‘Access necessitates being seen’: Queer visibility and intersectional embodiment within the health information practices of queer community leaders

Abstract

Navigating healthcare infrastructures is particularly challenging for queer-identifying individuals, with significant barriers emerging around stigma and practitioner ignorance. Further intersecting, historically marginalised identities such as one’s race, age or ability exacerbate such engagement with healthcare, particularly the access to and use of reliable and appropriate health information. We explore the salience of one’s queer identity relative to other embodied identities when navigating health information and care for themselves and their communities. Thirty semi-structured interviews with queer community leaders from South Carolina inform our discussion of the role one’s queer visibility plays relational to the visibility of other identities. We find that leaders and their communities navigate these intersectional visibilities through unique and iterative approaches to health information seeking, sharing and use predicated upon anti-queer, racist, ableist and misogynistic sentiments. Findings can inform queer-inclusive, intersectionally informed interventions by health and information professionals such as non-profit advocacy organisations and medical librarians.

Advancing information practices theoretical discourses centered on marginality, community, and embodiment: Learning from the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) communities

“…Thus far, we have been generalizing lived experiences among LGBTQIA+ communities. Though such generalizations convey important commonalities among community members' information practices, they also threaten to represent marginalized communities as monoliths Wagner and Kitzie (2021). Understanding embodied information practices become essential to avoid this reductive mistake.…”

Personal information management burden: A framework for describing nonwork personal information management in the context of inequality

“…In recognizing that one's information behavior can be related to one's association with a marginalized group, Chatman draws attention to the nature of the inequality between the information behavior of a marginalized social group, which was explored in this study. Chatman's theory of information poverty has also been explored in many situations with examples including but not limited to the information world of female prisoners (Chatman, 1999), the information world of the homeless (Hersberger, 2002/2003), young men who have sex with other men (Veinot et al, 2013), and health information practices of the queer community (Wagner & Kitzie, 2021). Haider and Bawden (2007) used discourse analysis to gain an understanding of how the concept of information poverty is described in LIS research.…”

Beyond disclosure: the role of self-identity and context collapse in privacy management on identified social media for LGBTQ+ people

“…The perception of context collapse will motivate people to engage in privacy management activities to reevaluate and recalibrate the privacy rules. Many previous studies have found that LGBTQþ individuals would conduct protective and defensive information practices (Kitzie et al, 2022), and employ various tactics for being strategically visible and avoiding context collapse, such as creating multiple profiles, tailoring disclosed contents, separating audiences (Carrasco and Kerne, 2018;Duguay, 2016;Hanckel et al, 2019;Triggs et al, 2021;Wagner and Kitzie, 2021). Hence, we propose that:…”