I. INTRODUCTION

As technology that facilitates communication, the internet affects how users present themselves and often requires formation of virtual identities. Based on this observation, the internet has the potential to affect how individuals do gender in a variety of new and fascinating ways. This paper aims to discover if the technology that has facilitated communication on the internet has influenced the ways in which individuals do gender online.

The internet makes it easier to present an identity that may not be representative of one’s gender identity in face-to-face communications. Gone are physical signifiers of gender – vocal tone or appearance. Websites that require participation often offer a user an opportunity to create a virtual identity out of text or graphics. Depending on the type of interaction, an individual can choose to take note of, express, ignore, or conform to any gendered norms that may appear to exist in a space that promotes interaction between users.

But how does gendered behavior exist in a virtual realm? On social networking sites, online profiles and behavior within the community combine to create a user’s a virtual identity. As expected, a user does not have to adhere to any essentialist or biological construct of gender and is free to create an identity using the tools of the software codes to construct a self within the social norms of the virtual community. I am curious as to how exactly users construct gender on social networking sites, both in their profiles and behavior. The scope of that question is larger than this paper, so I have chosen to focus on how one internet celebrity in particular, Jeffree Star, presents his gender identity.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

Lawrence Lessig, in his book Code and the other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), argues that code is the underlying institution of the internet and that as an institution it shapes users’ behavior. Code manipulations can create software platforms and programming opportunities that allow for the development of virtual communities and other forums for virtual identities that afford the internet user new ways of constructing gender. Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is the programming language which allows for hyperlinking, or connecting web sites by a clickable link and it governs all behavior on the internet (Lessig 1999).

West and Zimmerman argue that gender is a situated accomplishment shaped by institutional arrangements (West and Zimmerman, 1987). This social interactionist framework of understanding gender has proved successful to earlier studies of gender and cyberspace as well. Writes researcher Michelle Rodino in her 1997 study on chat rooms, “Neither the function of utterances nor the construction of gender adheres to dualistic descriptions, as past research has implied. Reconceptualizing gender as performative helps researchers break out of binary categories that have bound past research.” Rodino's research applies the concept of situationally accomplished gender to the virtual realm. By explaining how gender can be accomplished in cyberspace, Rodino's study provides an excellent starting point for gender analysis in virtual communitites.

The internet “offers user very real opportunities for collective communities and individual identities,” as states the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies on the introduction page of their website. Not surprisingly, then, the social component of the internet has provided numerous opportunities for studies by forward-thinking sociologists as well as academics in other disciplines. Of direct interest to this paper is the academic treatment of the medium which itself is a composition of several types of media. In a 2001 paper, the “Social Implications of the Internet,” Paul DiMaggio, et al explain that from a sociological perspective, “the internet is unique because it integrates both different modalities of communication (reciprocal interaction, broadcasting, individual reference-searching, group discussion, person/machine interaction) and different kinds of content (text, video, visual images, audio) in a single medium. This versatility renders plausible claims that the technology will be implicated in many kinds of social change.”

Within the emerging discipline of cyberculture studies, many researchers have focused on various elements of doing gender online. The topic of gender identity in chat rooms was one of the first ways in which researchers examined gendered behavior in a virtual forum (Rodino 1997). Internet communities pose another area of cyberspace studies where ways of doing gender potentially exist. In the past, sociologists have grappled with traditional definitions of community when discussing virtual communities and this has hindered any comprehensive evaluation of virtual communities. With the advent of cyberculture, factors that play a role in defining real-world communities such as location and face-to-face interaction were no longer necessarily relevant to virtual communities.

J. Preece & D. Maloney-Kritchmar, in their 2005 study “Online Communities: Design, Theory, and Practice,” compile these issues into a conceptualization of virtual community. The authors cite several competing definitions including researcher Amy Bruckman’s theory that “a more productive approach may be to accept [online] community as a concept with fuzzy boundaries that is perhaps more appropriately defined by its membership. This can be done by noting the similarities and differences of each new member and comparing them with the characteristics of members who are regarded as being within the community” (Preece & Maloney-Krichmar 2005). This working definition gracefully navigates around the issues of sample representation or lack of defined commitment to a community, issues that are perhaps central to a definition of a real-world community but not necessarily essential to the success of an online community.

