Running head: EXCLUSIONARY SPACES

Exclusionary Spaces:
Facebook and Gender Identity
D. J. Shull
California State University, East Bay

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Abstract
This paper addresses how Facebook creates exclusions that affect individuals who identify
differently from the socially constructed binary of male and female. The analogy of spatiality is
addressed as a way of creating the argument, and the authors gender identity is also addressed as
it forms a point of reference for why examining this issue is important. The exclusions are
named as gatekeeping and insularity, and defined: first, as a way to keep non-binary individuals
from participating authentically on Facebook; and second, as a way to prevent non-binary
individuals from being seen via the mechanism of the News Feed. These exclusions are
analyzed through the lens of the implementation of power and authority, and how that is
constructed through the technology of the site. The argument is then critiqued in terms of how
Facebook allows open presentation once a person uses the site, the availability of other social
networking sites, and the difficulty in using specific terminology for non-binary identifying
individuals.

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Exclusionary Spaces:
Facebook and Gender Identity
The analogy of spatiality is often applied to the Internet, despite its lack of a specific
physical location. People use words that evoke movement to, from, and through the various
locations (websites) on the Internet. As with most locations in physical reality, the virtual places
of the Internet also have boundaries and conditions for travel and participation, mostly having to
do with use and experience once they are at a particular website. And as Dourish and Bell
(2011) observe, [s]pace is organized not just physically but also culturally; cultural
understandings provide a frame for encountering space as meaningful and coherent and for
relating it to human activities (p. 115).
Social media is a prime example of this, since sites such as Facebook express these
concepts of location, physical and cultural organization, and boundaries and conditions. By
creating these boundaries, however, Facebook in particular allows some people in and excludes
others; this becomes very clear when questions of gender identity are brought to the forefront.
I believe that it is both appropriate and important for the purposes of this paper to
disclose my gender identity. In the Introduction to the Yogyakarta Principles, co-chairpersons
Corra and Muntarbhorn (2007) state:
Gender identity is understood to refer to each persons deeply felt internal and individual
experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth,
including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen,
modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and
other expressions of gender, including dress, speech and mannerisms. (p. 6)

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I identify as genderfluid: my internal sense of gender is not strictly male or female but variable,
encompassing male, female, and queer (as used by Ferreday and Lock (2007) in terms of the idea
of crossing boundaries and not only sexual orientation). My growing awareness of my identity
has led me to explore how media, the Internet, and social media deal with the idea of genders
different from the socially accepted binary of male/female.
Facebook functions as a point of orientation in this exploration. Facebook states that as
of the end of March 2012, they had over 900 million monthly active users (Facebook, 2012b).
As Cooper and Dzara (2010) discuss in their article The Facebook Revolution, Facebook is
primarily a computer mediated mirror of real life relationships, such as those between family,
friends, and acquaintances. Cooper and Dzara (2010) also say the following:
Through Facebook, the user creates a social artifact expressing ones self. This involves
developing a profile which states basic information about the individual (however much
he or she desires to reveal), possibly posting pictures, reporting a current status based
upon what the user is doing at any selected time and posting music or news events on
their walls. (p. 101)
At the same time, however, Facebook has limits on how a person can express themselves. Most
of these limits are clearly stated in Facebooks Community Standards (Facebook, 2012a) and
generally govern instances of violence (physical, mental, or emotional), salacious or graphic
content, and intellectual property.
The unstated limits around gender identity are more problematic. As an example of this,
a high school student posted a blog entry on May 22, 2012 that is now available on the
Huffington Post website. In this entry (Kellman, 2012), the student discusses their experience
with identifying genderqueer which, in my case, means that I feel part-female and part-male

