Performing politeness, citing gender: a digital ethnography of compliment exchanges on Facebook among Egyptian youth

Abstract This study investigates the speech act of complimenting on Facebook within the Egyptian context, exploring how gender is performed and negotiated through these linguistic exchanges. It employs a mixed-methods, digital ethnographic approach to analyze a corpus of 240 compliment-response sequences collected from the public Facebook profiles of young Egyptians. Theoretically, the study integrates Politeness Theory with Theory of Gender Performativity, proposing a critical-performative framework in which politeness strategies function as citational practices that constitute gender identity. The findings revealed distinct gendered patterns in both verbal and nonverbal complimenting behaviors. Men predominantly offer appearance-based compliments, often employing metaphorical language, while women’s compliments are more varied, covering performance and personality. Nonverbal compliments, particularly through Facebook’s ‘Like’ and ‘Love’ reactions, emerge as frequent but ambiguous politeness strategies. Compliment responses also showed gendered variation, with women often employing deflection or amendment strategies. The findings also suggested that online compliment exchanges should not be approached as simple phatic expressions. Instead, they are effective performative acts through which Egyptian youth cite, reproduce, and occasionally subvert traditional gender ideologies. This study offers a novel, empirically grounded analysis of the dynamic interplay between language, gender, and technology in a contemporary Middle Eastern context.