Preece and Maloney-Krichmar go on to list accepted forms of studying internet communities, including ethnography, content and linguistic analysis, data logging and questionnaires. Issues of gaining an accurate sample online pose difficulties with survey and questionnaire methodologies. Ethnographic studies appear to be preferred methods of data collection (Preece & Maloney-Kritchmar, 2005).

Lessig’s perspective of code and DiMaggio’s theory relating multiple forms of expression compressed into one medium explain how structural elements of the internet influence expression of identity within community. Indeed, hyperlinking and social networking profiles thrive by creating links between identity and community. In a study focused exclusively on social networking sites, Dinah Boyd explains exactly how the content of an individual profile is central to the community aspect of a social networking site. Boyd finds that “when content is relevant to individuals, they consume it and then share it. This act shifts the context to be defined egocentrically which means that rather than information being shared based on a common interest, it is shared based on an affiliation with an individual” (Boyd 2006). This perspective explains that the number of friends is socially significant in the sense that choosing friends to link expands upon the chooser’s virtual identity in addition to creating a conduit for informaton exchange.

The popularity of an individual on a social networking site--essentially the number of virtual friends— is thus reliant upon the way others perceive that individual’s virtual identity in relation to other users' identities. Tila Tequila is a model who leveraged the networking power of MySpace and other online networking sites to accrue 1.8 million friends (Tila 2007). Her popularity led Rolliing Stone magazine to put her on their annual Hot List and in 2006 Time magazine called her the Queen of MySpace (Grossman 2006). After Tila, Jeffree Star is arguably one of the most talked about members of social networking sites. He gets between one and three thousand comments on his MySpace page a day, has been featured in magazines and recently launched a music career (Emonds 2007). Star grew up in Orange County, Calif., before moving to Los Angeles after high school to work at the M.A.C. store in the Beverly Center. His success as a makeup artist led to lucrative, short-term celebrity gigs--he once worked as Kelly Osborne's private make-up artist--but Jeffree's true celebrity seems to stem from his outlandish internet presence, which deftly manipulates social networking sites to spell out the existence of a club-hopping, blow-sniffing, atypically-gendered socialite.

As the first of the e-celebrities to show up on mainstream pop culture radar, it's not surprising that Tila’s image on MySpace does not conflict with conventional ways of doing femaleness. A survey of her profile reveals photos of a petite female wearing a bikini top and cutoffs . Unlike Tila, Jeffree identifies as a gay male and dresses like a drag queen on acid. His gender presentation does not conform to normative standards yet he has accrued a fan base of over 500,000, judging by the number of MySpace profiles that link to his profile. Tila Tequila does not choose to violate gender norms when she represents herself visually online and according to Boyd, that says something about the 1.8 million MySpace users who keep her link among the Friends section of their pages. By the same logic, users who choose Jeffree Star as a friend thus reference his atypical gender presentation as part of their virtual self. In real world terms, then, the profiles of Jeffree’s online friends literally display Jeffree’s photo and link, in the Friends section, and Jeffree becomes a part of his friends’ individual identities.



The size of Jeffree’s network, then, could speak to the resonance of how he does gender. Jacqueline Kacen presents an analysis of gender construction on the internet which examines the intersection of gender, technology and consumerism. In her 2000 article, she argues that consumer attitudes can impart new ways of constructing gender that vary from a binary understanding of gender as conventions are dissected and collaged in a medium that does not only rely on face-to-face representations of self. She explains that “postmodern consumers aren’t merely recombining feminine and masculine traits to forge new identities; the very meanings of masculine and feminine are being actively deconstructed and reconstructed in order to create new, unique selves.” Kacen cites Butler (1990)’s explanation that “’in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself’” to prove her point that gender identity is a “pastiche of possibilities,” and no more so than on the internet, where she finds that “the cues which denote social hierarchies and gender attributes are not present” and free up the user to “create…less normative identities” (Kacen 2000). The pastiche she speaks of parallels DiMaggio’s conception of the internet as a single, compressed medium. The multiple media formats that make up a user profile coupled with an active reinterpretation of masculinity and femininity explain exactly what is involved when one negotiates gender on the internet.