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and how those experiences are made more difficult by the fact that they cannot self-identify
appropriately on Facebook for their family and friends. For individuals who identify differently
from the gender binary, Facebook is structured such that non-binary people cannot state their
self-identity.
These specific unstated limits come in two forms. The first limit is encountered when a
person creates or edits their profile a pull down menu gives the person a choice between
male and female with no other options. As part of their Community Standards (Facebook,
2012a), Facebook specifically says, On Facebook people connect and share using their real
identities. These things taken together imply that Facebook does not consider non-binary
gender identities real.
The second is built into the News Feed: while this function allows a user to see whatever
their friends are doing, it also means that unless their friends are making statements about nonbinary gender identity, or the user does a specific search for terms like genderqueer and
genderfluid a user will likely not ever encounter anything that suggests non-binary gender
identities. These unstated limits in Facebook create exclusionary spaces that disconfirm and
make invisible individuals who do not identify themselves as male or female.

Discussion
Before addressing specifically the two forms of exclusion gatekeeping and insularity
some groundwork is needed on this issue.
Cooper and Dzara (2010) provide one of the only works available that addresses the issue
specifically of the LGBT community and their use of Facebook:

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[W]e dissect Facebook as a tool that LGBT users employ to construct, maintain, and
sometimes hide their identities. We do this because Facebook is an innovative social tool
that enables users to attempt to reflect to their friends who they believe themselves to be.
(p. 100)
They spend the majority of their paper addressing issues of gay and lesbian identities (the L
and the G), but spend less time on the T or trans* (a term currently in use by and for transidentified individuals, and generally covers transmen, transwomen, and other individuals who do
not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth) component of that acronym:
There have also been complaints by the transgendered and their allies that Facebook
forces a choice between only male and female for ones sex. While Facebook now
allows the option of not showing ones sex in the profile, a transgendered option is not
available. (p. 102)
In that same paragraph, they continue, While Facebook can be seen as multiplying options for
networking among LGBT individuals, in other ways it may be seen as perpetuating the
hegemonic discourse by its creation of a structure that does not permit total flexibility in selfidentification (p. 102). It is perhaps ironic that the authors devote a limited amount of attention
to the issues of non-binary gendered individuals, repeating the discussion or lack thereof that
is not taking place in society.
The analogy of space in this discussion of Facebook is necessary for discussing the
concept of gatekeeping and insularity, as well as how the virtual environment in which people
participate is created. Phillips (2009), in his discussion of ubiquitous computing as it relates to
identity, says, Space is produced by the actions it mediates (p. 307), and Carey (1989), in his
discussion of communication as ritual, says, Space is made manageable by the reduction of

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information (p. 28). When paired like this in relation to Facebook, the mediated actions (posts
of writings and photographs, for example) create the space, and are then made easier for a person
to deal with because of the limited amount of information (only having a News Feed to monitor).
Space is created then bounded in a mediated fashion. As Dourish and Bell (2011) state, The
very organization of space and then its use, occupancy, navigation, and so forth are
experienced through a range of cultural lenses that give it meaning and significance (p. 106).
Another important point comes from Conrad (2009) when she points out that surveillance
is based in culture, which then has a normative effect on people whose bodies dont fit what is
considered normal that control of information that represents a persons body (as in a Facebook
profile) can be out of the control of that person because of culturally constructed norms. Even
when Facebook allows for a user to post whatever pictures they want within the boundaries as
set by their Community Standards (Facebook, 2012a) those images are still attached to a
profile that only allows for a binary declaration of gender. Visual presentation in terms of posted
images can be compared to the users profile, generating a possible dissonance that is out of the
users control.
Carey (1989) is also very useful in this discussion, because he addresses definitions of
communication. His transmission view of communication (p. 15) is formed from a metaphor
of geography or transportation (p. 15) entirely appropriate for a discussion of spatiality in
terms of its effects on communication. And his ritual view of communication (p. 15) is
relevant because it is directed not toward the extension of messages in space, but toward the
maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of
shared beliefs (p. 18) and that [I]t sees the original or highest manifestation of communication
not in the transmission of intelligent information but in the construction and maintenance of an

