane conceptualised this behaviour as a form of activism, although it was not appreciated by everyone. Admitting that ‘occasionally, once or twice’ people would be annoyed by her retweeting her supporters, she pointed out that she was a media professional, and retweets demonstrated that she has an audience. Like Lee, she used that audience to gain work. Speaking Across Issues As Lee noted, online spaces allow activists to engage with various issues, resulting in a diverse audience who may follow them for one issue but are exposed to a range of ideas and concerns. Karlie also commented on how this has worked for her: ‘What is really cool about social media is that I when speak at an event about astronomy, people will find me on social media and then they’re bombarded with a heap of information about intersectionality, about low education outcomes for Aboriginal people, women not being represented in science spaces.’ Karlie considered this connective capacity as a positive of the spaces she worked within, emphasising the importance of enacting a well-rounded, multidimensional persona. However, for Karlie and others, there are downsides to speaking on a variety of topics. As an Aboriginal woman, Karlie often dealt with tokenism. She explained that her ‘number one professional struggle’ was being able to speak as a scientist rather than an Aboriginal person: ‘My complaint isn’t that I’m asked talk about Indigenous things. My complaint is that I’m only asked to talk about Indigenous things.’ Nicole Lee, a disability and anti-domestic violence activist, also felt pigeonholed. Nicole had spoken publicly about her lived experience as a wheelchair user who dealt with an extended period of domestic violence within her marriage. She continued to speak out on disability rights and domestic violence. She initially found sharing her experiences cathartic and validating and was proud that she had spoken up, hoping that it would allow others to feel less alone in their experiences. However, Nicole

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increasingly felt that focusing on this period of her life resulted in her being forced into ‘perpetual victimhood’. To counter this, Nicole was pushing back against media requests for a further rehashing of her experiences of violence. She said, ‘Everybody wants that get you to tear up or get emotional, and my emotion and pain is not for sale anymore.’ She was ready to move on, ready to be taken seriously without having to relive her trauma or revictimise herself to be heard. Instead, Nicole used her lived experiences as a position from which to speak on various social and political concerns. Nicole’s and Karlie’s experiences mirrored Nyadol’s, as she has found it increasingly frustrating having to share her refugee story to be heard on other topics. Like Roj, Nyadol had been involved in community work with migrant and refugee communities for many years before taking a more public role. Her increased prominence came when Nyadol pushed back against the treatment of Sudanese people—and others with African heritage broadly construed—subjected to a discourse constructed by conservative news media and politicians about ‘African gangs’ terrorising Melbourne streets (news of these ‘gangs’ came as a surprise to Melbourne residents). Nyadol used her platform on Twitter and elsewhere to speak against this racist discourse and call out those promoting it, as she witnessed the direct impact on marginalised and vulnerable people. However, as a Black woman speaking against the White mainstream, Nyadol’s actions were read as an activist. Her experiences as a refugee before and after settlement in Australia became the focus of how her identity was understood. A practising commercial lawyer, Nyadol found this constrained framing of her selfhood around her past highly problematic. She felt her professional identity was ignored while her experiences of war and statelessness were prioritised. There was a different challenge for Ruby speaking out on bisexuality and neurodivergence. Rather than having external restrictions placed on them that meant they could not speak beyond those topics, Ruby had to put boundaries on where an impact was possible. They noted that they did not have the energy to ‘fix everything’ or to speak on all the issues they wanted. They had to manage their guilt at not taking on other concerns. To mitigate this guilt, they identified the broader impacts of their activism: ‘I have an impact in bisexuality activism, but climate change is probably a more pressing issue. However, if people become more compassionate because they understand themselves better, they’re less likely to reach for a gun when the world starts to end.’

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Activism and Platform Specificities This chapter largely focused on those who use text-based social media platforms for their activism. Those interviewed were most commonly users of the big, most famous names in Western social media: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They may also have had presences on other platforms—TikTok or YouTube, for example—but the more established platforms were where they had the highest followings, and there text was dominant. However, for Nyadol Nyuen, Instagram played a specific and important role. Although Nyadol’s Twitter account represented her largest online audience and was where she had the most engagement (even if some people directed highly aggressive messages at her), her Instagram account was important in different ways and directed at a different audience. She equated the individual platforms as equivalent to the different versions of herself that she performed in physical spaces. More specifically, Nyadol used Instagram to complicate and diversify the representation of Sudanese people online. She observed that most famous or lauded people of Sudanese descent with online visibility were there because of their looks or physicality (e.g. sports stars, models and make-up artists). This phenomenon limited the capacity of diasporic Sudanese youth to see themselves in different spaces and roles. What opportunities are there for those youth not good at or interested in sport or fashion to see themselves taking up in the future? To help diversify the examples available, Nyadol modelled a different sort of future for young people, one that emphasised intelligence and education to become powerful in their own right without depending on their bodies looking or working in particular ways: There are a group of kids who will always grow up being told that they are the leaders of tomorrow, that they’re going to change the world, and then there is a group of kids who will never hear that. Those kids who are being told they’re going to be the leaders of tomorrow are always going to see themselves reflected in the media, reflected in politics, reflected in literature. But this other group of kids will never receive that same affirmation because you don’t see those people in those spaces. So, I’m trying to make a way forward.

There was also a personal challenge in the images Nyadol shared on Instagram and how she presented herself in this space. Pushing back against cultural preferences for ‘long, thick, flowing hair’, Nyadol had a buzz cut to remind herself, her niece and other young Black and Brown

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women that hair does not define a person’s value. She wore high heels, often standing a head taller than the men in her photos, challenging expectations that women should be physically smaller than men and occupy less space. However, she periodically cleaned out her accounts of images, usually when targeted by racist trolls or coordinated attacks, to remove possible ammunition. Because of the high chance of being targeted by trolls, which she experienced at least once a year, Nyadol was very cautious about including images of her children on social media. She ensured their faces were obscured to limit their chances of being recognised in public or having their appearance made the subject of the abuse. Instagram gave Nyadol the capacity to diversify representations of Sudanese people. While she reached out to the broader Australian public via Twitter, she used the image-centric platform to speak more directly to the Sudanese diaspora.

Activist Personas Each of the women engaged differently with activism through digitally networked online spaces. However, the following three similarities provide insights into the performance of an activist persona: (1) self-­ identification and audience interpretation, (2) dialogue and (3) content diversification. Being an activist can be understood as a profession, a calling or both; it can be understood as practice, praxis or both. Despite the effects of digitally engaged activism since the development of web technologies, there remains a considerable bias towards unmediated, in-person action. As Bobel (2007) notes, it is possible to do activism without considering oneself an activist. That was certainly the case here, with several participants indicating their discomfort with being known as activists despite classifying their online activity as activism. However, even when the women resisted identifying as activists, their audience may read their online personas as such. In speaking out publicly from a marginalised identity position—whether based on age, gender, race, disability, sexuality, ethnicity, class or from a layered intersection of these—the women challenged the status quo and pushed against existing systems of authority and power. ‘Punching up’ marks the personas as activist through their very existence, collectively constructed through the audience’s interpretations of the content and the positionality of the producers. These personas were also produced through dialogue. None of those I interviewed saw their engagement with social media for activism as a

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one-way activity. The dialogue they engaged in—whether with supporters or otherwise—was a necessary component of their activism. Street protests can be interactive; however, nuanced discussions and the opportunity to talk through different positions are limited during marches and protests events. The interactive nature of the online platforms the women used produced a more dialogical persona. While platform affordances for social media encourage interactions with other people, there is a gendered component, given that stereotypes of women include an expectation of innate capacities in interpersonal communication and relationship building. What has been interesting to watch is how the use of online platforms has shifted since these interviews took place in 2019. For a number of the interviewees, the intensification of online life due to lockdowns and isolation periods as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a renewed focus on in-person (and interpersonal) action once public movement restrictions were lifted. For Ruby, this was a self-protection mechanism, reflecting their growing awareness that they ‘can’t live in urgency all the time’, driven by the outrage cycle of internet culture. By shifting their attention to building networks of people, creating space for others to participate alongside them in pushing for change, Ruby now focuses on building resilience and community rather than agitation. They also recognise that changes in online platform use since 2020, including a growing emphasis on visuality and video rather than written exchanges, means that their approach to online activism no longer quite fits. What is still central here, whether online or offline, is dialogue and building on connections between people to facilitate change. Because the online personas explored in this chapter were enacted on platforms that support engagement with a broad range of issues, the women produced diverse content and spoke to various concerns. The activism coalesced around a persona rather than an issue. Privileging a persona can be considered a positive attribute because an audience from one activist domain can be exposed to the material from other domains. However, it may be negative if the persona overwhelms the issue it is advocating for, which reflects Trott’s (2018) findings on the role of the individual activist in structureless movements. For the most part, the women were not working as activists within specific campaigns with defined targets or timelines. Rather, they spoke against broad social, political or environmental issues. The mediatised activist personas draw on the hyperindividualism of social media and reflect influencer culture’s focus on the personas behind the message. Hence, the mediatised activist personas

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become Freeman’s ‘stars’, ‘appointed by the media and the public when no formalised leader has been elected’ (Trott 2018, 118). While those featured in this chapter had differing degrees of comfort with the focus on the individual, they all accepted that they could use elements of their identities to personalise their messaging. In doing so, they provided a way for their supporters or potential supporters to connect to the message but also left openings for detractors to criticise or attack them, not just their message. It was a difficult balancing act that they negotiated each time they engaged with social spaces, trading parts of themselves to achieve a more positive future.

References Abdurraqib, Samaa. 2017. “Just Another Monster”: Michonne and the Trope of the Angry Black Woman. In Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film, ed. Julie A.  Chappell and Mallory Young, 227–251. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­ 319-­47259-­1_12. Baer, Hester. 2016. Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism. Feminist Media Studies 16 (1): 17–34. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14680777.2015.1093070. Bobel, Chris. 2007. “I’m Not an Activist, Though I’ve Done a Lot of It”: Doing Activism, Being Activist and the “Perfect Standard” in a Contemporary Movement. Social Movement Studies 6 (2): 147–159. https://doi. org/10.1080/14742830701497277. Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. #Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42 (1): 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12112. Duarte, Marisa Elena. 2017. Connected Activism: Indigenous Uses of Social Media for Shaping Political Change. Australasian Journal of Information Systems 21: 1. https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v21i0.1525. Hutchinson, Jonathon. 2019. Micro-Platformization for Digital Activism on Social Media. Information, Communication & Society 24 (1): 1–17. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1629612. Marshall, P.  David. 2015. Intercommunication and Persona: The Intercommunicative Public Self. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Communication 10 (1): 23–31. Ministry for Culture and Heritage. 2020. ‘The 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour’. NZ History. Updated 4 February. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/1981-­ springbok-­tour.

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Pearson, Luke. 2017. ‘Just Being Aboriginal Doesn’t Make Me an Activist’. ABC News RN, 1 July, updated 2 July. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-­07-­01/ just-­being-­aboriginal-­doesnt-­make-­you-­an-­activist/8664194. Trott, Verity. 2018. Connected Feminists: Foregrounding the Interpersonal in Connective Action. Australian Journal of Political Science 53 (1): 116–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2017.1416583.

CHAPTER 6

Online Community Managers

Conceptualising Community Social networking spaces are hybrid spaces that depend on the interaction between users to operate. These spaces are highly personalised as each user encounters a different platform version depending on their activity and preferences. The purpose of the platforms has shifted over time as the software matures, particularly in light of a more commercialised structure. The focus for many users has shifted from connection to display, collective to individual and engagement to performance, or at least that is how it feels. However, community is still at the heart of many social media spaces. Indeed, for many of the women who contributed to different case studies in this book, connecting with others online kept them active and engaged with friends, family and colleagues. After all, ‘the widespread adoption and use of social media has added to the array of ways in which people connect with each other’ (Gruzd et al. 2016, 1191). As collections of people with shared interests and ideas, communities facilitated by online media are often integrated with in-person friendships or other types of personal and professional relationships. Groups of people may come together over shared geographic location, such as in neighbourhood groups, state, city or even street-level networks of people who engage through mediated online communication and in-person meet-ups and activities. Equally, online communities might centre on shared interests or concerns that transcend people’s physical location. The complexity © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barbour, Women and Persona Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7_6

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of identifying and defining ‘online community’ has been an ongoing task for internet scholars and sociologists since the technology was developed. This complexity is amplified by the fast-changing nature of the field (i.e. technological change and changes in conceptualisations from research and rethinking) and the term’s use in common discourse. The way online community is used in everyday speech as a descriptor of practices and experiences can complicate scholarly work given the looser conceptualisations of what constitutes community in the public realm. What follows is a summary of the key arguments around what makes up a community and how scholars of social engagement online have worked through these complexities. Working through this field of scholarship, I do not intend to rehash the debate about whether online groups constitute a community. Instead, I introduce some of the defining attributes of community formation to contextualise the focus of this case study—the persona enactment of two women who, through administration and moderation, facilitate engagement with online communities for other members.

