"We Gather Together We Collaborate Together": Exploring the Challenges and Strategies of Chinese Lesbian and Bisexual Women's Online Communities on Weibo

Abstract

In China, lesbian and bisexual women face intense stigma and difficulties developing relationships with each other. Although prior research has shown that online communities help LGBT people connect and exchange social support, few studies have explored the challenges Chinese lesbian and bisexual women face when initiating, growing, and sustaining such communities, in an atmosphere of platform censorship of LGBT-related content and intense discrimination from non-LGBT people. To address this gap, we interviewed 40 Weibo users in China, four bloggers and 36 followers of their blogs, who self-identified as lesbian or bisexual women. We found that a key technique these bloggers used to initiate their online communities was helping followers publish posts seeking support, sharing personal experiences, and seeking offline relationships. Then, their followers built relationships with bloggers by journaling their daily experiences as lesbian or bisexual women via private-messaging channels. As the communities' members grew more attached to them, bloggers and their followers began to work together to protect themselves from external threats, including Weibo's censorship and non-LGBT+ infiltrators' harassment. However, such attachment to the communities sometimes might lead to conflicts within them, which in turn prompted many members to leave, raising questions about the communities' long-term prospects. Our findings foreground important design considerations for those seeking to help lesbian and bisexual women in China and other discriminatory environments to develop safe online communities.

Cruising Queer HCI on the DL: A Literature Review of LGBTQ+ People in HCI

“…Also in 2020, at CSCW, the first paper on the experiences of queer people living in the Global South was published: Nova et al 's study of how Hijra in Bangladesh navigate social media ecosystems [158]. The first papers about the experiences of sexual minority women 13 was published at CHI in 2022 [45,46]. That same year, the first paper centering relationship dynamics beyond monogamy, which explored the breakup of a polyamorous queer couple, was published at DIS [128].…”

“…The first papers focusing on specific groups in the LGBTQ+ community often look at issues related to social stigma (e.g., the first papers on the experiences of bi+ [213], hijra [158], and lesbian/bisexual/sexual minority women [45,46]). Rather than focusing on particular groups, some work has also studied the selfpresentation of LGBTQ+ people writ large across various social computing contexts [34,52].…”

“…There is very little HCI research on specific queer populations. We found one paper centered on polyamorous queer people [128], one centered on bisexual people [213], and two centered on sexual minority women [45,46]. Clearly, there is "much ground to be covered" in research on queer populations [51,53], and specificity in Queer HCI research is a way we can be held accountable as a research community to cover this ground.…”

“…They found that while many works engage with sustainability as their central research focus "with tools and methods chosen or adapted as appropriate to address concerns about sustainability" [57], some start with an interest in "particular tools and methods" and use sustainability as an "application domain to test out those tools and methods." Similarly, some research in our corpus centered on queer people as a research focus (e.g., [34,45,97,213]), while others used queer experiences [210] or queer rights [229] as an application area to, for instance, understand content moderation [210] or predict policy changes [229].…”