Research

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.