Social Media as Social Transition Machinery: Separating Identities and Networks During Gender Transition on Tumblr and Facebook

Abstract

Social media, and people's online self-presentations and social networks, add complexity to people's experiences managing changing identities during life transitions. I use gender transition as a case study to understand how people experience liminality on social media. I qualitatively analyzed data from transition blogs on Tumblr (n=240), a social media blogging site on which people document their gender transitions, and in-depth interviews with transgender bloggers (n=20). I apply ethnographer van Gennep's liminality framework to a social media context and contribute a new understanding of liminality by arguing that reconstructing one's online identity during life transitions is a rite of passage. During life transitions, people present multiple identities simultaneously on different social media sites that together comprise what I call social transition machinery. Social transition machinery describes the ways that, for people facing life transitions, multiple social media sites and networks often remain separate, yet work together to facilitate life transitions.