Pre-digital Community Before the development of social networking platforms and other internet-­ facilitated community spaces, a community had been understood as largely territorial (concerned with geography and physical co-location) or relational (concerned with relationships between people) (Gusfield 1975, as cited in McMillan and Chavis 1986). However, these domains are not mutually exclusive. Riger and Lavrakas (1981) identified social bonding (identifying other members and emotional connection) and behavioural rootedness (length of stay and sense of permanence) as important to whether people felt part of their neighbourhood communities. Communities are generally conceptualised as collections of people who gather together based on their relationship in space or shared interests, know one another and feel a sense of ongoing connection with the group. However, McMillan and Chavis (1986) raised the concern that academic research at that time was insufficiently theoretically grounded and lacked a clear definition as it worked to understand how community members understood their relationships to others—their ‘sense of community’. To resolve this, they defined a sense of community as ‘a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together’ (9). McMillan and Chavis unpacked the

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importance of membership, differentiated by (1) boundaries, (2) emotional safety, (3) a common symbol system, (4) a sense of belonging and identification, and (5) personal investment. They note that these five elements work to reinforce one another as follows: Boundaries provide the protection for intimacy. The emotional safety that is a consequence of secure boundaries allows people to feel that there is a place for them in the community and that they belong. A sense of belonging and identification facilitates the development of a common symbol system, which defines the community’s boundaries. We believe too that feelings of belonging and emotional safety lead to self-investment in the community, which has the consequence of giving a member a sense of having earned his or her membership. (15)

In constructing the definition of a sense of community, McMillan and Chavis (1986, 20) note that they intended to support the development of inclusive, diverse communities ‘based on faith, hope, and tolerance, rather than on fear, hatred, and rigidity’. They observed that communities of exclusion, such as neighbourhood vigilante groups, gated communities or hate groups (e.g. the Klu Klux Klan), demonstrate the same sense of community as those aiming to foster ‘understanding and cooperation’ (20). Their observation shows remarkable foresight, given how much more polarised and individualised much of the world has become in the intervening decades.

Early Online Social Spaces The idea of online spaces facilitating or building community predates the development of social networking platforms. Howard Rheingold (1993) effectively deployed this concept through his foundational text Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Awkward colonial implications aside, the idea of community has remained the principal descriptor for groups of people on the internet. Indeed, it could be argued that digital spaces could look quite different and potentially much less socially inclined without the widespread adoption of the notion of internet-­ as-­community. Early conceptualisations of internet-facilitated communities lacked the enclosures of social networking platforms. They were understood as forming ‘when enough people carry on computer-mediated nonprivate discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to

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develop what are considered “social relationships” with other online participants’ (Brown et al. 2007, 3, drawing on Rheingold 1993). The spaces that facilitated community building included ‘listservs, chat rooms, community forums, web logs (‘blogs’), and even e-mail’ (Hambrick et  al. 2010, 456). However, internationally popular sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter (along with region-specific alternatives worldwide) quickly took over. Parks (2010, 108) identifies the following five common elements of psychological community formation to determine whether a group of people who use digital technology such as social networking sites represents a community: (1) an ‘ability to engage in collective action’; (2) ‘ritualized sharing of information’ in socially regulated ways; (3) ‘patterned interaction among members’; (4) identification, belonging and attachment; and (5) ‘self-awareness of being a community’. Parks argues that ‘a group might qualify as a virtual community if its members engaged in collective action, shared in rituals, had a variety of relational linkages, and were emotionally bonded to others in a way that conferred a sense of belonging and group identification’ (118–119). Parks (2010, 119) continues that the affordances of social media sites work to support this type of community formation and maintenance, structured as they are to support communication and ‘relational formation among members’. Although Parks identifies some problems with conceptualising social networking sites as communities (i.e. number of connections, frequency of visiting and level of engagement), these could reflect the features of what and when he was researching. Parks’ main focus was MySpace, and although social media was becoming a force to be reckoned with in 2010, it was not as ubiquitous as when I wrote this chapter. Platform membership does not correlate to community membership, and globally dominant social networking platforms do not operate as communities. However, platforms can act as ‘social venues in which many different communities may form’ (Parks 2010, 105). While research into offline communities most often began with a sense of shared geography (e.g. neighbourhoods, cities, states, countries), many of the defining features of those communities translate to the study of digitally facilitated communities. McMillan and Chavis’ (1986) components can be used to evaluate the sense of community developed through online groups by examining whether group members feel like they belong, that they matter, that their needs are met and that they share emotional connections with

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other members. Parks (2010, 107) argues that by understanding community as existing beyond physical space, it can be ‘viewed as a culture, a set of ideas and interpersonal sentiments’ and that online communities can be ‘defined as social groups that display the psychological and cultural qualities of strong community’.

Facilitating Online Communities How and whether a strong online community thrives can be impacted by the administrators, moderators (commonly known as admins and mods) and frequent contributors who play an important role in sustaining the community for the wider membership (Lee et  al. 2019). Admins and mods are ‘responsible for the community’s information flow, participation rules, limits and members’ identities and well-being’ (3032) and support the development of the culture of the group through their action, inaction or both. While women and other marginalised people may experience many open social networking spaces as hostile, a well-managed group can provide a haven where members feel safer and able to participate with less fear of repercussions from others (Archer et  al. 2021). Managing the group involves setting clear boundaries for membership and access, that is, determining who can join, what can be posted and how visible posts will be to outsiders. Archer et al. (33) explain that this boundary work creates ‘expectations of privacy, trust and safety [for members], creating a sense of belonging and identity for a particular online group, as well as creating a mechanism for restricting access to the content shared within the group and also ensuring the relevance of that content’. These features replicate components of the development of a sense of community as theorised in offline settings, where geographical boundaries of neighbourhoods, cities, states or countries are replaced by a combination of behavioural expectations and platform affordances to create in-group/out-group status. In the remainder of this chapter, I explore how two women have worked to build a sense of community and safe space through the development of Facebook groups.1 Online community administration and moderation is most often unpaid labour and can be highly feminised. 1  While Facebook no longer holds the cachet that it once did, ‘Groups’ remains one of its best features for its ability to connect people, to allow decentralised content posting and to facilitate differing degrees of privacy. Both the women whose experiences are featured here utilised a range of social media sites, but the groups run on Facebook.

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These women’s experiences provide insight into how this work relies on gendered norms, including within spaces run by and for women. This labour supports the continued functioning of global digital media platforms. As Lisa Nakamura (2015, 106) points out, women’s labour (underor uncompensated) ‘is the engine that powers the internet’, whether through the production of physical technology in factories or the management and moderation of online spaces. In highlighting the role of volunteer labour in supporting safe and enjoyable online communities (e.g. providing advice, setting expectations for participation and welcoming new members), Nakamura argues that management, administration and moderation roles have been ‘feminised, devalued, ultimately offshored for pay, and borne by volunteers’ (108). The two women’s work (without financial compensation) is significant and valuable. It incorporates the dayto-day labour of approving membership requests, posting, commenting and deleting, along with setting boundaries, building connections, holding members accountable and maintaining standards of behaviour.

Nadine: ‘Very Low-Key Lead by Example’ Nadine Chemali was born in Lebanon; she spent her early childhood surrounded by civil war and disruption before escaping the chaos for a life in Australia. She spent her teens and early twenties trying to ‘fit in’ to her adopted home, eschewing signs of her Middle Eastern heritage; she did this so successfully that some friends had no idea that she was not born in Australia. Now, she embraces her ethnic and cultural roots while acknowledging that being a somewhat White-passing woman of colour gives her a privilege that other women of colour do not hold. Chemali (2022, para. 12) is ‘dedicated to creating and nurturing communities, facilitating discussions on identity, sexuality, displacement and representation’, whether through Femmo, the online community that is the focus of this discussion, or her professional role as a social worker, as a small business owner, public speaker or online activist. I interviewed Nadine twice (in 2019 and 2022) via videoconferencing about her online activity, persona and involvement in Femmo Collective. Navigating being the ‘face’ of a collective was a challenge that Nadine had dealt with for a decade. Fulfilling this role meant Nadine was the focus of both considerable admiration and personal backlash as her identity, beliefs and elements of her personality stood in for the group as a whole. Organised with a group of friends back in 2012, Femmo was

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conceptualised by Nadine as a collective designed to connect women. The idea for the group came from watching women struggle to meet court appointments due to childcare responsibilities. Nadine realised how many women would benefit from a broader network of care and support: ‘it was this real kind of penny-dropping moment that women need women, and women need support from women, and it needs to be unwavering.’ Femmo was intersectional by design, a collective designed to hold space for ‘women, trans people, non-binary people, people of colour, queer people, sex workers, people with disabilities, members of the working class, people of all body sizes and members of marginalised groups’. The basic premise is simple: in this community, members can vent frustrations, share fears, give voice to worries and insecurities, and the community will help pick up the pieces and find a way forward. Beginning with local connections enabled Nadine to meet women who shared her interests. She quickly saw the benefits for herself and other members: ‘I started forging relationships with women in my community that I knew for years […]. We’d always waved at each other at gigs or picnics, but we hadn’t really connected. We hadn’t heard each other’s stories. And by creating a space for myself to speak and ask for support or vent, that was a safe space that guaranteed some semblance of privacy.’ However, although Femmo supported its early members as a collective space, the group struggled to gain traction beyond their in-person networks. After two years, they tried a new approach and rebranded, using Nadine as the focal point. Although the group did not change its structure, the collective now had a face, a ‘leader’ and a target: ‘I got a lot of abuse. But I have a really good way of dealing with that, which is just I shut it down straight away. I block, I delete. No, you don’t get a voice on this platform at all. I don’t engage with it. I don’t talk to it. I don’t want to know about it. If you have harmful ideas and views, you don’t get a voice here; it’s just not happening.’ Protecting herself from the abuse was part and parcel of protecting the group. While most of the pushback came from those outside the group, this was not always the case. The group grew, and the admin team had to work through new challenges: ‘When I talk to the Femmo admins, we talk about this growth period when Femmo first started. We made a lot of mistakes, and people made a lot of mistakes, and there was this intense growing and learning period where there was a lot of labour involved with managing personalities and people, in explaining things and getting things wrong.’

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Group membership shifted over time, ranging from a few hundred people to several thousand. The COVID-19 pandemic saw significant growth in the core community and spin-off groups focusing on everything from craft and cooking to parenting and sexuality were launched. Every so often, the admins shifted the main group to a new Group page and deleted the old, consolidating members. Inactive members missed the transition or did not request to join the new space. This consolidation functioned as a privacy protection mechanism for members by deleting past posts and comments. While Nadine’s support needs were diminished over time, the core team of five who administered the group passed on what they learnt, building a community for women who needed it. This community building could involve sharing resources or information on social or political topics, finding specialist support for finances, legal issues or real estate problems, and providing space for recommendations for inclusive professionals such as doctors, hairdressers or tradespeople. Group expectations discouraged lurking while acknowledging that each person would contribute based on their capacity. The admins ‘low-key lead by example’, modelling an approach to inclusion that centres the perspectives and experiences of systemically marginalised women. A core principle for Nadine was pushing back against stereotypes associated with women’s friendships, particularly in terms of ‘bitchiness’ and competitiveness that she regarded as ‘actually nonsense’. While Nadine had not run an online group before Femmo, she had been involved in some community and social support roles. As a teen, she was a youth ambassador for a suicide prevention organisation that involved three-hour weekly shifts engaging on an online forum. The role gave her ‘a sense of responsibility and a sense of self’, which fed into Femmo. Nadine’s background and social work training and experience provided a grounding in managing some of the more challenging elements of supporting group members who might be dealing with significant trauma or sharing experiences that could be triggering or emotionally challenging. For much of its existence, Femmo has been a safe space for people to share this type of content because the admin team worked hard to provide support and assistance to at-risk members. ‘There Is Compassion Fatigue in Doing What We Do’ Nadine’s professional training in social work enabled her to anticipate the impact on her and the other admins of working with people with

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challenging stories and life experiences. She intended to remain positive in her engagement with the world and the online community, but this could be challenging: ‘There is a lot of trauma that you’re exposed to on a daily basis. People do come to you with their wounds and kind of try to show you—“Help me”—ask for help. There is a little bit of vicarious trauma, but also from my “real work” as a social worker. It kind of carries over.’ Nadine saw the importance of sharing her and others’ lived experiences of trauma as an educative process for those who had not dealt with similar situations. She argued that it’s ‘really hard for people to argue against someone with lived experience because they can’t. Because here’s my trauma in front of you.’ Nadine was aware that as someone with the advantages offered by education and relative social security, she could speak out with a degree of safety that not all have and was listened to in ways that not all people are. Her acknowledgement of her privilege meant that she could push back against others who did similar work but were frustrated at the lack of recognition or reward for their time and energy: ‘There is compassion fatigue in doing what we do. But then there’s the compassion satisfaction, which is something you learn about in social work. Compassion satisfaction is seeing that systemic change being enacted.’ Nadine’s training and understanding of her duty of care towards the community she moderated affected how the group responded to the challenges of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in two significant ways. First, the group pushed to diversify within the platform, setting up several niche groups where people could engage with specific topics (e.g. plants, pets, cooking) without derailing the main group. One spin-off group focused on COVID-19-related information and discussion. Corralling this content in an opt-in space allowed members a break from the information overload that was pervasive during 2020. The second adaptation to the increased membership and online time from lockdowns and isolation periods was a limitation on group posts that could have spin-­ off effects for other members during the period of highest anxiety. Facebook’s post approval settings were used to ensure that admins were notified of any concerning posts as follows: We made the decision that people couldn’t really post ‘I’m at risk’ posts that could potentially trigger other community members. Because sometimes in self-harm and suiciding communities and things like that, you see this chain event, where one person does it and then it kind of catches on, and you see it permeate throughout the community. We really felt that duty of care

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responsibility of how do we stop that happening. One of the decisions was that you have to clearly label if you’re at risk […]. There was always someone that could step up, even sitting online with someone for a few hours. There’s been many nights where we’ve done that, video call, ‘let’s hang out until it passes’ and doing that kind of thing. But that was one of the difficulties, dealing with that risk to community members.