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ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action
(p. 18-19). These definitions highlight the concept that communication on Facebook creates and
maintains certain beliefs and meanings and that this communication reifies the gender binary in
two specific ways: the gatekeeping function and the insularity function of Facebook.
Gatekeeping
The first function of exclusion occurs not only at the very beginning of a users
experience with Facebook, but throughout their time using this social media site. To register for
use, a person must select from one of the two options, even if neither are appropriate to their
gender identity. The gate is kept by the software of the site itself, and only admits a person once
they have completed the appropriate tasks.
In and of itself, this could be considered a non-issue. It is simple enough to pick an
option (which can be changed over the course of use) and then create a presence that more
accurately demonstrates the appropriate gender identity.
Unfortunately, this view does not take into account the disconfirming nature of such a
choice. For individuals who do not identify as male or female, the need for a binary choice
(along with the use of the term sex when allowing users to make their gender public, and
messages that use gender specific pronouns, such as those about birthdays) create a form of
control on the experience of the site. The exclusion is not strictly physical, but blends elements
of the social and cultural as well.
Munns (1996) paper discusses excluded spaces in her examination of how certain
Australian Aboriginal (her term) peoples create places where a person is not supposed to go
based not only on the physical environment, but also social roles and the history of a place.
Munn (1996) says:

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These interdictions (referring to certain Australian Aboriginal spatial interdictions) create

a partially shifting range of excluded or restricted regions for each person throughout his
or her life. A specific kind of spatial form is being produced: a space of deletions or of
delimitations constraining ones presence at particular locales. (p. 448)
This idea of constraint on a persons presence is clearly applicable to Facebook. The
interdictions on gender identification constrain presence on Facebook to what is allowed by the
site.
Munn (1996) also discusses how boundaries are constructed in stories told by certain
Aboriginal peoples. The specific ancestral story she uses involves the witchetty grub, an edible
larval form(s) of various tree-boring insects (p. 456, note 37), and how a spirit guarded the
entrance to a specific location, and only allowed new witchetty grubs (immigrants) to travel to
the entrance, and then did not allow them to go inside (p. 456-457). Even as this story is used to
explain certain features of the terrain, it also defines the ways in which the owner of a physical
location expresses their control over that location. The owner can grant permission to travel or
refuse it, or create a limited set of conditions for passage or use.
The parallels with Facebook are obvious. The site can be seen as both the location and
the owner of that location (much as in Munns example), with the owner as the entity that allows
or disallows access. The boundary must be approached, and the only when certain criteria are
satisfied (according to the structure of the sign up page) can a person gain entrance. Only in the
case of this social media site, the person trying to gain entrance to the site can only do so by
satisfying a condition that disconfirms their gender identity.

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Insularity
The second function is at once both more and less obvious. Once a person begins to use
the site, they can select individuals to friend or pages to like; those friends or pages then
begin to show up in the News Feed, a continuously updated stream of information based on what
people say or do.
The feed allows the user to know what their friends are doing, saying, photographing, or
declaring interesting. But the feed only allows that, providing a limited amount of information to
a user, recalling Careys (1989) statement about managing space by reducing information (p. 28).
When the flow of information is managed in this fashion, it creates the illusion of openness while
insulating a user from a wider world.
Munn (1996) again is useful, in that she explains:
A simple but important example of this negative interaction is the detour, a pervasive
type of Aboriginal act, generally made either to avoid the temporary location of certain
persons or certain contemporary events, or the enduring agentive powers left in the
countrys named places by ancestors during ancient events. (p. 451)
She adds, On the whole, a detour of an ancient place must be far enough away to avoid seeing
it (p. 452).
The News Feed is that detour. It creates a situation where the user is directed away from
looking at certain topics unless they make a concerted effort to seek them out (through a search
function at the top of each page), or have friends on their list who address gender identity issues
on a regular basis. For people who do neither which may well represent a majority of the users
who passively observe their friends feeds Facebook insulates them from hearing or learning
about issues of gender identity.

