Queering Internet Studies: Intersections of Gender and Sexuality

Bromseth, Janne; Sundén, Jenny

doi:10.1002/9781444314861.ch13

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Various researchers have investigated other online spaces devoted to specific LGB sub-communities, such as barebackers (Mowlabocus, 2010), gay men who possess and/or are attracted to non-normative bodies (Campbell, 2004), and LGBs who are into BDSM (from BDDSSM: Bondage and Discipline, Domination and Submission, Sadism and Masochism; Rambukkana, 2007). Yet, some authors also criticize different normative constraints of the usually general-interest LGB spaces on the Internet, particularly with regard to racism (Gosine, 2007;Lee, 2007) and sexism (Bromseth and Sundén, 2011 Munt, Bassett, and O'Riordan (2002, p. 136) conceptualize the Internet as "a facilitatory space [which] allows the development of social identities that might otherwise be more constrained". The Internet then gets to be regarded as a testing ground or a "social laboratory" (Turkle, 1995) where LGBs or questioning youth may try out new sexual identities (see also Alexander et al, 2004;Boellstorff, 2008;Egan, 2000).…”

Section: Coming Out and The Internetmentioning

confidence: 97%

The internet and sexual identity formation: Comparing Internet use before and after coming out

Szulc¹,

Dhoest²

2013

Communications

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Even in its early years, the Internet was recognized as a medium with great potential for lesbians, gay men, and bisexual individuals (LGBs), especially for LGB youths struggling with their sexual identity. Yet, Internet research related to coming out tends to focus on particular cases or Internet use before and during coming out. Consequently, as such research emphasizes the opportunities and positive aspects of the Internet for LGBs, it may lead to an overestimation of the importance of sexual identity in terms of LGB Internet use. Therefore, in this paper we explore the LGB-specific Internet use of a broad crosssection of the LGB community both before or during and after coming out. Our quantitative online survey and in-depth interviews show that LGBs use the Internet for LGB-oriented purposes less after coming out than before or during it. The results suggest that sexual identity becomes a less salient topic in terms of everyday Internet use after coming out.

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Section: Coming Out and The Internetmentioning

confidence: 97%

The internet and sexual identity formation: Comparing Internet use before and after coming out

Szulc¹,

Dhoest²

2013

Communications

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“…Here, I would like to note that I explicitly locate myself as a queer internet subculture researcher whose in-group knowledge and physical body shapes my data collection and mediates relationships with interlocutors (Campbell, 2009;Bromseth and Sundén, 2011). Further, my theoretical interests in race and racism are explicitly tied to my own identity as a Black American queer man and begins from the position that the internet has long been a conduit for meaningful intimate connections and disconnections among queer people (McGlotten, 2013).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Racing the Platform/Platforming Race

