Negotiating trans identities: A discourse analysis of young adults' identity construction on social media
Publication Date
July 31, 2026
Creator
Jackson, Gabriel
University of Bristol, University of Nottingham
Abstract
This thesis investigates how transgender young adults use social media to construct their identities in response to known and unknown audiences, both online and offline. Using an approach combining sociocultural linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis, this study brings together analysis of participant social media posts and interview data to both examine and contextualise their social media practices within their wider social lives. It explores how seven participants take advantage of social media affordances to construct positive, agentive identities as transgender people across a variety of online contexts while also navigating the challenges of managing their online visibility and privacy. In addition to exploring how my participants understand and negotiate human audiences online, this study also considers the growing impact of non-human audiences, such as personalisation algorithms, expanding on existing research to explore social media users' relationships with these automated systems.
The findings of this research highlight first the creativity, adaptability, and complexity inherent in my participants’ social media practices as they work to construct their identities as transgender people amid an increasingly hostile political climate. My analysis further reveals the nuanced relationships that participants construct between themselves and their online audiences, and the sophisticated strategies they employ to mitigate context collapse. I examine how participants make use of the multimodal affordances of social media to construct vibrant trans and transitioning identities across semiotic modes, as well as exploring the complex relationship they have with social media visibility in both a literal and figurative sense. In explicitly considering the interrelatedness of their offline and online social lives, my analysis provides unique insights into how participants’ experiences of marginalisation cross the boundary between ‘offline’ and ‘online’ and inform their construction of positive, resistant online identities. Finally, this research underscores the critical role of social media technologies as sites for resistance, community-building, and positive expression, creating space for transgender people to resist cisnormative ideology and construct authentic queer and trans identities.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
PhD
Supervisors
Jones, Lucy
University of Nottingham
Hunt, Daniel
University of Nottingham
Associated Schools / Departments
UoN Repository URI
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