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This is different from the gatekeeping exclusion in that it creates a type of invisibility for
non-binary individuals. As Ferreday and Lock (2007) state, It is only as a consequence of the
explicit and observable nature of online gender identities that the processes involved in their
construction are rendered visible (p. 171). When online gender identities are made explicit and
observable, the processes and by extension, the person performing those processes become
visible, and therefore when gender identities are not observable, the processes and the person
themselves become invisible.
Another aspect of the function may be found in Phillips (2009) statement, For example,
unusual gender performances notoriously call forth intransigence, as can attest anyone who has
tried to live a queer identity (p. 306). A person with an unusual gender performance on
Facebook may well become the target of that intransigence; this suggests that people who
identify differently from the binary may well choose a level of silence or invisibility that protects
them from negative reactions. In a perfect example of this, I do not make any direct reference to
my gender identity on Facebook; it is real for me, but so is the potential for intransigence,
whether by other users of Facebook or the site itself. Yet this silence simply perpetuates the
insularity function of Facebook.
And once again, we approach Careys (1989) work:
This projection of community ideals and their embodiment in material form dance,
plays, architecture, news stories, strings of speech creates an artificial though
nonetheless real symbolic order that operates to provide not information but
confirmation, not to alter attitudes or change minds but to represent an underlying order
of things, not to perform functions but to manifest an ongoing and fragile social process.
(p. 19).

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The confirmation of which Carey speaks is embodied in the apparent absence of non-binary
individuals. If a person does not have experiences with different gender identities in their life,
and their News Feed never mentions those identities, then the feed simply confirms what the
person experiences that male and female are the only valid genders. This is, for them, the
representation of the underlying order even as it manifests the ongoing process of culture.
Carey (1989) even says, For the ordinary person communication consists merely of a set of
daily activities: having conversations, conveying instructions, being entertained, sustaining
debate and discussion, acquiring information (p. 33). Facebook users do most of these daily
activities, but if a subject is not brought up or seen, it cannot be talked about, be part of debate or
discussion, or be information that is acquired.

Analysis
The very (in)visibility of this issue is apparent in Laukkanens (2007) piece on selfrepresentation online, in which she talks about teen girls coming out as lesbian or even trans*.
Specifically, she says, First, the different discursive spaces enable different social categories
and thus different self-representations. If a users self-representation does not fit into socially
constructed and negotiated (self-) representations, it is unimaginable and thus it does not exist for
others (p. 95). And Dourish and Bell (2011) mirror this when they say:
Information technologies are those of representation, and as such they inscribe particular
worldviews and inevitably obscure others. Information technology, tied as it is to our
mental and cultural images of scientific representation and progress, is a tool not only for
automation but also for legitimation. (p. 200)

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Facebook legitimates the concept of the gender binary because it represents a specific
worldview, enforces that particular world view, and makes other views invisible, much as nonbinary people tend to be invisible with regard to other forms of media. And when individuals are
made invisible, the other users of Facebook do not see them, do not see any of their acts of selfrepresentation (if such acts are even performed within the space of discourse that is Facebook);
this then reifies the idea that such differently identified individuals simply do not exist.
Winners (1980) article Do Artifacts Have Politics?, written more than twenty-five
years before the creation of Facebook, is an essential resource in examining this issue; he said,
But we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and
built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of
its professed uses (p. 125). It is within the realm of possibility that Facebook was not coded and
constructed to exclude certain groups of individuals. When we look at the Community Standards
(Facebook, 2012a) and the specific phrase, On Facebook people connect and share using their
real identities, an innocent reading of the text would suggest that the intent of the creators and
maintainers of the site is simply to allow people to connect and share. Unfortunately, as
Winner has already pointed out, the construction of this particular artifact has consequences that
result logically from how it was constructed.
This is not to say that Facebook itself is political; at no point do the Community
Standards (Facebook, 2012a) say anything regarding politics, political positions, or express
support for one viewpoint over another. Winner (1980) himself points this out: In the
processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are differently situated and
possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness (p. 127). If this is
applied to Facebook it suggests that this may simply have been a question of a lack of awareness