The group grew quickly during 2020 and 2021. As the core team was at capacity, the admin team needed to grow to manage the spin-off groups and the main Femmo group. Nadine noted that ‘the challenge was training all those new people and getting them learning by making their own mistakes, but they’re not some of the big mistakes we made in the early days’. One area she worked hard on was admins setting boundaries as to when they were ‘on’. These boundaries ensured that they did not replicate the early stages of Femmo when admins felt they always needed to be available. Nadine led by example: ‘If I’m not online, or if I’m busy, look, you just have to deal with it, and passing that responsibility back to community. So that community care model kind of kept itself going, and it wasn’t reliant on “Nadine” to be managing things.’ Although the community came together to support this approach and be more conscious of the admin team’s time and contribution to the group, Nadine noticed that Femmo became quieter than it used to be when she was more regularly contributing. She learnt to set boundaries on her involvement and to limit the responsibility she took for other people’s actions in gendered terms: ‘I think there’s been a step away from my ego as well as I don’t want to be a mum of the group and I don’t want to be the be all and end all. I don’t want that responsibility, and I no longer need to fill that part of my life with “I’m the loving mother that’s caring for all of you.”’ In choosing to be less available and to protect her own time, Nadine described drawing on the example of ‘men in management [who] care a little bit less’ about the individual or switch off more easily by decentralising the responsibility for other people’s lives and feelings. As an admin, Nadine used a combination of humour, gentle admonishment and firm boundaries to uphold the expectations within the group. As her regular involvement reduced, she observed these same tactics reflected in the group as it became more self-managing. Rarely flexing authority means that it is more keenly felt on those occasions where it is necessitated.

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‘It’s Not Just Bad Guys and Good Guys’ While she worked hard to avoid errors in judgement, Nadine acknowledged that as a somewhat public figure, making a public mistake was a rite of passage. In her case, she considered the mistakes she made as allowing her to grow past being an ‘arrogant little shit that thought she knew everything’ into someone who engaged more thoughtfully and considerately with others. She was grateful to Femmo for providing an opportunity for this growth in a protective, safe space. Still, she knew that dealing with the backlash for her choices, beliefs, language or behaviour was part and parcel of her admin role. Just as Nadine was allowed to learn from her mistakes and was schooled by others enabling her to grow, she saw the need to extend that opportunity to others who mess up. She did this by ‘calling in’ rather than ‘calling out’—by addressing concerns in private rather than in public. Or she assisted others to atone for bad behaviour. Nadine believed everyone can learn to behave better in future, provided they ask for advice and are willing to do the work. She argued that ‘we need to, at some stage, allow growth when you see it. Enable it and nourish it. Especially when you’re in a position of privilege.’ Despite this empathic response, Nadine avoided requiring or setting up an expectation of forgiveness from those harmed by the problematic behaviour in the first place, arguing that ‘there are no responsibilities to “get over” anything’. This important distinction reflected her focus on intersectionality: those who live with more layers of marginalisation should not have to take responsibility for the rehabilitation or education of someone whose position is more (or differently) privileged. Nadine’s conviction about the importance of community care, restorative justice and direct aid was reinvigorated and solidified as she watched and learnt from the Black Lives Matter movement: Watching Black communities in America take ownership of community in a way that was completely unprecedented, was groundbreaking for all communities, whether they’re online or elsewhere […]. That’s one of the reasons I think we all refocused, and we’re like, ‘all right, we really do need to create community care models, we really do need to create these places that are safe’, and we do need to allow that vulnerability, those mistakes, that restorative justice. It’s not just bad guys and good guys, and ‘you’re out!’ Learning from those really decolonised principles, from the Black women that have literally written the books on it.

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While the risks and downsides of Nadine’s position were real, the benefits were also significant. She acknowledged that there had been personal successes, too. When she started a small business, she had a ready-made audience willing to support her. Personal rewards also came from witnessing the group’s direct impact on others, as the connections enabled people to get work, housing or justice. Equally, the capacity to provide financial support for people gave Nadine a real sense of satisfaction: ‘People who are moving house or in a DV [domestic violence] situation and needing some funds, and we can click a finger and raise a grand for them overnight; that kind of thing has been absolutely invaluable.’ Her sense of responsibility towards the group was important to her sense of self. Through her time, labour and sacrifice to this community, she contributed to something larger than herself. She remarked, ‘To make someone feel safe and loved and cared for is a huge personal reward for me.’

Heidi: ‘Get Rid of All the Chasers’ A non-binary trans woman (or trans femme), Heidi Le Fay grew up in regional Australia in a town she described as ‘basically the most homophobic, transphobic, racist place in the whole country’. Moving to a large and diverse city having survived her early years of bullying, harassment and assault by those in her physical community, Heidi had worked as a community support worker, hairstylist, sex worker and burlesque performer. While not actively working as an admin or mod for any online communities, she shared her previous experiences in this role with me via video interview in 2022. Heidi’s entrance into online group moderation came from her involvement in community development and support in the not-for-profit health sector. Her professional role involved in-person support, largely peer support for other trans women, and she knew that many of her clients were joining online communities. Heidi joined a number of the groups to understand those spaces better and quickly realised that the groups were not necessarily safe for people like her and her clients: ‘I think a lot of what I was seeing was older generations who were still doing that “pick me” stuff for people who are like, “Oh, I want to sleep with you, so, therefore, I’m an ally”. But I could see what it actually was, and I’m like, “You're actually allowing people into our space to prey on us.”’ From speaking with one of the group’s administration team, Heidi realised that the young trans man who ran the group was not equipped to

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identify and respond to outsiders who fetishise and target vulnerable trans people. Although she had not sought the role, she volunteered to take on administration and moderation for the group. Heidi started working through the group’s membership list to ‘clean it up’. First, she sought people’s motivations for being in the group: ‘We had people who were commenting on girls who were posting, mainly towards the trans femme community, and most of the people who were probably not supposed to be there were cis men. So, a lot of what I did was just going through, messaging people trying to suss out who they were. If they didn’t meet all the right criteria for me, they were out.’ Heidi’s hard-line approach was for a good reason: many of the cis men she encountered on the site not only fetishised those the group was set up to support but actively recruited trans femme members into sex work. Such men are colloquially known as ‘chasers’. Therefore, the space was unsafe and uncomfortable for many members: ‘I’m pro sex work. I’m a sex worker myself. That’s not the issue. But what the issue is, is when cis men come into trans spaces and try to poach trans girls: that’s the issue.’ The group’s purpose—to provide an opportunity for trans people to share experiences, receive support or advice, or meet and hold space for each other—was derailed by outsiders accepted into the membership without appropriate vetting. Noting that trans women, in particular, face ‘pretty extraordinary’ rates of violence and sexual assault, Heidi felt compelled to clean up the online space: ‘I feel like the bar had been set [too low], and everyone was just kind of like going, “Oh well, this isn’t right, but no one’s really doing anything about it. So, I don’t know whether to do something”. And I was just like, “No, fuck that.”’ The responses from administrators and other trans people to Heidi’s approach were mixed at first. The young trans man welcomed someone with more experience and a clearer idea of the probable red flags taking on the admin role. However, in other groups run by older trans women, she faced resistance. She noted: I guess the older trans feminine community, more often than not, they were still very binary in their thinking. They still believed in passing culture. They still perpetuated passing culture. So, there’s a lot of stuff to unpack around why it was so hard for me to break through to any of them in that particular group. It wasn’t until after I’d started this fight basically within the community and a bunch of other people said, ‘No, no, Heidi’s right!’ that they went, ‘Oh, shit!’ and took a step back, and they were like, ‘Well, we don’t

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want anyone to hate us, so let someone else take over’ […]. That’s a result for me.

Heidi did not take on an admin role in the groups run by older trans women. However, she was pleased with its shift towards a more progressive and inclusive administration team that was less tolerant of chasers and protected the safety of the trans people in the group. ‘Learn from Me’ Heidi took a hard-line approach to address the membership problems of the group she did moderate. She estimated 40 per cent of the group membership were cis men who were actively pursuing trans women for sex (something that shocked the previous admin). Subsequently, she posted that she would delete many members; if anyone felt they were unfairly removed, they could message her directly. As Heidi spent longer in the role, she softened her position. Instead, she reached out to those behaving inappropriately to offer counsel or explain why their behaviour or perspective was unacceptable in the group. She saw this as a way to change how people see the world and avoid radicalisation: ‘You don’t want to enable somebody to have really shit opinions, but you don’t want somebody going into the wrong hands because you’ve turned them away. You don’t want to radicalise somebody, turn them away from the community because you’ve got these standards.’ Therefore, the moderation work of maintaining the membership lists and standards of the group expanded to include education and support not only for trans members but for others whose behaviours and perspectives were no longer welcome in the safer community. The generational changes in trans spaces reflected those observed in many places concerning gender more broadly, including moving away from a binary understanding of gender. In trans groups, the change included rejecting the requirement for people to ‘pass’. Heidi noted that this shifting discourse proved particularly challenging for older trans women who had passing privilege based on years of hormone treatments and feminisation surgery and were handing down those expectations to younger trans women. One of Heidi’s reasons for engaging with online spaces and community moderation was to push back against expectations that trans people need to change their bodies to ‘match’ their gender identity or that to be accepted as trans, they need to pass. For young people

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struggling with fears of rejection while facing substantial hurdles—medical, financial, emotional—to accessing medical care (including surgery), these expectations from within a community were challenging. However, an alternative discourse could be positive. Heidi knew how impactful this discourse could be: ‘Once you can actually connect and break through to them, they’re relieved, because they’re like, “Oh, shit! I don’t have to do all of that. I don’t have to be all of that. I don’t have to be that angry and mean to myself”. That’s what it comes down to. It’s just perpetuating the same hatred that other people have towards us, towards yourself.’ The safer online groups that Heidi worked towards included practising what she termed ‘healthy vulnerability’. She believed healthy vulnerability helps older women who had previously been resistant to change. She openly shared about her transition and how her perspective has shifted over time to help those avoid the same pitfalls she struggled against, arguing, ‘You don’t have to have a lived experience to learn that trauma. You can learn from the trauma without having the trauma. Learn from me.’ Safer Group Experiences Moderation and administration of online groups were a form of community work for Heidi. It was equivalent to work she performed in the not-­ for-­profit sector (although online moderation was unpaid). While much of the moderation work was invisible to most members, the group valued the results of the changes she put in place. She described it as the ‘muscle’ of the group, providing protection that allowed everyone else to have fun and enjoy the space: They knew that if they posted a picture, they weren’t going to get preyed upon. They knew that if they posted something really personal about their transition or their body or something they’re going through, they’re not gonna have a cis person there picking through their personal details and probably getting off on it. It just created a safer space, and I got a lot of those comments saying, ‘Thank you for doing this. Thank you for doing this.’

Alongside the bouncer or bodyguard analogy of being the ‘muscle’ in her role, Heidi drew on familial connection, referencing the idea of being ‘Aunty Heidi’ or ‘Mama Heidi’ to other trans people. Interpersonal connections and family-like relationships within trans communities were important to her. She noted, ‘I knew so many people that would benefit

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from that system. I just created a little bit more of a trans social buddy system.’ Importantly, Heidi supported others to take on moderation and resisted being regarded as a ‘leader’. When she had to step back from moderation in 2021 due to changes in her circumstances, Heidi knew that others were capable and willing to carry on. Her work, then, was not just in dealing with membership or intervening when people posted problematic things but also working to support others to develop similar skills. Regarding the importance of safe and healthy trans community spaces, Heidi argued that good community support is not just a resource for the individual; it’s a resource for the whole community. You’re building capacity. It’s not just supporting a person in crisis or giving them information about a question they have. It’s literally building them up in who they are, who they are in the community, where they’re placed, and if it’s a healthy community, if it’s got good healthy boundaries, it can really have a positive effect on people's life in that everyday kind of way.