III. METHODOLOGIES

West and Zimmerman discuss doing gender in terms of preserving sex categorization. This definition allows their discussion of a transgender individual, Agnes, to delve into what Agnes, and, technically, everyone who expresses gender, must do to preserve desired sex categorization. According to the authors, Agnes’ “initial resource was the predisposition of those she encountered to take her appearance (her figure, clothing, hair style, and so on), as the undoubted appearance of a normal female. Her further resource was our cultural prospective on the properties of ‘natural, normally sexed persons’” and the fact that it is rooted in a binary construction of gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Thus by judgment of her presentation of gender, the authors can examine how an individual does gender by invoking on the social cues that imply sex-gender categorization.

I use West & Zimmerman’s discussion of Agnes’ presentation as a model for my observations of Jeffree Star’s virtual identity.
I initially hoped to discuss Jeffree Star’s gender presentation based on his MySpace profile, because that website has provided the widest platform for his popularity. However, Jeffree Star recently switched his MySpace page from a personal user profile to a band or artist profile, perhaps to promote his new album, and band/artist profiles on MySpace do not present the same information on age and gender as personal profiles. This makes it slightly less accurate to discuss Jeffree’s virtual gender identity as an individual on a band page (even if he is the only artist in the band).

Buzznet.com is a site that is similar to MySpace in terms of the way it allows users to present content. Like MySpace, Buzznet also presents a relatively uniform organization of user-generated content that is intended to create identity—these include blogs, videos, audio, links, responses to surveys, and comments. I have chosen to use Buzznet as my source for data, on the basis that it has already garnered a reputation for being the “new” MySpace (Lecaro, 2007), that Jeffree has a lot of fans on Buzznet that also write to him and visit his page quite often and multiple comparisons over a period of several months have confirmed to me that this site provides overwhelmingly similar content to MySpace.

In terms of what constitutes a virtual identity, I have chosen to restrict this term to only user-generated content on that user’s own Buzznet page. This includes all Jeffree’s blogs, photographs, captions, song lyrics, video diaries and answers to profile questions taken at face value. In regards to photographs, I distinguished between the “default” photo that represents the user on other pages, and the total number of photos a user has chosen to put on his/her page, whether in the “photos” section of the profile or in other parts of the profile using code. This observation rests on the assumption that all content on a user’s social networking profile relates to a user’s identity. For actual data, I carefully observed all areas of this user-generated content for representations of gender.

In terms of assessing the profile owner’s identity, comments posted by other users were not considered as elements of the virtual identity because the content comments did not ostensibly originate with the profile owner.
It is important to also remember that one’s online identity carries no implications of one’s identity in the real world and thus any points of analysis are meant to refer to the way in which the individual chooses to incorporate or refer to gender in the creation of the virtual identity.

IV. DATA

**most of the data is in long charts that I was too lazy to compile into HTML. it is available upon request, but a more user-friendly approach would be to simply skim Jeffree Star's Buzznet**




V. ANALYSIS

The statistics of Jeffree’s Buzznet indicate a high amount of interest in his identity. For example, the number of users that link to Jeffree’s profile is roughly the same as the number of users that Jeffree links to (7,182 links to other user profiles versus 7,099 user profiles linking back to Jeffree). A definition of community that goes beyond links to user profiles to include comments reveals a more one sided display of interaction attempts. Two million visits to Jeffree’s page have been logged and over twelve thousand comments have been made on the content of Jeffree’s page. The number of comments Jeffree has made to others is just 25. This quantification of community is hardly complete yet an immense interest of community members in Jeffree’s profile is apparent as well. These partial statistics reflect the need to define an internet community by its membership, as put forth by Bruckman in the Preece & Maloney-Krichmar article rather than a complete quantitative analysis of the population. Two million page visits indicates that Jeffree’s identity has generated a lot of interest and twelve thousand comments indicate that the interest comes from individuals who include Jeffree as a friend, thus implicitly including him in their online identities. This is consistent with Lessig’s characterization of code as an institution. The links are examples of how code has shaped the way identity is created and community is maintained on the internet. Jeffree’s popularity thus is created and reinforced by this institution.

