By foregrounding queer joy as a practice of personal and collective resilience amidst a socio-political landscape of increasing queerphobia, queer joy in online spaces can be seen as a digital good for users, platforms and policy.
This project centres queer users, their knowledge, and their experience by building connections with and between communities, practitioners, and policymakers to explore how digital technologies can work for people and society, including through the development of a standard that platforms and policymakers can refer to as a benchmark for their provision.
The project also brought academics, user-communities, practitioners, and policymakers together in developing critical media literacies, highlighting the role of joy as an act of resistance against oppression.
Key findings
Queer joy – and its manifestation as a digital good – is found in relationships between people, with technologies, at all scales (ie from local to international), and in all contexts (ie from intimate to public). It is also found in the relationships between queerness and cis-hetero-normativity, and in our relationships with both the joy and rage that come out of our experiences within and outwith cis-hetero-patriarchal structures.
Queer joy is as variable as the number of people who experience and express it. The way platforms can enable or constrain queer joy are nuanced, ambiguous, and experienced differentially. Anonymity and identifiability, public access and privacy, and the porosity of digital borders are all features of digital platforms that can both facilitate and constrain the experience of queer joy.
Our findings tell us that the manifestation of queer joy as a digital good – and, arguably, the digital good more broadly – is a human-centred, rather than a technology-centred phenomenon. Whilst digital environments and the technologies that underpin them can enable or constrain, users have and yearn for the agency to control and navigate them in the pursuit of queer joy and the good it entails. As such, queer joy and its facilitation in digital environments is ‘problematic’ for solutionist approaches to improving digital experiences in the sense that queer joy is multiple, variable, and requires ambiguity/nuance.
Control over this variability and ambiguity necessitates a relinquishing of certain powers by platforms and policymakers, requires a re-conceptualisation of approaches to content curation and moderation, and means that ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to development and regulation are unachievable.
Theorising and making good digital futures should therefore consider the plurality and potentiality of queer(ed) subjectivities, the joy experienced through them, and the radical worldviews they entail. Ongoing machinations at the interplay between platform giants and global politics means that this problem – and the queer possibilities of change – is more pressing than ever.
Above: outputs from one of the workshops, held in Newcastle, 2023.
Team
Dr Lexi Webster, Deputy Director of Digital Humanities, University of Southampton
Dr Dawn Woolley, Research Fellow, Leeds Arts University
Dr Madeleine Steeds, Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin
Dr Ben Dalton, Principal Lecturer, Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University
Dr Genavee Brown, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Northumbria University
Dr Sarah Clinch, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Manchester
Dr Carolina Are, Innovation Fellow at the Centre for Digital Citizens, Northumbria University
Dr Alice Wilson, Research Assistant, University of York
