Snapchat and digitally mediated sexualised communication: ruptures in the school home nexus

Abstract

Snapchat, released in 2011, is embedded in the youth culture of advanced capitalist societies. Theorising Snapchat from a socio-material ontology, we explore the application’s capacity to evoke the gendered politics of networked affect. Dipping into the conceptual toolbox of Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, we map how affect is distributed through bodies and objects (mobile technologies, the Snapchat application and human bodies) in socio-material assemblages. Conversations with principals and parents support this new material examination of the agency of this technology. Snapchat is inherent in the creative flows of affect that influence bodies, relations, and politics – at home, school, and across the online worlds of youth peer communications. The technology, when enfolded in schooling assemblages, is an agentic object that mobilises moral panics associated with childhood innocence, slut shaming and the commodification of girl’ bodies.