As Jenny’s post last week discussed, Facebook lets us identify our gender in very specific ways. But this blog post suggests that Facebook may also be a medium for performing gender. The post’s title suggests that “suspension” from Facebook is a “status symbol”–but I wonder if it’s not a gendered, nationalist/racialized status symbol, a symbol of a specific type of Indian masculinity?

Shriram Venkatraman writes:

one of my informants from this group, casually stated that he was banned from Facebook, meaning that his account was suspended for a couple of days. This was pretty strange and when further probed, he stated that he was thrown out because he had sent Friends request to strangers (read “foreign women”, specifically Caucasians) and Facebook had his account suspended as he seemed to be spamming Friend Requests to people he just didn’t know and who in no way shared any mutual friends with him. This was not the first time this happened to him. In fact, the first time Facebook had his account temporarily suspended he didn’t even know why his account was banned. But, he seemed to understand from the trend of account suspensions, that whenever he sent out numerous friends request to people (women) he didn’t know, his account was automatically suspended, or at least this was what he attributed his temporary account suspension to.

So, Facebook is set to suspend the accounts of non-white and/or non-Western men when they try to friend too many women–especially, it seems, white women. Is this another manifestation of social media’s tendency, which I talked about last week, to treat non-white users as threats to white women? I mean, when I read the post, it immediately struck me as another instance of the sort of racist sexism that uses the supposed vulnerability of white women to rape by men of color as an excuse to overpolice and oppress men of color. Lynching is another example; Birth of a Nation is another.

These men respond to Facebook’s suspension policy in a very interesting manner. They turned it into “a game they played; the more number of times their account was temporarily suspended and the number of days their account got suspended with the story of why their account was suspended earned them brownie points within the group.” Are those brownie points a kind of gender status, points for being a rebel? As Venkatraman argues, “the yardstick for heroism had shifted from the number of friends they made to the number of times they rebelled and were suspended for trying to make (read “spam”) friends.”

From this perspective, the suspension game sounds like a way for these men to turn racist policies into something that’s pleasurable rather than damaging. While it may shift the racial politics a bit, it still instrumentalizes women, using them as means to gain alternative status points. Women are just pawns in this game. Which means, in my view, that politically this game is a wash: it uses patriarchy to ameliorate racism.