Theme:
Gendered Bodies and Digital Selfhood in Short-form Videos: Research from the Global South
The rise of digital platforms has significantly shaped the ways in which gender is negotiated in the digital age. Platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok have functioned as discursive spaces for self-presentation and critiquing of age-old gender stereotypes (Farcia, Scarcellib, 2023). Short-form videos, with their highly viral and shareable format, have emerged as an important tool in this context (Zhang, 2020). These videos enable a new generation of active users to create content that shapes and influences both social and commercial trends and informs quotidian practices that frame our perception of gender and embodiment. Discourses on the digital self centre around how bodies perform and how they can deviate from the socially accepted aspects of gender performativity. Social media platforms facilitate a redefinition of how gendered bodies are expressed, performed, and consumed.
These dynamics reveal the paradoxical nature of short-form videos such as digital reels as both tools of empowerment and instruments of containment. Understanding this duality is key to feminist digital scholarship, especially in the Global South. This special issue invites submissions that explore the intersections of gender, self-representation, digital reels, and platform culture, with an emphasis on how gender is both expressed and commodified in online spaces. We welcome analyses of how these expressions either reinforce or resist hegemonic and violent structures, and their implications for feminist scholarship in terms of agency and affect. We encourage interdisciplinary perspectives from gender studies, media studies, sociology, cultural studies, and related fields, particularly those rooted in the Global South, that critically examine how gender is represented, commodified, and contested in the age of digital reels.
Possible areas of exploration include (but are not limited to):
- Gender performativity in digital reels
- The commodification of gender and sexuality
- Bodies and the Nation
- Drag, body positivity, and gender activism on digital platforms
- The impact of algorithms in promoting gendered trends
- Authenticity vs. performativity
- Reels and gendered trends around fashion, body image, and social behaviour
- Self-representation and self-presentation
- The intersection of race, class, and gender in the commodification of identity on social media platforms
- The impact of social media reels on gendered visibility and activism
- Body shaming and flak in short-form videos
- Hate-mongering and Trolls
- Being and Becoming Bodies
- Platform governance, algorithms, and visibility politics in gender performance
- Feminist politics and the role of digital media in challenging or reinforcing stereotypes
Submission Guidelines
- Submit: 300-word abstract with author’s bio
- Email: sfvspecialissue@gmail.com
- Deadline: September 15, 2025
- Notification of Acceptance: End of October 2025
Notification of acceptance: Decision about acceptance will be sent by the end of October 2025. Only authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit full papers through the journal’s official submission platform.
Note: No publication fees will be charged for accepted papers in this special issue
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