Heidi described the importance of community online and off, and the two came together in the groups Heidi worked with. Although facilitated by social media platforms, the group was also connected to physical space. Most members lived in a single city in Australia, allowing the ‘buddy system’ and friendships developed online to spill into offline spaces. Heidi saw the style of administration and moderation that she developed as useful and appropriate to its purpose. The no-nonsense and rigorous approach that centres safety was replicated by others in different groups as a model to build expectations for online group participation. However, Heidi developed the approach largely on instinct, as she had not previously observed well-managed trans groups. Her work experience helped Heidi approach the task, whether from sex work, where others shared tips on red flags and particular people to avoid as clients, or community development work. She noted, ‘I have to trust my own experience as a trans person, as someone who worked in mental health and community development, outreach, all of these things where I know what I’m talking about. I know what I’m doing.’ Heidi’s experiences as a site admin demonstrated her strength and sense of responsibility to support and protect those around her from harm. She drew on her experiences of other types of communities to determine how best to rebuild a safer online community, starting with setting firm

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boundaries on the behaviour that would be tolerated and holding accountable those who went beyond the bounds. Although she increased her direct engagement with people as she became more experienced in the space, allowing people to grow and adapt, she also expected people to shift to meet those expectations if they wished to participate in the space. Heidi concluded, ‘I just provide the ground rules. This is what is required to be a part of this group. If you choose to do something else, you’re choosing to leave the group.’

Creating Spaces for Others to Flourish: The Admin Persona Interestingly, Heidi and Nadine avoided framing their labour as leadership. Heidi argued, ‘I wasn’t leading anyone. I wasn’t doing anything that fantastic. All I was doing just putting in necessary safety precautions.’ Nadine said despite seeming like the ‘poster boy’ for individualism in online engagement, she felt resentful towards what she perceived as the increasing personalisation of the space ‘because of the personal cost, but also because I’m feeding a system that sucks’. There were commonalities in how the two women enacted personas through their roles as admins and mods in their respective groups. Their approaches enabled the groups to develop rituals and shared language and systems, engage in collective action, build a shared sense of community and create emotional bonds between members. Their actions and the personas Nadine and Heidi performed facilitated the development of safer group spaces where members felt a sense of belonging and identification. In both women’s personas, a sense of responsibility for the spaces they supported drove their engagement. A sense of responsibility was the driver for Heidi to volunteer initially and would be the impetus for her returning to an admin role in future. Having witnessed chasers and trolls exploiting trans spaces, she understood the necessity for ‘a safety guard’ to protect group members. Her sense of responsibility also came from working in mental health domains for a decade and acquiring a great deal of knowledge on supporting people in need. Nadine felt similarly responsible for group members while working to reduce the overwhelming effects of that responsibility on her health and well-being. She also worked to expand the group’s reach. Consequently, some parts of the Femmo community became accessible to cis men alongside the women and non-binary people

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who were the core members. A new audience was exposed to the approach to community care and the inclusion of Femmo’s core philosophy. The strength of purpose of the two women’s admin personas was another commonality. Nadine’s commitment to creating a more just and inclusive society drove her. Despite being run by volunteers, the Femmo group was not a hobby or something she did in her spare time. Her involvement in the group took a toll on her time, relationships and finances. Femmo, in turn, gave Nadine significant satisfaction. Her satisfaction came not from Femmo’s popularity or influence on her personal success but from the group’s achievements, whether educating members, supporting people in need, fundraising or validating someone’s experience and identity so that they felt cared for and more comfortable in themselves. Heidi’s commitment to shifting the discourse in trans spaces from the culture and privilege of passing, and away from accepting (or ignoring) the fetishisation of trans femme group members, required intervening with outsiders and those already established within the community. In relying on her hard-fought experiences and knowledge, Heidi used her belief in the necessity of inclusive and welcoming trans spaces to remake the expectations of community membership in the group. The final commonality was how education and growth informed the two women’s personas. Sharing resources and information to help build people up was a core part of both groups. However, both women discussed the importance of extending that education focus beyond the main membership, allowing space for people to grow and learn and move on. Nadine modelled this through Femmo by sharing how her thinking and behaviour changed over time and explaining the work others put into personal development, deepening their understanding of intersectional issues and changing their approach to the world. Similarly, Heidi worked to educate and help people engage thoughtfully and respectfully with the spaces she administered. She extended empathy towards those who struggled to understand or meet the standards of participation. Both women held the line when people were unwilling to ‘do the work’, to put in the time and energy that personal development required. Heidi explained, ‘Yeah, I’ll give you a chance. Once you know better, and you choose not to do better, you’re out, and then that’s your choice.’ By building strong boundaries to membership and participation in the online groups, Nadine and Heidi enabled spaces with a common symbol system; those groups provided opportunities for members to engage with each other in safety and engendered personal investment that created a

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sense of belonging and identification with the group. The groups become, therefore, communities.

References Archer, Catherine, Amy Johnson, and Leah Williams Veazey. 2021. Removing the Mask: Trust, Privacy and Self-Protection in Closed, Female-Focused Facebook Groups. Australian Feminist Studies 36 (107): 26–42. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/08164649.2021.1969518. Brown, Jo, Amanda J.  Broderick, and Nick Lee. 2007. Word of Mouth Communication within Online Communities: Conceptualizing the Online Social Network. Journal of Interactive Marketing 21 (3): 2–20. https://doi. org/10.1002/dir.20082. Chemali, Nadine. 2022. ‘Nadine Chemali: Creating Words & Community’. Patreon. Accessed 13 December. https://www.patreon.com/nadinechemali. Gruzd, Anatoliy, Jenna Jacobson, Barry Wellman, and Philip Mai. 2016. Understanding Communities in an Age of Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated. Information, Communication & Society 19 (9): 1187–1193. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1187195. Hambrick, M.E., J.M.  Simmons, G.P.  Greenhalgh, and T.C.  Greenwell. 2010. Understanding Professional Athletes’ Use of Twitter: A Content Analysis of Athlete Tweets. International Journal of Sport Communication 3 (4): 454–471. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsc.3.4.454. Lee, Joyce Yi-Hui, Chin-Sheng Yang, Carol Hsu, and Jhong-Heng Wang. 2019. A Longitudinal Study of Leader Influence in Sustaining an Online Community. Information & Management 56 (2): 306–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. im.2018.10.008. McMillan, David, and David Chavis. 1986. Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory. Journal of Community Psychology 14 (1): 6–23. 10.1002/ 1520-6629(198601)14:1%3C6::AID-­JCOP2290140103%3E3.0.CO;2-I. Nakamura, Lisa. 2015. The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Colour Call Out Culture as Venture Community Management. New Formations 86 (86): 106–112. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.86.06.2015. Parks, Malcolm R. 2010. Social Network Sites as Virtual Communities. In A Networked Self, ed. Zizi Papacharissi. New York, NY: Routledge. Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing. Riger, Stephanie, and Paul J.  Lavrakas. 1981. Community Ties: Patterns of Attachment and Social Interaction in Urban Neighborhoods. American Journal of Community Psychology 9 (1): 55–66.

CHAPTER 7

Minecraft YouTubers

—WhatsApp conversation between author and neighbour, 30 January 2021

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barbour, Women and Persona Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7_7

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Finding Minecraft YouTube It is late summer 2021, and my then six-year-old daughter is at our neighbour’s house for a play date. Having exhausted their interest in building Lego, the two girls moved to screen entertainment, first playing Minecraft: Story Mode on the XBox, before shifting into Minecraft proper. The two older children (a 9-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy) explained the basics and supported my daughter to start playing. The collaborative game mechanics allowed the three children to play together across separate devices. Tablets, a console and a laptop were used as she was inducted into the world of mining and crafting. Not having an account, my daughter played utilising the mother’s avatar. My daughter was familiar with Minecraft from watching friends’ gameplay, seeing merchandise in stores and, importantly, viewing Minecraft-­ related content on YouTube. In early February, she was successful in her campaign to obtain a copy of the game for her tablet. Her father and I established some boundaries (e.g. no using chat on public servers, showing us anything weird or upsetting immediately and supervised playtime). Then we quietly hoped that would end our involvement, provided we facilitated gaming play dates with her friends. As South Australia was gripped by our first significant community spread of COVID-19 through 2021, digital Minecraft play dates mediated by video chat on a second device helped break the monotony of short isolation periods and time away from school for other illnesses. The kids planned their worlds together, showed off their builds, explored public servers and asked and gave each other advice. The game was a space to socialise, whether physically separated or not. I am sure it was an experience of the pandemic shared with millions of other (economically privileged) children worldwide. Minecraft is, after all, the most-played digital game on the planet. However, the experience was always about more than the game. Although there are some instructions on what to do, most people learn to play by watching Let’s Play (LP) videos on YouTube, where Minecraft is consistently among the most watched games on the platform (Hjorth et al. 2020; Clement 2021). Hjorth et al. (2020, xi) define Minecraft LP videos as ‘documentation of a videogame playthrough with commentary’. Minecraft video content ranges from scripted narratives told machinima-­ style, to detailed tutorials on building architecture or Redstone contraptions, to recordings of competitions and speedruns, to incredibly complex

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transmedia stories across multiple channels and creators. While my daughter happily watched almost any of these genres of Minecraft content, it was the last group that caught and held her attention. Through these videos, she slowly drew her parents into the Minecraft world. By early 2022, my husband and I had personal accounts and Minecraft worlds. The cross-platform play enabled us to join across multiple devices (I on a laptop, my partner on his XBox and our daughter on her tablet). Our whole family played simultaneously, if rarely in the same world, and gameplay time was complemented by LP time. Our daughter initially focused on LDShadowLady, a young British woman named Lizzie who built fabulous pink Disney-inspired castles, favoured colour-saturated texture packs and leaned into a kawaii aesthetic. My husband, fascinated by the engineering side, sought YouTube tutorials on Redstone contraptions and automatic farms. His research led him to Mumbo Jumbo, where a dig into the channel’s catalogue led us to the Hermitcraft LP world. The storytelling and multiple narratives in Minecraft Survival Multiplayer (SMP) servers attracted me as an audience member and media scholar. We worked our way through several seasons of Hermitcraft, watching content from multiple YouTubers’ perspectives. Three seasons of the Life series followed (confusingly titled Last Life, Third Life and Double Life). At the same time, our daughter repeatedly watched content from the Empires SMP, both the original series and the 40-minute musical machinima version. In October 2022, we geeked out together as Hermitcraft players shifted to the world of Empires (Season 2), then reciprocated as members of Empires visited the Hermitcraft server. This crossover brought together some of our favourite content creators. These parts of gaming YouTube felt wholesome in a way I had not found elsewhere. It was the kind of content I was comfortable allowing my daughter to watch largely unsupervised, as the emphasis was on light-hearted fun, collaboration and creativity. In this case study chapter, I unpack how gender has informed the performance of the personas inhabited by the women of Minecraft YouTube. Women are the minority of creators; few have risen to the popularity (based on the number of subscribers) of the men who dominate the platform. My initial impressions were of videos featuring cute and colourful builds and highly saturated texture packs. Those that used game mods seemed to incorporate markers of girly femininity—unicorns, flowers, animal care—while squeals of surprise illustrated a girly fear of ‘scary’ things such as the hellscape-style Nether dimension. This content style seemed to

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function as a deliberate feminisation of a fantasy world built around cubes, mining, construction and engineering. To explore my initial thoughts, the object of my fandom became the object of my research. The remainder of this chapter has three sections. First, I consider the literature on LP videos as a performance space, reviewing the existing scholarship on Minecraft as a game and space for identity production. I also consider the literature on women as gaming content producers. Here, I argue that a series of distinctions can be made between the YouTuber as a person, the persona presented through the YouTuber’s content and the character performed through different LP videos. Turning to the videos, I discuss the findings of a textual analysis of the character personas performed by women Minecraft YouTubers involved in high-profile SMPs. This analysis focuses primarily on the third component, the character presented in the videos. Finally, I present a Minecraft YouTuber’s account drawn from an interview conducted in August 2022. The YouTuber explored all three components of their persona in this interview: the person, the YouTuber persona and the character. Per ethics approvals and at the participant’s request, this account was de-identified. In concluding the chapter, I reflect on the interaction between character, persona, identity and game that emerged through the relationship between this case study and gender.

