Rethinking genders in the digital landscape: Non-binary identities on Reddit

Resumen

The accelerating digitalization of everyday life has transformed the cultural and social organization of contemporary societies. Digital platforms mediate key dimensions of identity work, shaping, constraining, and enabling gendered self-knowledge through practices of media consumption, self-presentation, and community engagement. Within this landscape, online environments have become central arenas for the articulation of emerging gender subjectivities. This study adopts an integrated methodological approach combining quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how non-binary identities are constructed, negotiated, and legitimized within Reddit communities. Non-binary experiences challenge binary logics of gender classification, revealing the epistemic limitations of dominant frameworks and exposing the ideological nature of normative regimes. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on a corpus of 6,000 top-ranked Reddit posts, complemented by qualitative interpretation and netnographic observation, the research identifies a discursive ecosystem organized around three interrelated dimensions. First, autobiographical narratives foreground affective experiences and reflective processes through which users make sense of their gendered positions. Second, discussions concerning names, pronouns, and social interactions highlight the micropolitics of recognition and the relational labor required to navigate offline contexts. Third, digital rituals of validation enable users to test, refine, and affirm their identities within supportive environments. Together, these dimensions illustrate how Reddit discussions contribute to the collective production of vocabularies and visibility regimes that make non-binary experiences socially intelligible. Theoretically, the study contributes to sociological and queer digital studies by conceptualizing non-binary identity as digitally mediated performativity. Methodologically, it highlights the value of hybrid approaches integrating computational analysis with qualitative interpretation.

Keywords: Non-binary identities, performativity, online, recognition, digital cultures, LDA, netnography.