Social media, social space, and African newcomer youth sexual subjectivity in Winnipeg, Canada
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Date
2017
Authors
Marmah, Estella
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Abstract
My research interrogates how African newcomer youth navigate the sexual terrain of Winnipeg and social media, to explore and express their sexual subjectivity. I examine the question: How does Winnipeg as an urban space shape African newcomer sexuality? Through ethnographic research, I gained considerable knowledge into how African newcomer youth navigate different cultural norms of sexuality in the emergent production of their sexuality in Winnipeg, as well as how youth use social networking technologies to form and maintain intimate connections with others. Following the anthropology of sexuality scholarship, I define sexuality, broadly, as the many ways in which one displays his or her sexual desires and sexual preferences, the feelings and performances of sexiness, and the enactments of and resistance to sexual norms. Rather than reducing sexuality to innate or solely physiological or biological impulses or even to sexual “orientations,” sexuality is continually under construction and emerges intersubjectively, through social relations and relationality. In this way, sexuality is spatially contingent as the different space in which one spends their time shapes their sexuality, as I show in my thesis. By exploring the emergence of African youths’ sexualities, as youth navigate between “Africanness” (what is deemed as acceptable and appropriate mostly by adults) and their developing identities as “Canadian,” social media technologies appear as vital technologies through which they come to understand and express their gendered and racialized erotic subjectivities. Through this thesis, I show how Winnipeg as a local and trans-local space shapes African newcomer youths sexuality.
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Keywords
Social Media, African newcomer youth, Winnipeg, Blackness, Settlement, Sexuality, Immigration, Sexual subjectivity, Religion