Theorising Minecraft Let’s Plays LP videos have been integral to players learning Minecraft, particularly because the game largely avoided instructional content such as in-game tutorials for many years (Dezuanni 2020; Hjorth et al. 2020) even if in-­ game tips, help pages, numerous official and unofficial books and other resources are now available. However, when players want to learn how to complete certain tasks, improve their building skills or know what is possible in the game, they often turn to platforms such as YouTube, Reddit, wikis and Discord. On those sites, skilled players share tutorials, show off their builds and, particularly on YouTube, produce episodic narrative-style video series of themselves playing with friends such as those that my family consume. Some of these narrative series are pure machinima, with the players immersed in the diegetic world they are producing, replicating serialised storytelling modes from television and film but with in-game footage providing the visuals. In other series, the players use direct address, presenting vlog-style with or without a facecam embedded in the

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recording, as they deliberately bring the viewer into the story. This content is encouraged by Mojang, the company that produces Minecraft. As a ‘particularly non-litigious’ company, Mojang has ‘recognized the value in allowing “the community” to use their platform to produce and monetize content across other platforms’ such as YouTube (Dezuanni 2020, 40). The content producers who gained a particularly significant following could support themselves from their content and became drawcards at Minecraft and YouTube conventions, with some becoming full-time, professional Minecraft players. Although LP videos involve gameplay, the range of formats necessitates different types of skills and performances from the player or content producer. While some YouTubers use editors and producers to fine-tune their videos, others take on these tasks themselves, becoming one-person media production studios. Dezuanni (2020, 32) argues that unlike ‘walk-­ throughs’—guides that show a player how to complete or win a game—or similar didactic formats, LPs are ‘more focused on immersion and gameplay fun’. However, LPs are distinct from machinima, as a ‘significant part of the appeal of Let’s Plays is that the recorded commentary is often humorous and potentially informative’ (Dezuanni 2020, 32, drawing on Glas 2015), and is driven by the YouTuber persona. Therefore, the YouTubers are central to the success of the LPs, and their performance style, narrative choices, personality and views on the game becomes central to the videos’ attraction. Equally and importantly, the collaborations that YouTubers develop through their series enable complex and interesting narratives and function as a tool for audience building. In his exploration of the Minecraft YouTuber StacyPlays, Dezuanni argues that ‘YouTubers support each other to build a subscriber base’ (103) and leverage their friendships and each other’s popularity to boost their audience numbers and potential revenue streams. For this reason, gaining a space on one of the leading SMP series can be important to a YouTuber’s success. The endorsement of established players through collaborative storytelling provide ways to build audience numbers. Views and subscribers can be monetised through YouTube AdSense revenue (Dezuanni 2020, 40) or similar processes on other platforms such as Twitch, as well as through merchandising and sites such as Patreon. In his exploration of LPs as fan texts, Nguyen (2016) suggests that, rather than sharing the player’s interiority, LPs offer ‘constructions and performances of playing personalities’ (para. 3.2). Additionally, ‘Let’s Plays value personality over mastery, although demonstrations of mastery

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might serve to construct a Let’s Player’s personality’ (para. 2.10). In the context of Minecraft LPs, YouTubers demonstrate mastery as they build fantastical structures and contraptions in the game. The style of their builds and how they perform their on-screen characters through narration, direct address to the audience, interaction with other players in-game and the use of mods, texture packs or shaders contribute to their personas. YouTubers must deal with gameplay mistakes (i.e. errors in builds, unexpected player deaths, contraption failure). They also share what Nguyen terms ‘expressive reactions’; jump scares and near-misses are not uncommon in gameplay, and the player reactions to these through shrieks, squeals and shouts give a sense of liveness and authenticity to the character enacted on screen. Similarly, shifts between gameplay with live narration or dialogue and footage with narration overlaid after the fact contribute to the sense of the in-game character and the YouTuber persona (e.g. time-lapse format to show the progress of repetitive or tedious gameplay such as resource collection or large-scale building). YouTubers will often play across multiple games; within Minecraft, they will also  play in multiple series and worlds. Therefore, I argue that it is necessary to distinguish between three distinct identity components. The character, embodied in-game by an avatar, is the first and can change between series and server within the Minecraft universe. Character ‘skins’ and names can vary, as can characteristics such as in-world competency or relationships to other players to develop the SMPs diegetic world. This character is brought to life by the YouTuber persona, who ‘plays’ the character through voice and action while they play the game, developing the narrative through the character’s development. This YouTuber persona is the second level of identity performed in this space; it is produced through the channel across LPs, game titles, vlogs and characters. However, as Nguyen (2016) argues, the player personality presented through the YouTuber persona is also a strategic performance; for those who are (or seek to become) content producers as a career, it is enacted through the platform as a professional identity performance. That strategic persona performance needs to feel ‘authentic’ to connect with the audience and emphasise desirable and distinctive features while minimising or eliding those parts of the self (the third identity component encompassing roles enacted outside of YouTube) that would be detrimental to the YouTuber persona.

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Minecraft and Gender Minecraft creator Marcus Pearson, aka Notch, declared on Tumblr in 2012 that ‘gender doesn’t exist’ in the game (as cited in Hjorth et  al. 2020, 116). Despite this claim, there are gendered components to the default skin designs. The first default character was ‘Steve’, whose design included the suggestion of facial hair, which along with the character name, marked him as a man. Steve was joined in 2014 by the ‘Alex’ character, whose orange ponytail, marginally lower neckline and suggestion of a waist (through a belt and a couple of pixels of shading on her top) marked her to be read as a woman. Players are randomly allocated their default character when they first launch the game, regardless of the details they include in the account set-up process. In my home, I was allocated Steve, and my husband allocated Alex. The only difference between the two characters is their appearance—no abilities or special traits are associated with either skin. However, players have immediate access to a ‘dressing room’ (at least in Bedrock edition), where hair length, style and colour, facial features, skin tone, clothing, body size and fixed accessories such as scarves or glasses can be adapted. While the skin design options are not labelled by gender, and the most problematic elements of gendering characters in video games (such as exaggerated muscles or breasts) are minimised by the blocky aesthetic, many choices can be understood in gendered terms. It is possible to produce a character outside binary gender norms and non-human skins can be downloaded from external sites. However, the default choices produce varieties of humans starting from two beginnings,1 a brown-skinned man named Steve and a pale-skinned woman named Alex. While the characters are interchangeable in terms of their abilities, gender influences play style and engagement with Minecraft. Hjorth et  al. (2020, 116) argue, ‘it is clear that boys and girls experience the game differently in ways that are complexly intervolved with age, and cultural perceptions of attitudes and behaviour specific to gender.’ They also note that young girls and boys are involved with the game at different rates depending on age; boys are dominant until about age nine, while girls dominate over the age of eleven. The difference in player numbers makes the gender discrepancy in YouTubers significant, with many more men making content and gaining traction with viewers than women. For example, of the 1  The Minecraft 1.20 update, released on 7 June 2023, included seven new default characters. They are designed to represent a range of race and gender identities (Morton 2022).

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27 participants in Season 9 of the Hermitcraft SMP (launched in March 2022), only five of the characters are women. Similarly, there are no notable women YouTubers making content focusing on Redstone contraptions or recognised as top fighters (known as player versus player or PvP). Instead, men dominate the lists of popular, prolific, most subscribed or talented Redstoners and PvPers. The most popular women are builders and storytellers, and most are explicitly child-friendly. The gender discrepancy in top creators is acknowledged by YouTube, which reflected on the role of women in Minecraft content creation in a 2021 article. The piece commented that ‘female creators have played a significant role in the [YouTube] community since its earliest days’ but only named three such creators: Aphmau, iHasCupquake and Lydia Winters (aka MinecraftChick) (YouTube Culture and Trends 2021). Speaking about the male domination of online content generally, Winters reflected in her interview for the piece that the early days of gaming YouTube were unpleasant. She was accused of attention seeking by including her face in videos—now a commonplace practice for many streamers and content creators. She noted that the negative and obnoxious comments on her videos were highly problematic. Moreover, male creators did not encounter the level of abuse targeted at her: ‘As women, online harassment and horrible comments are so commonplace, you try not to dwell on them too much. Now I speak up about it more because it’s good for male creators to understand how different it is to be a woman online’ (Winters, quoted in YouTube Culture and Trends 2021). Winters’s experiences reflected those of the broader gaming community. Harrison et al. (2016, 53) found ‘in the masculine-oriented gaming environment, gamer girls are highly sexualized and viewed as imposters by the gaming community’. The stereotypes that represent girls and women as imposters and inauthentic members of gaming communities ‘contribute to an environment wherein female gamers are harassed, abused, and disrespected’ (55). Salter and Blodgett (2012, 403) argue that stereotypes extend to the types of games women play. The dominant discourse constructs ‘women as casual gamers, found in social game communities such as Words With Friends or Farmville’. These types of games are less valued within the gaming community than the games traditionally associated with male players.

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Gendered Performances: Women on Minecraft While the game itself may not enforce gender norms or presentation onto player behaviour, there are notable components of women YouTubers’ performances and play styles that reflect wider sociocultural norms associated with gender. Women YouTubers exhibit less engagement with the technical or engineering side of gaming through Redstone contraption building (reflecting how women are less likely to participate in engineering, as described in Chap. 4). There is also a tendency towards a more ‘girly’ build style and a focus on story development that reflects stereotypical feminine behaviour. In his analysis of YouTuber StacyPlays, Dezuanni (2020, 111) describes her persona as follows: The StacyPlays persona is normatively feminine, caring, and maternal. In this sense, she represents as a cool mom or aunt who plays Minecraft. She is fun but acts responsibly. Her language is casual and peppered with a tempered version of Valleyspeak slang, using phrases such as, ‘oh my God,’ ‘this is amazing,’ ‘cool,’ and ‘aww,’ and she often uses uptalk, with a rising inflection at the end of sentences. This includes the occasional use of ‘girly’ phrases such as ‘Isn’t this cute?’ and ‘That would be pretty’, and she sometimes screams or ‘squeals’ when something fun or scary happens.

Textual analysis of LP videos of established and up-and-coming women on Minecraft YouTube shows that the normative femininity Dezuanni (2020) observed in StacyPlay’s content is a part of the personas developed by many women YouTubers (see Table  7.1). Although YouTubers may have public identities outside their characters (e.g. LDShadowLady is enacted by Lizzie), my analysis pertains to the character enacted in the video, and I use their in-game name only. For comparability between the analyses, I chose videos with a run-time of 20–30 minutes (the average for the genre), posted between 2020 and 2022, and included elements of either collaborative performance (i.e. the YouTuber interacted with other players in a multiplayer world) or direct address. The videos were accessed via the YouTubers’ main channels and received a high number of views for the channel. Where many videos met these baseline criteria, I selected the most popular example of the type on the channel. The analysis included the following:

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Table 7.1  LP videos analysed YouTuber Name

Video Title

Date Posted

Aphmau

Using HACKS To Cheat In Minecraft Hide N’ Seek! I Spent 100 Days in Minecraft Skyblock … Decorating My House! Craftin’ w/Katherine S2 Ep. 2 100 Days in a Minecraft World

8 January 2021 5 April 2021 26 April 2020

GeminiTay Katherine Elizabeth LDShadowLady PearlescentMoon

Hermitcraft S8: The MEGA-GIGA Boatem Base Beginnings! | Episode 7 Shubble Empires SMP #1 | A NEW EMPIRE EMERGES Strawburry17Plays The NEW Mushroom Queen! | Minecraft Afterlife SMP | Ep 1 StressMonster101 Hermitcraft 7: 36: I FELL DOWN TO THE RESISTANCE… ZombieCleo HERMIT ARENA BATTLE – 10 – Hermitcraft – Season 7

31 January 2021 2 August 2021 21 July 2021 5 March 2022 17 October 2020 12 April 2020

• character skin designs;2 • elements of voice such as pitch, intonation and speed, and non-­ lingual vocalisations such as squeals and laughs; • language features such as slang, jargon, self-deprecation or self-­ praise, adjective and pronoun use, and direct address to the viewers; • storytelling elements such as plot points, episode focus, intro and outro style, and interactions with other players and non-player characters (NPCs); • audiovisual elements such as editing style, VFX, sound design, use of texture packs and facecam; • demonstration of gameplay such as building, fighting, Redstone and play mode (e.g. creative/survival, vanilla/modded); • branding components such as title sequences, end cards, profile pictures and theme music; and • additional notes on the video. 2  Players can toggle from a first-person view, to a third-person view following behind the character, to a front-on third-person view. Many YouTubers use the front-on third-person view to address the audience, showing their full avatar, moving the ‘camera’ around and manipulating the avatar to gesture, walk, jump or crouch as they speak. Minecraft character faces do not have animations (mouth movements, blinking etc.), so this body movement gives a sense of life and engagement to the character skins.

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Although various stories, build styles and play modes were represented in the videos, the women often displayed normative and heteronormative femininity. All character skins incorporated signs of femininity such as long hair, oversized eyes and gendered clothing like skirts or dresses. For example, LDShadowLady’s character has pale skin, waist-length pink hair and oversized blue eyes. The character wears a blue and white ‘sailor suit’ reminiscent of Sailor Moon, complete with a short skirt and wide-collared shirt. Aphmau—the top woman Minecraft YouTuber in terms of subscriber numbers—used a skin with dark hair reaching to mid-chest in the front, oversized brown eyes and tanned skin. Aphmau’s clothing included a white, midriff-baring bandeau top under a purple off-the-shoulder jacket and short denim-look shorts. In contrast, other player skin designs were only partially visible and only when not covered in armour. StressMonster101, FalseSymmetry, ZombieCleo and Pearlescent Moon wear armour that covers their skin design for much of their respective episodes of different Hermitcraft seasons, leaving only the character’s face and occasionally long hair visible on screen. Removing their helmets connects them more directly with the audience and allows more of the character to be identifiable. iHasCupquake shows her cape design to her fellow players—and incidentally the audience—at the outset of her first episode of the Shady Oaks SMP,3 but the remainder of the episode sees her playing in the first person without addressing the audience through her avatar. Importantly, the Shady Oaks series was recorded entirely from streamed gameplay; therefore, iHasCupquake’s facecam is a part of the edited video. As a result, the audience sees the YouTuber—a White woman with long dark hair and a ready smile on her emotive face, which collapses the distinctions between YouTuber and character. The videos I analysed from Strawburry17 and Shubble were the first episodes of their new SMP series. Both avatars are ‘naked’—wearing no armour—leaving their full skin visible for their opening address to the audience. Strawburry17’s skin is colourful, with a rainbow-coloured top, long, bright pink hair and brilliant blue eyes dominating her face. Shubble’s character is dressed in a silver gown with a crown topping her long brown hair. As with iHasCupquake, the character skin is superseded by the 3  Shady Oaks SMP is a ‘retirement home’ themed server that hosts some of the original Minecraft YouTubers, many of whom, including iHasCupquake, had long since stopped producing Minecraft content. Only 2 of the 14 players in the series are women.

