Fashioning Multiplatform Masculinities

Abstract

Scholarly interest in the potential of personal style blogging to intervene in fashion media’s gendered norms has focused on women and femininity. To assess the implications for men and masculinity, this article examines gay male bloggers’ self-representational practices. Through interviews and textual analysis, we find their uses of different digital platforms reproduce and confront the heteronormativity of men’s fashion media in ways that speak to their status as bloggers in the industry. Specifically, their desire to demonstrate recognizable forms of fashion expertise keeps their blogs disciplined by industry norms of masculinity even as the need to self-brand encourages queer self-expression across other social media. We thus argue the ways in which bloggers embrace platforms’ technological affordances to engage multiple audiences are central to theorizing how their labor produces different discourses and depictions of masculinity. This builds on arguments made by gender and sexuality scholars to explain the significance of gay men’s fashion.