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on the part of the designer(s) of the software and the site. Gender identity is certainly not a
common point of discussion in the United States, compared with sexual orientation (another
issue that highlights a non-normative group of individuals). A person may be aware of issues
surrounding same-sex marriage because the issue has become quite visible in the media over the
past several years. At the same time, however, issues surrounding non-binary identification are
less visible, despite recent attention such as Chaz Bonos transition from Chastity, and a piece by
Melissa Harris-Perry (2012) on April 15th of this year called Being transgender in America.
And even this attention is oriented on trans* individuals; while technically the term transgender
is defined (by the site Genderspectrum.org) as Sometimes used as an umbrella to describe
anyone whose identity or behavior falls outside of stereotypical gender norms (2010), the
definition continues, More narrowly defined, it refers to an individual whose gender identity
does not match their assigned birth gender (2010). And people who identify as genderqueer and
genderfluid are not truly trans* except in the sense that the gender identity of individuals does
not match the gender they were assigned at birth.
But politics is inherent in the structure of the site because of the way it was created /
programmed. Winner (1980) addresses this:
There are instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly
biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results counted as wonderful
breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others. In such cases it
is neither correct nor insightful to say, Someone intended to do somebody else harm.
Rather, one must say that the technological deck has been stacked long in advance to
favor certain social interests, and that some people were bound to receive a better hand
than others. (p. 125-126)

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Even something as simple as a pull down menu contains an element of that bias, because it has to
be programmed to do the specific task of allowing a person creating a new profile to choose their
gender even if that choice is strictly limited. There may well be valid technological reasons to
maintain that programming, but investigation of the coding of Facebook is outside of the span of
this paper. Winner (1980) cites the example of Robert Moses, who had overpasses in New York
built to exclude buses from certain neighborhoods because socially disadvantaged individuals (in
Moses view, the poor and African-Americans) rode the bus (p. 123-124); Facebook may not
have explicitly programmed the pull down menu to exclude non-binary identifying individuals,
but the result is much the same as if that choice had been stated at the outset.
The artifact that is Facebook has politics, even when those politics are invisible to even
the people creating it. At Winner (1980) says:
the same careful attention one would give to the rules, roles, and relationships of politics
must also be given to such things as the building of highways, the creation of television
networks, and the tailoring of seemingly insignificant features on new machines. (p. 128,
italics mine)
In this case, the seemingly insignificant features of Facebook create a political stance: that
genders different from male and female do not exist. This is certainly not politics in the sense
most Americans would use the term, but it is political in the idea that this choice can embody
specific forms of power and authority (Winner, 1980, p. 121). The authority in this case says
that only two genders are valid, and the power is how that idea is reinforced.

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Critique
Some critiques can be made in regard to this argument, however.
The first, and most reasonable, is that Facebook does allow people to present themselves
however they wish within the confines of the Community Standards (Facebook, 2012a), and to
create groups and pages that allow people to express themselves in whatever manner they
choose. Facebook also allows users to search for pages and groups with specific key terms, such
as genderfluid or genderqueer.
In addition, an individual who self-identifies as genderfluid and who does not use
Facebook for several reasons, mostly centered on a preference for face-to-face connection says
that, The counter to that (the existence of exclusionary spaces on the Internet) is that the net
allows for people of whatever co-culture to create their own spaces (Shull, 2012). It (the
identifying pronoun requested by the interviewee) continued, I dont think the net creates those
spaces, the net just reflects the culture that creates those exclusionary spaces. The critique is
especially valid when considered in light of Ferreday and Locks (2007) paper that addresses
individuals who choose to present themselves cross-dressing through the medium of blogs, and
their freedom to self-identify as they choose.
Unfortunately, this freedom relative to Facebook turns out to be nearly as invisible as the
presence of non-binary identifying individuals. A recent search on Facebook (genderfluid
Facebook Search, 2012) for the term genderfluid results in one group and one community with
that specific word; the remaining top ten results vary between names of individuals (Gunderlund
the most common in the first ten results) and the term genderfuck (which is likely deliberate,
as the term is generally used when a person challenges normative gender identities). The open
group Genderfluid has, at the time of the search, 91 members, while the GenderQueer /