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YouTuber’s face as the episodes were edited from footage recorded while streaming. In terms of vocal style, the women all demonstrated aspects of ‘YouTube voice’, described as ‘a variety of ways of emphasising words’, including overstressing vowels, adding extra vowels between consonants, lengthening some vowels and consonants, and emphasising aspiration (Beck 2015, para 2.1). The YouTube voice is not gendered and is thought to stem from older audiovisual media forms such as newscasts as ways to catch and hold the attention of viewers (Beck 2015). However, I observed two elements with gendered connotations. First, uptalk—sometimes termed the ‘high rising terminal’ in linguistics (Warren 2016)—was common, replicating what Dezuanni (2020) identified in StacyPlays videos. When first identified, this upward inflection at the end of declarative statements was considered a sign of uncertainty, indecision or deference associated with women, particularly young women (Miller 2016). Although uptalk has been observed across much of the English-speaking world and is no longer considered dependent on gender or indicative of insecurity, it remains an element of vocal style used as a marker of youthful femininity (Habasque 2020). Similarly, Habasque (2020) notes that vocal fry or ‘creaky voice’ is used to portray ‘girl talk’. I observed creaky voice when listening to a number of the YouTubers, perhaps most markedly through Strawburry17. Although creaky voice is used by many people when speaking, it occurs when using the lowest vocal register, such as when women deliberately lower the pitch of their voice. Pietsch (quoted in Johns Hopkins Medicine 2022) suggests that radio personalities may use vocal fry to ‘sound more natural and accessible to their audience [that can] sometimes give off the impression of the person being more relaxed’ (para. 4.1). Whatever the intent, the widespread use of vocal fry by high-profile women in the media, such as the Kardashians and prominent pop stars, leaves it firmly in the public imagination as stereotypically feminine. Several players balanced self-deprecation and self-praise through dialogues with other players and monologues and narration directed at the audience. Strawburry17 commented that the random allocation of attributes her character was given in the modded Afterlife SMP was because ‘it knew how bad at Minecraft I am, and was like let’s just help this girl out. Let’s just make her sparkle like Edward and she can do mushroom stuff.’ At the end of the episode, when she successfully built a small starter base

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shaped like a mushroom, her pride in her achievement is clear in her tone, and she notes that it has been a year since she last played the game. In a video following her playing 100 Minecraft days4 in a Skyblock world—where players build out from a small island suspended in space5— GeminiTay narrates over the tightly edited game footage as she demonstrates extensive skills through her resource generation and building. As GeminiTay’s character dies when she clicks the wrong block, she comments dryly as she falls into the void, ‘Nothing in this world kills me as much as my own stupidity, I swear.’ On Day 93, she fights the Ender Dragon (the ‘final boss’ of Minecraft). She says she is ‘very impressed with these shots, by the way’ as her arrows hit their target and that she is getting better at fighting through practice. She wraps up the video, noting that she has achieved diamond armour, villager trading (with NPCs) and the island looks ‘absolutely gorgeous’. Although GeminiTay explained that she did not achieve as much as she had hoped in the 100 days, she is proud of what she has achieved. Her statement balances humble self-­ deprecation with recognition of her progress. Although the nine videos analysed are not a representative sample of the women who make Minecraft videos for YouTube, they are exemplars of approaches to encoding gender through their content production. Avatar design is a key component of character design, where appearance functions to express gender in the Minecraft world just as it can in physical space. Through pitch, tone and language, the YouTubers use their voices to bring their characters to life and catch and keep their audience’s attention. However, I find build style most striking in terms of gender performance. While fantastical builds are common across Minecraft YouTube, I observed distinctive attention to detail and aesthetic coherence in smaller builds, including starter bases, that is common in how women build. While some of the most popular male builders (e.g. GoodTimesWithScar, SmallishBeans and Grian) produce detailed and beautiful constructions on SMPs, running jokes about one day getting around to finishing the interior or building the back of the base abound. This trope is so common that when PearlescentMoon completed an extensive terraforming task producing a mountain range in her video, she flew around the location, saying, ‘And yes, I did build the back.’ GeminiTay spent the final 6 of her 100 4  A Minecraft day/night cycle is approximately 20 minutes of play time if the character does not sleep. 5  Skyblock is usually played in single-player mode rather than as an SMP.

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days in Skyblock ‘basically decorating’. Taking advantage of Minecraft’s mapping tools, ZombieCleo worked to redevelop a large-scale typeface for an in-game newspaper; she turned the very blocky placeholder font created by her male collaborator into a detailed serif font close to Times New Roman. ZombieCleo’s episode also demonstrated her facility with in-­ game sculpture as she used a data pack to produce highly detailed armour stand elements to decorate the colosseum-style fighting arena she built as a mini-game for other players in the SMP. While texture packs are applied at the server level, mods that add pink and purple foliage are more common on servers used by high-profile woman players. StacyPlays’ animal rescue series, analysed by Dezuanni (2020), represents another style of gender expression. In this style, players show maternal care for in-game animals, whether building ‘cute little farms’ or creating animal sanctuaries. As Hjorth et al. (2020, 140) argue, the game provides a space for players to ‘playfully test and express their identity through the decoration and adaptation of environments (both virtual and material), avatars and their own bodies through costume play (cosplay)’. The testing and expression of YouTubers’ identities are constrained by the elements of gender that are read in their embodied selves, most markedly their voice and physical appearance for those using facecam. Even without their cameras turned on, Shubble and Katherine Elizabeth’s audiences would assume femininity from their high-pitched, occasionally squeaky voices. Markers of normative femininity and storylines or references to heteronormativity (e.g. dating, child-rearing or marriage) can provide congruence between the player persona who enacts the role and the character persona produced in-game, even when the players are not heterosexual. By contrast, gay male Minecraft YouTubers rarely enact heteronormative storylines. The final section of this chapter explores the interaction between gender, YouTuber and character, and the role of the audience in the collective construction of personas. These highly mediated, highly strategic performances of self are a tightly controlled negotiation allowing the YouTuber to build a career, maintain her privacy and security, and make content with her friends. Coming from someone who actively resists gendered expectations, these reflections provide an important counterpoint to the girliness of the examples so far.

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Being a Minecraft YouTuber: ‘There Are a Lot of Men in My Comments’ Jamie6 had been producing Minecraft YouTube content for over a decade when we spoke in 2022; like most gaming content producers, she also streamed live gameplay. During this time, she had been involved in several SMPs, including some very high-profile SMPs. She also played on ‘vanilla’ (the base game without additional software added) and modded single-­ player Minecraft worlds. Jamie’s YouTube channel and Twitch streams include other gaming titles. Over her time as a creator, she had collected a strong enough audience across her platforms to support herself financially through content production alone. For Jamie, making videos of Minecraft gameplay began as a way to connect with a gamer friend in another country. They had played World of Warcraft (WoW) together, and when Jamie decided to leave that game, she needed another way to connect. As an experienced gamer, Jamie started playing modded Minecraft, specifically the Super Hostile maps, a popular series of highly challenging Minecraft worlds. Having recorded the gameplay, she posted the videos to her new YouTube channel for her WoW friends to view. These posts caught the attention of other Minecraft gamers, including the creator of Super Hostile, and Jamie’s network of YouTubers took form. She noted that, along with a few others who played Super Hostile, ‘we got into team games with different players of Minecraft. It was like, “this is my crew.”’ She continued to play together with many of those early connections: ‘and now we’re sort of reaching across the divide to other little groups of people, which will kind of mesh together’. The number of women involved in making Minecraft content is growing, particularly in terms of streaming gameplay, but is still dwarfed by the number of men. This imbalance was pronounced in the game’s early days: ‘I only knew of two female Minecraft YouTubers that were there when I started, and they were the untouchable, ethereal, kind of perfect stereotype of [the] female gamer. Whereas I am more the “We’re just gonna do this, and we’re gonna get our hands dirty, and let’s go.” And so, I didn’t feel like I fit in that role, and I still don’t really.’

6  This is a pseudonym, as requested by the interviewee in line with the Human Research Ethics Approval and consent process (approval number H-2022-063), and is unrelated to their legal name or player handle.

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As the ethereal gamer girl stereotype did not fit Jamie’s personality or play style, she had to forge a new type of identity within Minecraft. The no-nonsense, occasionally cheeky, highly competent persona she enacted on single-player and multiplayer worlds has been maintained for many years. Jamie characterised it as ‘mostly me’ if a more outgoing, less anxious version of the persona she enacts outside the YouTube space. She described the development of the YouTube persona from its earliest incarnations as follows: I was much more timid then than I am now, and actually having the platform and all that sort of thing has given me an opportunity to be the person that I want to be. It gives me the opportunity to be the person that I would choose to be if my anxieties and stuff would leave me alone. So, in a sense it is a character, but it is a character that is very closely aligned with my wants and who I feel I am really.

Jamie’s persona in Minecraft can be understood as a form of ‘expressive authenticity [that] necessitates the representation of an individual to be an accurate expression of the individual’s nature […] as well as performing an expression of the person’s personality, morals, and beliefs’ (Nguyen and Barbour 2017, para. 2.3). The character she performed is, in a sense, aspirational—it is the persona she would inhabit if her mental health concerns did not affect her as they do. She drew on aspects of her professional role outside content production because she found her anxiety manageable in the controlled context of her professional life. She slipped back into that professional persona while streaming if her audience (or ‘chat’) became rowdy. She also found that drawing on the persona of her previous career enabled her to get attention and respect from her peers in the SMP: At the moment, I’m on the group that I like to call ‘the adults in the room’ that make decisions when the decisions can’t be made. I feel like actually having that [professional] experience has helped me out a bunch when it’s come to talking things through with people. I mean, all those sorts of skills, they’re all transferable and being an authority figure not only helps in the server aspects but also in the creative aspects because when you have ideas, people are more likely to listen to you.

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The character is not without fun—after all, this is a game space, and although Jamie was a ‘professional Minecrafter’,7 she also loved her job and had fun doing it. In building their character arcs across the episodic series, the YouTubers play pranks, tease each other, start and end (engineered) conflicts and build complex overlapping storylines that keep their audiences watching for months. Jamie built episodes and story arcs with fellow creators: ‘These are the people that know who I am, and I have this slightly—I don’t want to use the word sadistic […] I like a little bit of dark humour.’ Working with people she knew and trusted allowed this side of her to come to the fore, with the professional identity to balance the humour when the context required. Jamie drew on the same character performance while streaming on Twitch. She considered her performance while streaming as the closest to her offline identity. Unlike YouTube, her Twitch performance was live to her audience. Therefore, she could not redo or edit aspects of the performance that did not fit with the overall episode intention or did not go to plan: ‘If you want my most authentic self, it’s when I’m streaming. I swear. I do all the all the things. The rules are still there. I try not to swear while [playing on the SMP server], but I still occasionally do it when I’m streaming.’ Her performance while streaming might be close to what Jamie regarded as her ‘authentic self’, but it was still a performance. She drew on her professional persona when needed to bring the audience back in line. Although there are more adult-focused series on YouTube that feature Minecraft content—complete with obscenities and questionable humour targeted to an older audience—most creators walk a similar line to Jamie. They recognise that building content around a game that attracts younger children necessitates care with language and content if only to adhere to YouTube’s child protection policies. Even when streaming gameplay from the same servers, streamed content is different. The Twitch audience tends to be older and generally more accepting that the streamers they support are adults who may occasionally use ‘adult’ language. There is no Twitch equivalent of YouTube Kids. 7  The term ‘professional Minecrafter’ is used frequently within the YouTuber community, most often as a form of self-deprecation when they make a mistake, but also to celebrate unexpected success, such as when their projects or experiments work first time. The irony is these content creators make their living from the advertising revenue from their Minecraft YouTube content; therefore, they are professional Minecrafters.