Persaud

Guarriello

Maris

et al. 2020

SPIR

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Race and racism are enduring structural forces that have a hand in virtually every aspect of society; the internet and its vast array of platforms, applications, devices, and cultures are well within their grasp (Nakamura and Chow-White, 2013; Brock, 2020). The papers on this panel trouble, question, and reorient notions of how race comes to matter in our contemporary digital landscape. We build on scholarship that explores how content creators make sense of their relationships to audiences, their contested digital labor, and the centrality of identity to their (im)material work (eg: Baym, 2018; Abidin, 2018; Senft, 2008). Indeed, as critical internet researchers interested in “the lively, animated machines of today’s internet”, we argue that an examination of influencers, microcelebrity, and virality that explicitly attends to race and racism is sorely needed. This panel brings together a diverse group of interdisciplinary (anthropology, sociology, media and communication, game studies, queer studies, and feminist studies) scholars working in the United States and Australia, who engage in empirical and theoretical research on microcelebrity and influencer cultures. The papers in this panel employ a broad range of methods - including qualitative discourse analysis and digital ethnographic research of YouTubers, OnlyFans creators, TikTok users, and Facebook groups - to offer a multifaceted analysis of how race and racism function across social media platforms and within microcelebrity/influencer cultures. The first paper takes the broadest approach in their digital ethnographic work and attempts to flesh out the workings of race, gender, and political economies of influencers on YouTube. Particularly, Paper 1 analyzes the Pokémon GO phenomenon and the influencers who came to fame through building relationships with their fans, discarding conversations of race and racism, and engaging in unequal, gendered forms of private work. Key to its argument is an examination of how particular social locations of race and gender and the neoliberal project of entrepreneurship affect the clout, visibility, and well-being of Pokémon GO influencers. The next three papers focus explicitly on how race operates within microcelebrity and influencer circles as well as the effects that racism has on influencers across various social media platforms. Indeed, Paper 2 examines how race and racism mediate the experiences of gay porn microcelebrities in order to flesh out the differing, racialized relational work that occurs on OnlyFans and within its attendant social media subcultures. Most crucially, it destabilizes the often unnamed ‘white default’ of porn studies, while accounting for how race, racism, and sexuality shape online microcelebrity. Paper 3 studies the TikTok platform to think about how young influencers navigate race and racism and pose social justice stances on a burgeoning and ephemeral platform. In particular, engagement with American racial and cultural politics are explicitly linked to notions of platformed citizenship norms on TikToK. Finally, Paper 4 introduces the term “platformed race” to interrogate how Asianness is commodified, circulated, and microcelebrified within Subtle Asian Things (SAT), a private Facebook group. The paper interrogates how dominant narratives on SAT tend to leverage diasporic Asianess in the generation and circulation of memes, which in turn provoke socio-political debate and incite culturally relevant discourse amongst its distributed global community. To summarize, our analyses explore the intersections of microcelebrity and influencer economies, cultures, and labor demands by looking at how creators and their audiences experience race and racism across several platforms. Our various approaches contribute different examinations of race and racism to existing literature on the everyday experiences and structural hurdles that microcelebrities and influencers must endure in order to sustain their livelihood in a shifting platform(ed) landscape (eg: Abidin, 2018, Baym, 2018, Duffy, 2017). As internet researchers working with qualitative methods, we can never know in advance what contexts might be most meaningful for our work, and so we remain critical of how we make sense of both our own judgements and those of our participants (Markham and Baym, 2009). References Abidin, C. (2018). Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online. United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing. Baym, N. K. (2018). Playing to the crowd: Musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection (Vol. 14). NYU Press. Brock Jr, A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (Vol. 9). NYU Press. Duffy, B. (2017). (Not) getting paid to do what you love: Gender, social media, and aspirational work. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. Markham, A. N., & Baym, N. K. (Eds.). (2009). Internet inquiry: Conversations about method. Sage Publications. Nakamura, L., & Chow-White, P. (Eds.). (2013). Race after the Internet. Routledge. Senft, T. M. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity and community in the age of social networks (Vol. 4). Peter Lang.

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“…In the late 1990s, trigger warnings also began to appear on feminist website message boards and blogs such as on xoJane and the Ms. Magazine forum, signalling care and safe spaces (Vigliano, 2014). In this sense, the history of trigger warnings can be connected to the simultaneous rise of cyber-feminist utopias about the Internet: how it could enable a different kind of world that would function based on the needs of the marginalised, and free us from identity-based hierarchies and oppression (for an overview see Bromseth and Sundén, 2011). On the other hand, the background has been located in fan fiction (Lothian, 2016), where content warnings were also used in the 1990s.…”

Section: Respecting Vulnerability: Trigger Warning Policies In Feminimentioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiating vulnerability in the trigger warning debates

Kyrölä¹

2018

The Power of Vulnerability

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Queering Internet Studies: Intersections of Gender and Sexuality

Cited by 11 publications

References 39 publications

The internet and sexual identity formation: Comparing Internet use before and after coming out

The internet and sexual identity formation: Comparing Internet use before and after coming out

Racing the Platform/Platforming Race

Negotiating vulnerability in the trigger warning debates

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