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GenderFluid community has 125 likes and was created in April of 2011. And a search for the
term genderqueer (genderqueer Facebook Search, 2012) only produces eight results with that
term, and only nine results in total. While the communities with genderqueer in their title have
more likes in general (four of those results show over 1,000 likes each), this is still a distinct
minority when compared to the population of active users. The insularity exclusion manifests
itself in the relative size of these communities and their likelihood of being found without the use
of a search.
A second critique parallels the first. Other social media sites exist that allow for a
somewhat more broad range of expression of gender identity. Google+ uses a pull down menu,
but with a third option: Other. (The choice of terms is problematic, but is outside the scope of
this paper.) Other social media sites provide even more choices for identification (FetLife, a
community for individuals who identify as kinky, has twelve choices for gender, including not
applicable; Diaspora*, another social media site, simply has a textbox for gender). Therefore
Facebook is not the only site available when a person wishes to present themselves on the
Internet as authentically as possible.
The response to this critique is that by comparison, Facebook is larger than any of its
competitors. The number of Google+ users is generally not available, though Guynn (2011)
quotes Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, as saying that it will finish 2012 with 400
million. Diaspora cites over 1.5 million users as of June 15th, 2012 (Diaspora*, 2012), while
FetLife states they have over 1.4 million users as of June 15th, 2012 (FetLife, 2012). Even
together, this does not begin to equal the current numbers as provided by Facebook. Its size and
scope contribute to the reification of the binary in the social media sphere.

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A final critique can be brought from Waites (2009) critique of the Yogyakarta
Principles, when he says, Gender identity tends to privilege notions of a clear, coherent and
unitary identity over conceptions of blurred identifications (p. 147). This is certainly a more
valid critique, in that the identities genderqueer and genderfluid are decidedly more blurred / less
coherent than the way that the Yogyakarta Principles defines gender identity.
A parallel critique must also be addressed in the context of this paper. There are a
number of instances where authors are mentioned, and then gender-specific pronouns are used. I
have done my best to use those pronouns only in instances when the pronouns are already used
in the papers cited; this still presumes and privileges a gender binary, though this presumption
exists more on the part of the individuals or groups who create biographies for those authors.
Both these issues and even the use of the terms genderqueer and genderfluid
assume a single identity, a single label that can be applied to an individuals expression of their
gender. Van Doorn, Wyatt and van Zoonen (2008) touch on this when they say:
The fact that the position of women is continually described in relation to the position of
men has reified the binary gender system, which functions as a normative mechanism that
categorizes individuals as either male or female and subsequently decides which
identities are both culturally legible and legitimate. (p. 358).
In this case, it can be said that the position of genderfluid or genderqueer individuals are
continually described in relation to the position of male and female that those identities are
defined by how they fit in with the socially constructed gender binary.
This is not a critique that can be resolved simply, as it addresses much larger issues than
how Facebook reifies binary gender identity. I bring it up here to point out that even in looking

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at these issues, they are still centered in the framework of culture, and therefore they must be
addressed in that larger framework.

Conclusion
The creation and maintenance of exclusionary spaces within Facebook is an artifact of its
construction and continued use. People who identify differently from the gender binary
experience a gatekeeping exclusion because they cannot declare a gender identity that is not
dissonant from their self-expression, and then experience an exclusion by virtue of the insularity
of the News Feed.
Dourish and Bell (2011) state, In particular, it is useful to think in terms of the legibility
of places, technologies, and actions how it is that they can be read and understood as
conveying specific sorts of messages (p. 193). Whether Facebooks creators intended their
artifact to convey the messages of power and authority, such a reading of exclusion can be taken,
and the specific messages of disconfirmation and invisibility conveyed.

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EXCLUSIONARY SPACES

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Oxford University Press.
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21, 2012.
van Doorn, N., Wyatt, S., & van Zoonen, L. (2008). A Body of Text. Feminist Media Studies,
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