“LGBTQIA voices are not just participating in digital culture but actively shaping it to be more joyously queer than at any other point in history”
BY ALICE WILSON
We live in an era where digital platforms can be battlegrounds for queer identities. Online homophobia and transphobia look to be on the rise, and young individuals are now more likely to hold negative views towards the LGBTQIA+ community compared to older age groups.
If you are a reasonably-online queer person yourself, it can all be a bit much.
That’s why I jumped at the opportunity to work on a brand new research project called Queer Joy As A Digital Good, funded by the ESRC Digital Good Network.
This project is a breath of fresh air because it moves away from approaches to queer lives that centre on harm and suffering, and instead, it focuses on joy, connection, and creativity.
We are using interactive arts-based workshops as well as survey data collection to look at questions like:
- What is a digital good?
- What is queer joy?
- How do we know queer joy when we find it?
- How can we create more of it online?
Our results are very preliminary, but so far I can tell you that the queer community has not only found resilience but is actively reshaping online life itself.
Queerness in Pop Culture
We already know that queer culture has a foundational shaping power on broader pop culture, digital movements, online slang, and modern internet culture.
Common vernacular like telling someone they are “slaying” a look, or now-popular voguing dance moves hail directly from black queer drag and performance culture.
The blockbusting success of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series is another example of queer lives and stories playing a formative role in shaping online trends.
And the unrelenting fervour of women online loudly dreaming about having Rachel Weiz spit in their mouths and explode a bird on their faces feels like it should also get a mention here.
Connection is joy, connection is a digital good
Queer joy is not solely confined to grand gestures like Weiz-worship or acts of resistance like marches and protests; it can be found in everyday experiences that nourish and uplift individuals within the LGBTQIA community.
This is what the preliminary results of our research are telling us.
That queer joy online is about happiness against insurmountable odds and the creative freedom of being your own, weird, gay, alone, angry, gleeful [insert your chosen descriptor] self.
Our participants told us that they often find these moments of joy in the simplest experiences shared with others who understand and appreciate their journey.
Embracing the freedom to express themselves authentically fuelled a sense of joy and empowerment for our participants, supporting them in defying heteronormativity and homonormativity too.
Queer Rage is Queer Joy
Our workshop participants also shared a lot about the subtle shades of joy that shine in anger and in refusal to participate in the conventions of hetero or homonormativity.
The commercialisation of pride and the recuperation of the protest aspect of pride marches were openly discussed in some conversations and visually represented in a number of drawings.
Negativity and the joy of negative feelings came up a number of times. I like this. To me, it speaks to the fullness of humanity that can be celebrated in queer circles.
It makes me feel like a level of acceptance and truthfulness is maybe more implicit in some queer circles because of how much so many of us have to hide, mask, and conceal parts of ourselves in The Outside World™.
During the collage and drawing phase of the workshop, superheroes and gardens emerged as popular motifs, revealing metaphors around growth and transformation, along with ideas around saving and being saved, getting and giving help and support.
So what?
Here’s what I want you to take from this article:
LGBTQIA voices are not just participating in digital culture but actively shaping it to be more joyously queer than at any other point in history.
In whichever ways, small or large, you can also add to queer joy online too.
It has never been more important for you to do so because of the right swing in politics that we are currently enduring in the UK and many other parts of the world as well.
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