Abstract
In this article, we argue how instant messaging (IM) is actively made into a communicative space of their own among migrant girls. Triangulating data gathered through large-scale surveys, interviews and textual analysis of IM transcripts, we focus on Moroccan-Dutch girls who use instant messaging as a space where they can negotiate several issues at the crossroads of national, ethnic, racial, age and linguistic specificities. We take an intersectional perspective to disentangle how they perform differential selves using IM both as an ‘onstage’ activity through which they express their communal, public and global youth cultural belongings and as a ‘backstage’ activity through which they articulate their individual, private and intimate identity expression. Instant messaging appears to be a space where they can strategically (re-)position themselves. The relationship between the online world of IM and the off-line world is shown to be intricate and complex; at certain points, both worlds overlap and at others they diverge. Despite all existing constraints that are both related to gender restrictions, often disenfranchised family backgrounds, religious dictums, and surveillance by parents, siblings and peers, which affect Moroccan-Dutch girls in specific ways, IM is also understood as a unique space for exerting their agency in autonomous, playful and intimate ways.
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Notes
CBS (2010) ‘Population, core figures, 20 October 2010’ Statistics Netherlands, http://statline.cbs.nl/, last accessed February 21, 2011.
MSN has recently been renamed Windows Live Messenger, but all our interviewees keep referring to it as MSN.
To open up this study to a larger audience, logs and interviews were translated into English. We sought out ways to include the specificities of the multi-lingual out-of-school IM literacies in our translations, and therefore all non-Dutch words and sentences (in English, Spanish, (Latinized) Arabic and Berber) were not translated into English in the running text, but are translated and clarified as bracketed text. Decorative creative spellings were carried over into English.
Insha’ Allah, inchAllah or In šā’ Allāh is an Arabic phrase
that can be translated into English here as ‘If it is God's will’, or ‘God willing’.Grinter, R.E. and Palen, L. (2002) ‘Instant messaging in teen life’ Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. (21–30). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/587078.587082, last accessed November 3, 2010.
Boumans lists ‘moker’, ‘maroc’ and ‘mocro’ as common Moroccan-Dutch self-identification labels (Boumans, 2002: 15).
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Acknowledgements
An earlier draft of this article was presented at the ‘Matters of Communication conference’ organized by the International Communication Association in Singapore, June 2010. We thank those who participated in the session on ‘Gendered discourses and networks of science, technology and modernity’ for their feedback. Also, we would like to acknowledge the thought-provoking suggestions made by two anonymous reviewers. Thanks to Fayrouz Boulayounne for her assistance in translating the corpus and to Tamara Shepherd for proofreading the article. We are grateful to Fatiha, Naoual, Midia, Kamal, Khadija and Inzaf for granting us access to their private communicative space.
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Leurs, K., Ponzanesi, S. communicative spaces of their own: migrant girls performing selves using instant messaging software. Fem Rev 99, 55–78 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.39