‘That’s your unrestricted internet access from a young age, dude, not … your gender’: an exploratory study on the complex interconnections between digital media, school life, and gender

Emerging from a larger critical ethnography on the culture and context of gender in the New Orleans public charter school system broadly, this exploratory study describes the interconnections between digital media, school life, and gender. By analyzing qualitative interviews with students (n = 18) and school professionals (n = 8), the study results revealed a strong overlap between the physical and digital lives of students, with digital media creating, escalating, and sustaining youth interpersonal conflicts at school, with important implications related to gender. Further, consistent with prior research, youth, especially transgender youth, described digital media as a way to safely explore their identity; however, youth were also at risk of encountering misogynistic and transphobic content that could harm their identity development and self-image. Finally, school responses and attempts to regulate digital media at school were discussed. Study implications suggest that given the inseparability of digital and school lives, alarmist public policy responses and school bans may cause more harm than good. Instead, schools must examine how hegemonic power dynamics related to gender and gender roles emerge in both digital and physical spaces and create ways for challenging these norms.