Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Liberating Young Adults from Gender Beliefs with Virtual Stickers in a Social Messaging Line Application
Chih-Ping Chen
ABSTRACT:
This paper attempts to understand how young consumers market themselves with virtual stickers in Line. The methodological approach to this research followed an interpretive phenomenology. To some extent, the results demonstrated that virtual stickers bounce the idea of creating new metaphors, liberating young consumers from gender beliefs to virtual imagination. Overall, the results highlight that virtual stickers stimulating interactions with others in self-marketing of Line friendships seem to depend on dominant cultural frame in which specific social situations/norms are constructed and, therefore, cannot be separated from socio-culture patterns of thinking, acting and interacting. To some slight extent, virtual stickers bounce the idea of creating new metaphors of digital identity formations, emotional expressions and gender role performances, liberating young Taiwanese consumers from gender beliefs to virtual sticker imagination. The main contribution of this study is that the knowledge young consumers gain about new ways of marketing themselves does not simply remain as forming digital identity, releasing emotion and doing gender with virtual stickers at a virtual level; rather it may become manifest in self-marketing practices in daily lives.
keywords: Digital identity, Emotion, Gender role, Self-marketing, Virtual sticker