LGBTQIOnline

Abstract

The entry examines some crucial ways in which LGBTQI people take advantage of pervasive digital communications affordances in their struggle for achieving full recognition and their rights in the digital as well as in the offline social spaces. This entry proposes that an understanding of the possibilities and the challenges offered by digital media to the LGBTQI community can be reached by considering both the material and the social aspects that structure the multifaceted relationship between LGBTQI people and digital media. The entry provides an introductory overview on these two orders of aspects, beginning from material ones—that is, by accounting for the (still few) reflections on the role that digital media affordances and working logics play in LGBTQI life. The entry then proceeds by focusing on the social aspects by looking at three broad sets of media practices that are particularly relevant to understand the potentialities and the risks that digital media bring forward to the LGBTQI world: representation and identity construction, community building, and activism.

Mapping the social implications of platform algorithms for LGBTQ+ communities

“…However, the claim that digital platforms directly empower LGBTQ+ citizens should not be made uncritically, as platforms can also play an important part in their oppression. Researchers are increasingly examining how digital platforms are implicated in forms of gender and sexual discrimination (Hanckel et al, 2019;Mainardi & Pavan, 2020). Studies examining the potential risks posed by digital platforms for LGBTQ+ communities have highlighted the propensity for their members to become the targets of online hate speech (Lingiardi et al, 2019), cyberbullying (Elipe et al, 2018), and harassment (Marciano & Antebi-Gruszka, 2020).…”