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Interestingly, using swear words on YouTube led Jamie to consider the gendered expectations of content creators: ‘There are different standards if you’re female than if you’re male. And you know if I swear it’s the end of the world.’ She received ‘an immense amount of backlash’ when a clip of her surprised into swearing by other players was included in their videos (albeit with the actual language censored): ‘One of the mods on Reddit make a sexist diatribe about me, and it was a genuine kind of “Oh, my God!” And I’m thinking, you’ve got [male players] who swear all the time. Nothing is said, you know, and it’s like, it’s the female side of things.’ Language is not the only area in which Jamie experienced differentiated treatment based on presenting a female-coded character in-game and on YouTube. When designing her initial character skin, the men who coordinated some of the spaces she engaged with for PvP-style gameplay instructed her to use a skin with a ‘revealing’ costume design. She remembered the astonishment of the moment: ‘It’s a Minecraft character. It was the weirdest thing.’ Given that the player skins are almost entirely uniform and made from the characteristically blocky shapes inherent to Minecraft, the deliberate attempts at the sexualisation of one of the very few women making early YouTube content was disappointing, if not particularly surprising. Other early experiences in Minecraft YouTube were also challenging. Jamie noted that although her (male) friends vouched for her that she ‘wasn't considered good enough to get on to the best server where most of my friends were going at the time, and […] it was just sort of like, “No, no, no, only men.”’ Getting access to the more popular series required what she termed a ‘coup’ by one of the men already involved. However, she immediately sensed that this server was run differently from others she had been involved with as a guest: ‘It was very much more collaborative and friendly, and me being female did not seem to matter [to the other players].’ While early challenges came from other content creators gatekeeping access to the audience—deliberately excluding women from popular series—Jamie’s latest challenges stemmed from members of her audience. While she acknowledged receiving ‘horrifying sexual comments’, she was more affected by the everyday ‘casual disrespect’ from her audience. Despite making it clear that it was unwelcome, being greeted with ‘Hey gorgeous’ or ‘Hi beautiful’ had become a form of microaggression. Although seemingly banal harassment, these audience members were deliberately intrusive and annoying to Jamie because she was clear about her boundaries. Jamie did not vlog or use facecam while streaming, so her

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appearance was unknown: ‘I don’t know how to exude a more clear aura that I am not interested in you sexualising me.’ Despite moderators and other audience members supporting her when she faced both blatant and subtle harassment, she regularly resorted to blocking and banning people from her stream content. She observed that it’s creepy dudes, and it’s always dudes. It’s never women. Creepy dudes who don’t see you as an individual person and are trying to push their view of who you are or who you should be on to you, and then getting very, very offended […]. It’s all about their perceptions of what our relationship should be. And it’s like, we don’t have a relationship. I said hello to you on a stream. Twice.

Presenting as a woman when making Minecraft content for YouTube was complicated for Jamie because she increasingly understood herself as non-binary and recognised that she always had been. She did not foresee a time when the character she played could shift to be less identifiably a woman, nor did she plan to come out to the community any further than she was. For Jamie, it is simply not safe to do so: ‘I still haven’t decided what sort of form of non-binary I am yet, but that’s a thing that I worry about, specifically when it comes to my audience because I get enough hate just being a woman.’ Reflecting on how her character has developed, she noted, ‘I might be presenting as female, but I’m presenting as a less girly girl’, particularly when considering some other women who make content, those she understood in the early days as ‘ethereal’, feminine gamers. Jamie’s non-binary identity helped her contextualise her instinctive objection to being categorised within the gaming community: ‘Being called a “gamer girl” in the beginning was prevalent, and I hated it. Hated it. And I used to go on diatribes about it. And looking back, possibly due to the gender identity thing? [laughs] It’s one of those things that my brain is just sort of like, “Oh, you always hated that.”’ Still, Jamie thought the Minecraft YouTube community generally was becoming more diverse, inclusive and positive in terms of representation. Jamie made the following observations: There are lots of different flavours now of Minecrafter that there weren’t in the past. The brown-haired, brown-eyed, White dude was prevalent and still is. But you’re seeing more people of colour. You’re seeing more queer people. You’re seeing more gender identities coming into the mix, and Minecraft

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is one of those things where it’s a collective. There are so many individuals now that there weren’t before, and being able to see someone who is like you makes such a difference.

After a decade of making content, Jamie still loved playing Minecraft. She viewed it as a storytelling toolkit that continued to challenge and inspire her. She had built not just a career but enduring friendships through the game. Our interview ended with Jamie enthusiastically stating: ‘I do love Minecraft after ten years. I have to now—it’s my job!’ Jamie’s popularity as a content creator made it clear that her straightforward, have-a-go approach to gaming filled a space in the market. Her character might be read and performed as a woman. Still, it belied the tropes and stereotypes of women in gaming as less competent, as imposters, focused on social play rather than competition. For Jamie, her character was no mere supporting act to the men on the server, even when collaborating on expansive stories and builds. Instead, Jamie’s character was the main character.

References Beck, Julie. 2015. ‘Why Do So Many People on YouTube Sound the Same?’ The Atlantic. December 7, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2015/12/the-­linguistics-­of-­youtube-­voice/418962/. Clement, J. 2021. ‘Most Watched Games on YouTube by Views 2020.’ Statista. Feb. 9 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201166/most-­watched-­ game-­content-­youtube-­global/. Dezuanni, Michael. 2020. Peer Pedagogies on Digital Platforms: Learning with Minecraft Let’s Play Videos. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habasque, Pierre. 2020. Linguistic Misogyny as a Parodic Device: Valspeak Markers in Jimmy Fallon’s “Ew!”. Anglophonia. French Journal of English Linguistics 29. https://doi.org/10.4000/anglophonia.3352. Harrison, Robert L., Jenna Drenten, and Nicholas Pendarvis. 2016. Gamer Girls: Navigating a Subculture of Gender Inequality. In Consumer Culture Theory. Research in Consumer Behavior, ed. Nil Özçağlar-Toulouse, Diego Rinallo, and Russell W. Belk, vol. 18, 47–64. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1108/S0885-­211120160000018004. Hjorth, Larissa, Ingrid Richardson, Hugh Davies, and William Balmford. 2020. Exploring Minecraft: Ethnographies of Play and Creativity. Palgrave Games in Context. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-­3-­030-­59908-­9.

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Johns Hopkins Medicine. 2022. ‘Is Vocal Fry Ruining My Voice?’ Health: Conditions and Diseases. Accessed 11 August 2022. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-­and-­diseases/is-­vocal-­fry-­ruining-­my-­voice. Miller, Ian. 2016. Perceptual Correlates of High-Rising Terminal Intonation in New York English. Explorations in Linguistics 3 (1): 16–26. Morton, Lauren. 2022. ‘Minecraft 1.20—Everything We Know about the next Major Minecraft Update’. PC Gamer. Updated 28 October. https://www. pcgamer.com/minecraft-­120-­update-­guide-­launch-­mobs-­blocks/. Nguyen, Josef. 2016. Performing as Video Game Players in Let’s Plays. Transformative Works and Cultures 22: 1. https://doi.org/10.3983/ twc.2016.0698. Nguyen, Linh, and Kim Barbour. 2017. Selfies as Expressively Authentic Identity Performance. First Monday 22 (11): 1. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm. v22i11.7745. Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. 2012. Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56 (3): 401–416. https://doi.org/10.108 0/08838151.2012.705199. Warren, Paul. 2016. Uptalk: The Phenomenon of Rising Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. YouTube Culture & Trends. 2021. ‘Pioneering Women of Early Minecraft YouTube’. YouTube Culture & Trends. Accessed 3 November, 2022. https:// www.youtube.com/trends/articles/minecraft-­one-­trillion-­pioneers/.

CHAPTER 8

Women’s Personas

Positioning Women and Persona Performance I wished to explore how women present themselves to the world through researching and writing this book. I began in 2019 interested in activists, although the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic soon necessitated a different approach. I am endlessly fascinated by how others present themselves. Conducting research allowed me to ask questions that would no doubt be considered probing and intrusive if I asked them outside a research project context. Equally, the diversity of approaches to being a woman available to us deserves celebration, and this book is intended to be celebratory. I see no value in creating restrictive definitions of who counts as a woman. Instead, I believe people when they tell me who they are, and this is not diminished if they tell me they also are other things. Our categorisation systems fall apart so quickly when challenged. As reasonable exceptions expand categories inherited from less enlightened times, it seems sensible to abandon a tick-box list of biological or social criteria. Instead of getting bogged down in creating in-groups and out-groups, I focused on examining the performance of being a woman for those who enact a woman’s persona as a representation of who they are. After all, gender is made through our social interactions; it is produced iteratively and performatively, intuitively or deliberately and expressed through our personas.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barbour, Women and Persona Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7_8

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This volume explored how women navigate their performance of self and enactment of personas in six different domains. Countless other domains also deserve the same attention. However, space restrictions led to the omission of planned chapters on women who are scientists, migrants, journalists and social influencers. I hope to take up this work again in other ways. Similarly, the case studies here reflect only parts of what was shared with me during interviews with participants. I hope to return to these data, doing justice to the trust and generosity of the women I interviewed. These women variously arranged childcare, took time off work and travelled to meet me or invited me (physically or digitally) into their homes to tell me about themselves. There is a risk in agreeing to be involved in a project like this, particularly with a researcher they did not know. These women took that risk despite having plenty on their plates already. I am grateful to them for sharing their expertise; after all, they are the experts in their own experience. What can be concluded about women and personas, given the limitations of these case studies that each had only a few participants? As strategically enacted performances of self, personas are the interface of our impression management. Personas are performative in that they produce that which they represent. Each woman’s persona performance iterates on the previous, adding to the possibilities of what a woman can be with their behaviours and interactions. For the mothers who contributed to the first case study discussed in Chap. 2, that persona performance is central to their understanding of themselves. Their personas draw on and push back against what mothers are supposed to be. The primacy of the commitment to their children adheres to the expectations of intensive mothering while challenging contemporary discourses that women should want and strive to ‘have it all’. In putting their mother persona first, they did not simply reproduce the norms of maternal care but recreated it in a new context. For the hairdressers contributing to Chap. 3, their role required a balance of competence—the technical skill with scissors and chemicals and tint brush—and communion. In being kind, listening and working to improve their clients’ confidence and appearance, they demonstrated the value of connection and community. Their personas were adaptive, adjusted to make each client feel secure and comfortable, building intimacy into what could easily have been reduced to a transactional relationship.

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For the women working in software engineering, their personas adapted not just to those around them but to the culture of a role that has long resisted women’s full and recognised participation. Importantly, the industry can provide a haven for women who persist in it, provided they are welcomed and supported in their work. Putting aside the norms and labour associated with traditional femininity and utilising their problem-­ solving and mathematical skills enabled the performance of a persona emphasising competence and creativity. Online activist personas also lean on competence through subject matter expertise but are centred around communication. Speaking up for beliefs, groups or causes requires activists to draw attention to themselves and keep that attention while their messaging sinks in and drives change. Speaking out on contentious social and political topics via social media allowed the participants’ messages to spread widely. However, this spread has downsides, as they became accessible targets for detractors, trolls and those who played ‘devil’s advocate’ for the fun of it. Nonetheless, their posts and dialogue informed, challenged, convinced, organised and supported their audiences. Their conviction in the possibility of change sustained them. Moderators of online communities may go unnoticed much of the time. Given that their role is to build safer spaces for community members, often, the attention they receive is from those who breach the space’s expectations. In performing an admin persona, the two women featured in Chap. 6 set their group’s membership boundaries while demonstrating the expectations regarding interaction and participation in the community. In managing the spaces, these women enacted personas that cared for and held accountable the communities they built. While they preferred to dodge the leader label, they certainly acted as guides and facilitators. Perhaps the performances of Minecraft YouTubers came closest to disrupting the distinction between persona and character. However, the expectation of authenticity baked into social platforms—even when authenticity itself is a contested concept—means that those who make this content enact versions of themselves within their channels, even if they play a character in their videos. For some women, their engagement with the game led them to feminise and domesticate the hostile fantasy landscape, distinguishing themselves from players focused on competition and dominance. For others like Jamie, being in the game world allowed them to put aside the parts of themselves that felt restrictive in the rest of their lives. They became more confident, less anxious, bolder and less

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constrained by societal expectations of being a woman, particularly when that category no longer felt a comfortable fit. The diversity of the women represented here illustrates how important it is to recognise the complexity and intersectionality of identities and how this drives persona performance and persona reception, acceptance and communal creation. Throughout this volume, I focused on the experiences of the woman who enacts the persona, leaving to the side the perspectives of those who encounter the persona as it is performed. However, as personas are necessarily collaborative creations because they are enacted for an audience, it would be useful to engage with those who validate or challenge the performance of a particular persona. For a holistic examination of a persona performance, it would be valuable to examine the role of physical setting as well as the mediation of persona creation including the impact of social media affordances, connectivity and metadata alongside the social and cultural influences on the creation of the persona. Although beyond the scope of this volume, it would be fascinating to examine all the contributing factors.

