Queer joy on social media: Exploring the expression and facilitation of queer joy in online platforms
The Queer Joy as a Digital Good project explored queer joy, a practice of personal and collective resilience amidst a socio-political landscape of increasing queerphobia, in online spaces as a digital good for users, platforms and policy.
In a paper for the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Madeleine Steeds, Sarah Clinch, Carolina Are, Genavee Brown, Ben Dalton, Lexi Webster, Alice Wilson, and Dawn Woolley conceptualised queer joy as a form of resistance to oppression by celebrating queerness in the face of adversity.
This paper was awarded an Honorable Mention award, meaning it was evaluated as being in the top 5% of the papers accepted at the conference.
Abstract
Queer joy is conceptualised as a form of resistance to oppression by celebrating queerness in the face of adversity. This research aimed to centre queer joy and understand how it is expressed and may be facilitated in online spaces. To do this we conducted a survey with 100 UK participants who indicated they identified as LGBTQ+ on the online recruitment platform Prolific.
We asked a series of open and closed questions in an online survey to investigate 1) what queer joy looks like on social media 2) how queer joy content is engaged with on social media 3) which platforms are perceived to facilitate queer joy and 4) how queer people protect their privacy online.
The results suggested that to facilitate queer joy online, platforms should allow flexible self expression and community engagement, while allowing for granular control over privacy and the audience such content is shown to.
How to cite the paper
M. Steeds et al. (2025) Queer Joy on Social Media: Exploring the Expression and Facilitation of Queer Joy in Online Platforms. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 954, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713592
Back to Outputs