Jeffree Star’s online identity, of course, also depends on the coding that has allowed social networking sites to utilize graphic interfaces to represent a person. This code influences how Jeffree does gender by asking him to choose a gender from a binary in a profile questionnaire as well as by allowing him to present photos, journals, audio and video that may or may not conform to the initial gender stated as part of the user profile. By presenting conflicting ways of doing gender, Jeffree draws on the unique institutional factors of the internet to create a persona that is neither explicitly male nor female. Data from the visual as well as textual analysis of his profile supports this claim. His appearance does not conform explicitly to one gender or another but instead borrows from female and male representations of gender. For example, Jeffree chooses a first name that is typically masculine but he indicates his gender on his Buzznet profile as female.

The photos of Jeffree Star present the most direct assortment of gendered behaviors and presentations that do not fall neatly into a cultural stereotype of male or female. His pink hair is long but completely artificial, independent of gender, and he has the hips of an underweight supermodel or a prepubescent boy. His skin appears pale, hairless, flawless, and at times, airbrushed. He wears tapered pants with high heels or miniskirts and carries a designer handbag like his female best friend. He has tattoos up both arms that are not explicitly masculine or feminine but nonetheless cover his arms so defiantly with green ink that the tattoos look more like what one would expect to see on a tough, male biker or punk rather than a delicate, airbrushed female. He wears excess amounts of pink, shiny sparkly jewelry by Tarina Tarantino, an expensive designer.
Jeffrree’s presentation references consumer culture in several ways, intentionally or not His excess jewelry and obvious false hair and makeup indicate that he is a consumer of beauty products more than implying a distinct maleness or femaleness but the proportion of his shoulders and jawline to the rest of his slim frame hint at some underlying maleness. In every photo, Jeffree wears theatrical eyeliner, false lashes, painted over eyebrows, and glossy neon lipstick. These draw upon the cultural belief that makeup is a sign of femininity and counteract the maleness implied by his body type, but the fact that he wears makeup is not as gendered as how he chooses to wear it. Jeffree does not stop at cues that would just indicate femaleness, instead wearing makeup so extreme and heavy that it references drag queen culture in its artifice and ultimately creates an identity as a consumer of product. Text on his page suggests that he has a career as makeup artist, which implies a vast ownership of makeup and indicates that the underlying factor in his construction of gender is at least as influenced by his consumer interests as it is by an interest in representing gender.



By presenting gendered behavior that defies sex categorization and overtly references consumer culture, Jeffree draws attention to ways that individuals do gender on the internet. This reflection of identity draws on Kacen’s explanation of gender reconstruction with a consumerist influence while using the tools of virtual representation to create identities that fall outside gender norms.

This composite identity relies on Kacen’s idea that in post modernity, gender has become a pastiche that is enhanced by the unique opportunities presented by use of the internet. While the text on his page gives Jeffree the opportunity to present as female, his photos reveal his visual representation to be more like a drag queen with the body of a female supermodel and a preference for accessories and fashion that is stereotypically upper middle class and female. His journal entries present another alternate identity as a gay male. The resulting configuration of gender identities that arise from this composition reveals that the institution of internet allows users to reconstruct gender as a narrative that borrows from conventional and cultural expectations of gender. His appearance situates his identity as a wealthy consumer more often than it indicates a preference for a particular gender.

VI. CONCLUSION

Jeffree Star looks like the love child of Gwen Stefani and Marilyn Manson. His shocking pink hair and silcon-esque cheekbones are rivaled only by his provocative sense of humor and chilling ability to articulate and expose gender and consumer stereotypes in the content of his online profiles. He encompasses elements of gay male identity and femaleness entwined with drag queen and consumer identity in his self-expression, which includes blogs, photos, comments, videos, and most recently, a 5 song EP that plays on his MySpace page and is for sale on iTunes. Jeffree is not the first internet celebrity to get a record deal based on his popularity on social networking sites. Jeffree’s biological maleness contrasts with the stark presentations of femininity in the content of his online profiles. His gender performance is not entirely consistent with male or female gender norms. The ways in which the internet allow for a new construction of gender are apparent in the example of Jeffree Star and the social importance of the way Jeffree does gender online is indicated by the size of the online community that supports him.


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