Browsing by Author "Julkunen, Jenny"

From the perspective of symbolic interactionism gender identities are negotiated in interaction. This study illustrates how transgender individuals negotiate on their gender identities in everyday interaction. The emergence of communication and interaction technologies and development of various online settings provide essential and unique contexts for these ongoing identity negotiations. This study focuses on how transgender individuals negotiate on gender identities in offline and online settings. As minority identities and online settings relate closely tor regulating privacy, special attention is directed to the relation of identity negotiation and privacy. This study is based on semi-structured intensive interviews of ten Finnish self-identified transgenders. The interviewees self-identified as transfeminines, transmasculines and non-binary and their ages ranged from 26 to over 60 years. Interview data is analysed with constructivist grounded theory analysis. The findings highlight the importance of online settings for gender minorities as it provides necessary privacy, tools to control interaction and presentation of “authentic self”. The automated face-recognition, friend recommendation systems in online settings and fear of confrontation in offline settings complicated the efforts to control interaction and presentation of self. This resulted continuous balancing between strategies to protect and disclose in order to construct a desired identity. These findings portray the relation of safe environments, personal control and identity negotiation. The findings suggest that individual´s identity negotiations are bounded in situations and contexts. It was discovered that online and offline contexts set various and differing boundaries and possibilities for identity negotiations. Online and offline settings are interwoven entities where transgenders manoeuvre flexibly to express themselves while protecting their safety and privacy.