Beyond “Commercial Realism”: Extending Goffman’s Gender Display Framework to Networked Media Contexts

Abstract

Erving Goffman’s gender display framework is a typology of nonverbal posing codes that connote the subordination of women in commercial imagery and a prominent tool for assessing visualizations of gender stereotyping in mass media. Researchers have recently begun to apply the advertisement-based framework to a new context: user-generated social media photos. Despite findings that gender display appears prevalent in such images, deeper critical examinations of how the framework changes when applied across media contexts have not been meaningfully undertaken. Drawing from the interplay of Goffman’s concepts of hyper-ritualization and commercial realism, I argue that the manifestations and interpretive implications of gender display are contingent upon the standard of realism at play, proposing a standard of networked realism that differently modulates gender display in user-generated photography. Ultimately, I suggest that gender display must be more thoroughly contextualized in networked media research and provide a groundwork for future feminist studies of visual gender stereotyping.