Videos of ‘unboxing’ smartphones Gender as an enunciative marker of the legitimacy of YouTube ‘influencers’

This article analyzes videos of YouTubers unboxing smartphones. We show that, far from reducing the gendered division of interests and expertise, these videos exaggerate identifiable gendered characteristics, in order to correspond with the media and society’s conception of the YouTuber’s gender. YouTube thus seems to support the gendered stereotypes propagated by the commercial sector, and even to reinforce them.