Implicit in this infrastructure is an understanding that there exists on the platform a sizable group of actors who would wish to do harm unto those people seeking refuge in locked accounts. It allows Twitter users to opt out, to a certain degree, from other users folding their cultural productions and words into a set of violent discourses. To view the tweets of a person with a private account, you must request to follow them, and they must in turn approve that request. Twitter allows users to operate with private or locked accounts. In order to understand how this happens within this subset of Twitter users, it is imperative to understand some basics of how Twitter functions, what memes are, what digital bodies are, what we mean by choreographies, and just what it means to appear gay.įollowing this analysis, I will highlight three areas that require specific attention by policy creators that allow for the establishment of more equitable grounds through which disempowered voices would have an increased ability to form notions of what it is to be queer.
The logics of this understanding of bodily aesthetics open subjects up to myriad forms of regulation and punishment, imposing constraints on how individuals fit in to different sociocultural categories. That is, they seek to establish a bodily aesthetic normativity for gay Twitter users, giving form to digital bodies.īodily aesthetic normativity references the ways in which bodies are made intelligible as belonging to certain constructed groups by making external and socioculturally coded perceptions of a subject’s bodily aesthetics seem natural, fixed, and self-evident. They rely on simple yet seemingly arbitrary qualifiers-drinking iced coffee, walking fast, and enjoying certain pieces of media or actors at formational ages-to determine what a gay body on Twitter should look like. Gay memes seek to establish a norm through which the gayness of a subject can be made intelligible to others in the know. This gives us an opportunity to see how social bodies are rendered through syntheses of digital narrative that are not only mimetic to a more seemingly natural social body, but indelibly a part of holistically comprised social bodies. Now, teens on Reddit or Twitch chat use boi synonymously with guy, apparently unaware of its recent history.The spread of social media offers insight into how understandings and formations of bodies are created intra-communally in global and pluralistic ways. Boi, through sheer luck aided by the fact that it’s quite cute and fun to look at, seems to have caught on to an extent few other things have. (For example, I found a self-described “nazi boi” on the r/teenagers subreddit months before the word entered common usage there.) Of course, their attempts don’t always work-extremists have influence, but not control over youth culture. This means that what’s popular among Nazis one day can become defanged and widely disseminated among the youth a few months later. They were able to try this because of the multiple points of overlap between extremist sections of 4chan and Reddit on the one hand and more mainstream meme-making and online gaming culture on the other. What to Do When Your Kid Is Reading a Book That Makes You Uncomfortable The Forgotten Gay Cable Network That Changed LGBTQ History Madison Cawthorn Thrusting His Naked Body on Another Man’s Face Doesn’t Tell Us Much About His “Gayness” There was even a minor controversy, covered in Paper magazine, over whether Dat Boi was an example of cultural appropriation because of its use of AAVE spellings, as described above. “Here come dat boi!” the standard text announces, with the response “o shit waddup!” It’s quite charming, as memes go, and was popular enough to have been covered in the mainstream press, including Vox and New York magazine.
Dat Boi is a piece of absurdist humor using an image of a frog on a unicycle the frog is placed in historical, fantasy, or futuristic environments, and the only joke is the strangeness and specificity of him being sighted by, say, Legolas of Lord of the Rings.
The big milestone of this newer, meme-influenced use is something called the Dat Boi meme.
On the other hand, r/bois was genuinely the first place I felt like I could be accepted for being a gender nonconforming AFAB person who likes being called a boy. In some ways it’s good that gender lines are less important, and of course things shift definition over the years (in terms of the meme use).