Visual Epidemic

This is my accepted abstract for next year’s Association of Internet Researcher’s conference in Gothenburg!

Constructing the ‘Fjortis’: How youth are (re)appropriating a gendered discourse.

In Sweden, the term ‘Fjortis’  is slang for the Swedish word fourteen (fjorton) and originally described someone who was acting immaturely or childishly (SAOL, 2006).While the term is applied more commonly to girls than boys, it did not originally have strong gendered connotations. On YouTube, however, the term has taken on a gendered meaning and the appropriation and re-appropriation between Swedish fashion vloggers (modevlogger) and Swedish boys on YouTube is assigning new and specific meanings to the term.


The concept of ‘Fjortis’ became popular on YouTube through a photomontage video of  adolescent girls from Umeå, a town in northern Sweden,  in various states of dress and drunkenness. The photos were backgrounded by a popular rap song called ‘Fjortis’ and which describes a boy rapper ‘wannabe’ (Fronda – Fjortis). The fjortis meme spread throughout the Swedish YouTube youth communities and at the time of writing, all major cities in Sweden have a fjortis video posted on YouTube, and many of the cities have yearly updates to the fjortis meme. In response to these videos, a group of Swedish adolescent girls began self-defining as a fjortis and performing additional, positive meanings to the term in their own vlogs. Many of these vloggers discuss fashion and appearance, and through declaring themselves as a fjortis, they are re-appropriating the term as  something positive. This term, however, remains gendered as they often associate the term with a particular style of dress, speech, and vlogging style.


This paper will analyze the discourse between two groups of Swedish youth vloggers – the fashion vloggers who self-identify as a fjortis, and the creators of the city fjortis videos in order to map how the concept of fjortis has become strongly gendered in online contexts. Additionally, the less obvious semiotics of the videos, such as the music, background, and dress will be analyzed in order to determine how the two groups are performing this discourse through various semiotic means (Butler, 1990, van Leeuwen, 2005). In order to establish a baseline of how gendered the term fjortis was before the city fjortis videos, an analysis based on a corpus of how the term has been used in mass media will be applied, as well as an analysis of mass medias present usage of the term in order to determine how the use of this term has changed in popular or mainstream discourse.


Constructing the ‘Fjortis’: how youth are (re)appropriating a gendered discourse is one of four reports in the ethnographic work of a three-part project called YouTube as a performative arena (http://www.yapa.se) which will examine the video-sharing site, YouTube as an arena for creative and artistic expression among Swedish youth. This project brings together cross-disciplinary research in order to gain a better understanding of how youth use these arenas, as well as how the YouTube phenomenon is understood and defined by the traditional, adult-managed media landscape.


This project is conducted as part of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation’s funded project, YouTube as a performative arena (http://www.yapa.se).


References:

Butler, J., 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

SAOL 13th edition. New words in the 13th edition of brian e fjortis :D SAOL

van Leeuwen, T., 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge.

Websites Referenced:

LetsSingIt, Fjortis lyrics, http://artists.letssingit.com/fronda-lyrics-fjortis-pzzgv3m [Accessed February 28, 2010].

YouTube, http://www.youtube.com

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This is a wordle of the Ir10 papers. I will write my reflections sometime today or tomorrow. At the moment my brain is slightly travel-mushy.

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Friday I submitted the AoIR paper, and honestly, I am not really happy with it. I am still missing the interviews, so the paper felt lopsided. I talked a lot about how Swedish youth perform parkour in the uploaded films, but need more data/interview information to really talk about how the performative arena is experienced. I touched on it, but the arguments could/should have been stronger. Before the actual conference, however, I will have the interviews. I plan to make defining the performative arena – or the interaction between the filmed runs, the runners, and the actual platform – the focus of the talk.

Here is an excerpt from the paper:

YouTube is a performative arena due to the interplay between the users who perform aspects of community membership and identity through a seamless blend of offline and offline practices, but also due to the social networking affordances allowed by the YouTube platform. Each channel on YouTube could be considered a site of engagement, as it is there that traces of social networking are collected and made visible. It is the collection and interplay of these sites, both through engaging in conversation on each individual video page, as well as subscribing and participating on a user’s channel which gives meaning to the performed practices within the videos. LaBelle (2006), defines the performative arena in sound art by exploring the relationship between the object and the viewer/listener.

“In understanding the art object and the art viewer as interwoven into a conversational exchange in which the object produces the looking/listening, and the looking/listening produced the object, comes to suggest the field of attention as a performative arena. Thus, art objects do not so much contain or embody meaning but rather are given meaning through a performative exchange” (LaBelle, 2006:101).

This field of attention that LaBelle speaks of can be seen in the interaction of communities of practice in Swedish youth parkour runners. This group has established practices for both their offline performances and their online interactions, and it is the reciprocity between these spaces and interactions that perform forth an arena which is simultaneously meaningful, shared and experienced.

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