Persona Intersections While the focus of intersectionality drew attention to how layers of marginalisation can stack up and magnify discrimination and harm, which is necessary and important, intersectionality also  facilitated greater attention to how valuable these different components of identity can be in enabling new ways of understanding the world. No two women in this group were aligned in the identities they inhabited. No two women provided the same types of answers to the questions I asked them in interviews. Perhaps that might change with a larger sample. Still, this volume was never designed to generate generalisable findings that speak to all women because women are not a homogenous group. The personas examined focused on particular domains of experience and expertise, reflecting that intersectionality. Gender was the starting point of this book, and itself proved slippery as participants aligned themselves in relation to the idea of being a woman. For some, being read as a woman feels congruent with their sense of self. For others, it is a frustration that disrupts their capacity to do their jobs and be taken seriously. For still others, it is a mis-gendering; being read as a woman is a reminder that binary categorisation systems can impact on everyday life despite them not fitting into either woman or man groups.

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The personas explored in this volume engaged with other elements of identity beyond gender, including class, race, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality and disability. Access to material resources differed both within and between case studies, and while many of the participants mentioned having undertaken tertiary education, the possibilities this can offer for employment (and therefore financial stability and/or independence) were for some disrupted by the needs of children, unexpected solo parenting responsibilities and/or the pursuit of interests not aligned with their training. This disruption was not necessarily understood as negative, given the intrinsic rewards of raising children or following a vocation. Race, ethnicity and citizenship intersected in the personas that the participants performed, and also intersected with their performance of gender identity. For those who are Aboriginal, race is tightly entwined with the history of colonialisation, and they drew strength from their cultural history while challenging (and being challenged by) a society that marginalises and excludes the oldest continuous cultures on the planet. A number of participants were not White, and some of these women of colour unpacked the role their racial identities played on their persona performance. Those who were White-passing noted their ongoing negotiation and discomfort from benefitting from socio-cultural expectations of Whiteness. Some of the White participants also noted they were conscious of the role their race played in their lives, acknowledging that their circumstances would likely be more challenging or more uncertain if they were not White. Given the bulk of the research for this volume was conducted in Australia, it is not surprising that many of the participants were born and/ or raised elsewhere. Some were recent migrants to Australia—the newest arrival was interviewed only 18 months after coming to the country— while others had arrived as children. Some were refugees from war, while others came as skilled migrants seeking new opportunities and challenges. Leaving behind familial support systems gave an opportunity to leave behind unfulfilling expectations; having a smaller network of people around them led to self-reliance; citizenship can provide a sense of security but living in a country other than the one they were born in gives a perpetual sense of otherness. Just as many of the White participants did not mention race, and many  Australian-born participants did not reflect on citizenship, so too did few straight participants reflect on the role of sexuality on their identity. For those who are queer, multi-gender attracted or lesbian, the

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personas they perform are informed by their sexuality, and often incorporate acknowledgement of their queerness in defiance of heteronormative assumptions that they be (only) interested in men. Finally, across the cohort there were a number of disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent participants. In a society that privileges physical and mental health, independence and economic productivity, living with a body or brain that requires additional supports and specific forms of care led to the participants seeking out different ways of engaging with the world. The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to lead to a substantial growth in the number of people who no longer fit into non-disabled, neurotypical norms. While a number of the participants noted that their ability to engage with the world improved as a result of greater acceptance of flexible work and work-from-home opportunities necessitated by pandemic movement restrictions, this acceptance may well disappear as the so-called ‘new normal’ replicates existing systems of exclusion. So while this volume explored persona performance by starting with a single feature of self-hood—gender—it has gone well beyond this in considering the complexity of a layered conceptualisation of identity and the impacts on people at the point these elements intersect.

On Exhaustion and Hope Sometimes it feels like being tired is a part of the human condition, a feature of adulthood (and increasingly encroaching on childhood). Some argue, not without reason, that this is the system working as intended. By keeping us in this state of being too tired to change the system, we work to afford the things we need to survive and then work more to afford all the things we are conditioned to want. This argument inspires and depresses me. Surely in knowing it, naming it, rests the possibility for change; that change has not happened yet indicates that perhaps the knowledge and naming is insufficient. If there were themes that ran through most of the interviews, the first was exhaustion (not caused solely by the dominant late neo-capitalist patriarchal hegemony), and the second was hope. The impact of the climate crisis, and the fear for the future of ourselves, our families, and the places we love, can be overwhelming. It may be so overwhelming that we put action aside, collectively acting like a child who gets out Monopoly when told it is five minutes to bedtime. For those who work so hard to drive change from within the system, the exhaustion

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comes from watching the game board being laid out and the money carefully counted—mines dug, oil rigs settling over new reserves, cars and toys and aeroplanes and plastic wrap—even though time is almost up. The impact of systemic racism reflected in embedded colonial institutions that routinely, without fanfare or apology, privilege White people and wealth is heart-breaking. Those same systems give lip service to change. Still, in Australia, no police officer has been convicted of causing the death of one of the hundreds of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders who have died in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 1987–1991 recommended urgent change. Still, countries are left decimated by wars based on differences in faith or culture or fought to liberate people from oppression; the latter is a noble aim but rings hollow when the ‘liberators’ expect obedience and reward. The global COVID-19 pandemic showed the fragility of many of our systems; it also showed what and who are considered ‘acceptable losses’. Protests against public health directives such as mask mandates and lockdowns, designed to protect those most immediately vulnerable to the disease such as the elderly, the unwell and the disabled, illustrated that some people believed their individual ‘freedoms’ were worth more than those of others. Mistrust in authorities and experts allowed misinformation to spread, and those seeking alternatives to uncomfortable or scary realities had plenty of time to find more palatable (if entirely false) explanations. Rusted-on patriarchal expectations tell children their identities are pre-­ determined by their bodies, tell girls to be quiet, caring, pretty and kind, and tell boys if they are quiet, caring, pretty and kind, they are weak and unmanly. These expectations are shifting far too slowly and hurting far too many people in the process. We tell children they can be whatever they want, but that only means we expect them to pick from a curated list of appropriate options for children like them. Sometimes those options fit nicely, and many in this book are living lives that adhere to the expected norms of women in our time and place. Other times, women have sought options not intended for them but made them their own, finding a way to make it work. It is bizarre that the complexity of the natural world is so great, yet in many places, people are treated as something apart, as if the variety of social and familial organisations found in plants and animals is the anomaly. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, humans are assumed to adhere to binaries and replicate norms that privilege heterosexuality and the nuclear family. Many are rewarded for fitting into the preferred boxes, including myself as a straight, White, non-disabled (if

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neurodivergent), middle-class cisgendered woman married to the father of our child. Many people would argue that change has been rapid or that I am erasing the significant work of those who got us to this point; I am not. Rather there is still so much to do, I am busy, and it is exhausting. If exhaustion was a common experience among the women here, it was not the only one. The other was hope. Sometimes desperate hope, hope against hope, but hope nevertheless. Hope breeds persistence in the face of hurdles and kindness in the face of cruelty. Hope encourages the sharing of experiences and wisdom, leaving space for people to grow and change. Hope inspires, and the hope shared by the women in this book inspires me. If nothing else resonates here, I hope they inspire hope in you as well.

Index1

A Agency, 9–11, 19 Analysis interpretative phenomenological analysis, 43, 44 narrative analysis, 14, 140 textual analysis, 14, 130, 135 thematic analysis, 22, 23, 44 Appearance, 5, 10, 11, 40, 43, 44, 48, 70, 80, 95, 103, 133, 139, 140, 145, 150 Archetype, 11, 12, 35 Audience, 4–8, 10, 13, 14, 58, 88, 95–100, 102–104, 118, 124, 129, 131, 132, 136n2, 137–145, 151, 152 Authentic, authenticity, 132, 142, 143, 151

B Binary, 1, 2, 17, 119, 120, 133, 152, 155 Biology, biological, 1–3, 17, 19, 84, 149 C Care, carer, caring, 9, 10, 13, 18, 20, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 40–43, 46–49, 53, 54, 58, 63, 91, 95, 98, 113, 115–117, 121, 124, 129, 135, 140, 143, 150, 154, 155 Character, 5, 10–12, 14, 95–101, 130, 132–140, 133n1, 136n2, 139n4, 142–146, 151 Choice mystique, 19, 20, 28

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barbour, Women and Persona Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33152-7

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INDEX

Cis, cisgender, cisnormative, 3, 20, 84, 119–121, 123, 156 Cishet, 21 Clothing, 10, 44, 51, 70, 83, 133, 137 Communal, 6, 9, 97, 152 Communion, 9, 10, 13, 14, 150 Community, 13, 14, 22, 23, 26, 27, 40–42, 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 101, 104, 107, 108, 128, 131, 134, 143n7, 145, 150, 151 online community, 13, 72, 107–125, 151 sense of community, 109 D Disabled, disability, 3, 14, 18, 88, 89, 92, 100, 103, 113, 153–155 Discrimination, 14, 64, 75, 77, 152 Domestic, domesticity, domesticate, 1, 3, 9, 12, 18, 34, 151 Domestic violence, 42, 100, 118 E Exclude, exclusion, exclusionary, 2, 28, 43, 68, 69, 78, 109, 153, 154 F Facebook, 6, 7, 13, 22, 99, 102, 110, 111, 111n1, 115 Feminine, femininity, 11, 13, 69, 70, 80–83, 119, 129, 130, 135, 137, 138, 140, 145, 151 Feminist, feminism, 2, 21n1, 88, 94, 99 Followers, 88, 96, 98, 99

G Gaming, 92, 128–130, 134, 135, 141, 145, 146 Girly, 83, 129, 135, 138, 140, 145 H Harassment, 64, 97, 118, 134, 144, 145 I Identity, 2–4, 6–8, 10, 12–14, 17–34, 21n1, 36, 41, 43, 65, 70, 71, 79, 93–95, 101, 103, 105, 111, 112, 120, 124, 130, 132, 135, 140, 142, 143, 145, 152–155 identity performance, 4, 13, 31–33, 41, 132 Imagined audience, 6, 88, 99 Impression management, 4–8, 150 Instagram, 102, 103 Internet, 66, 91, 104, 108, 109, 112 Intersectionality, 3, 18, 22, 84, 100, 103, 113, 117, 124, 152 Interview, 3, 4, 12, 13, 21–23, 25, 33, 41, 43, 45, 46, 58, 65, 69, 71, 73, 77, 82, 88, 104, 118, 130, 134, 146, 150, 152, 154 Intimacy, 42, 43, 46–47, 52, 55, 109, 150 M Marginalised, marginalisation, 2, 4, 14, 101, 103, 111, 113, 114, 117, 152 Maternity, maternal, 12, 17–19, 66, 135, 140, 150 Mediatised, mediatisation, 5, 14, 56, 104

 INDEX 

N Narrative, 44, 82, 97, 128–132 Neurodivergence, neurodiversity, 3, 14, 18, 101, 154, 156 Non-binary, 3, 113, 118, 123, 145 P Performative, performativity, 3, 4, 8, 12, 35, 150 Perform, performance, 2, 4–6, 8, 12, 13, 31, 32, 35, 41, 44, 56, 80, 95–101, 103, 107, 129–132, 143, 149–154 Persona performance, 3, 5, 6, 13, 24, 58, 82–84, 132, 149–154 Persona studies, 5, 108, 150 Pragmatic, pragmatism, 73, 82–84 Presentation, 6–8, 10, 45, 57, 81, 135 personal presentation, 73, 80 Privilege, privileged, 4, 12, 17, 19, 21, 74, 94, 95, 112, 115, 117, 120, 124, 128, 154, 155 Profession, professional, professionalism, 6, 10, 12, 13, 17, 27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 40–43, 46, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56–58, 68, 70, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 92, 100, 101, 103, 107, 112, 114, 118, 131, 132, 142, 143, 143n7 Q Queer, 3, 20, 92, 113, 145, 153, 154 R Race, 3, 14, 18, 19, 21, 88, 153 Aboriginal, 89, 100, 153, 155 African, 101 Asian, 11, 21 Asian Australian, 72 Black/Bla(c)k, 11, 42, 66, 96, 97, 101, 117

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First Nations, 94 Hispanic, 84 Indigenous, 89, 98, 100 Latina, 11 Sudanese, 101–103 White/Whiteness/White-passing, 20, 21, 27, 42, 72, 73, 92, 112, 137, 153, 155 Reddit, 22, 26, 30, 66, 130, 144 Represent, representation, representational, 4, 7, 8, 11, 18, 22, 34, 71, 87n2, 96, 102, 103, 110, 112, 134, 135, 140, 142, 145, 149, 150 S Sexist, sexism, 11, 64, 69, 77–79, 82, 92, 144 Social construction, 19, 67 Social media, 5–8, 13, 21, 40, 88, 89, 91, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102–104, 107, 110, 111n1, 122, 151, 152 Social roles, 1, 4, 8 Stereotypes, 4, 8–12, 21, 63, 67–69, 82, 84, 104, 114, 134, 135, 141, 142, 146 Strategic performance, 3, 6, 7, 132, 140 T Trans, trans woman, trans women, 2, 3, 20, 113, 118–124 Trope, 4, 8, 11, 12, 96, 139, 146 Twitch, 131, 141, 143 Twitter, 90, 92, 95, 97–103, 98n7, 110 Y YouTube, 14, 102, 128–132, 134, 135, 138, 139, 141–145