Self-presentation has been identified as a key practice within digital youth cultures. The scholarship on youths’ self-presentation has extensively investigated how young people negotiate affordances in ways that optimally support their transitions into adulthood. However, the scholarship’s focus on identity development and technological affordances risks constructing a homogeneous, de-contextualized, and media-centric representation of digital youth cultures. To unveil how self-presentation practices are embedded within a broader socio-cultural context, I conducted a 15-month hybrid ethnographic study with 23 ethno-religious minority young men living in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The observations illustrate that these young men attempt to reclaim agency over their identity representations by performing “masculine ideals” of the self in response to racialized discourses. Overall, the results underscore the necessity of adopting an intersectional perspective that considers the interplay between self-presentation on social media and the threats and opportunities within youths’ (digital) neighborhoods.

中文翻译：

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数字社区中的回收机构：对民族宗教少数青年男性自我表现的民族志探索

自我展示已被确定为数字青年文化中的关键实践。关于青少年自我展示的学术研究广泛调查了年轻人如何以最佳方式支持他们向成年过渡的方式来协商可供性。然而，该奖学金对身份发展和技术可供性的关注可能会导致构建同质的、脱离情境的、以媒体为中心的数字青年文化表征。为了揭示自我展示实践如何融入更广泛的社会文化背景，我对居住在比利时荷兰语地区佛兰德斯的 23 名民族宗教少数族群年轻人进行了为期 15 个月的混合民族志研究。观察结果表明，这些年轻人试图通过表现自我的“男性理想”来回应种族化话语，从而重新获得对其身份表征的代理权。总体而言，结果强调了采取交叉视角的必要性，考虑社交媒体上的自我呈现与青少年（数字）社区内的威胁和机遇之间的相互作用。