I argue that Instagram’s political economy, particularly the state-corporate nexus of surveillance and censorship in India, processes of algorithmic privileging and disciplining, and acontextual hate speech moderation practices, renders marginal queer/trans users particularly vulnerable to censorship and surveillance. I draw on insights from 23 in-depth interviews with queer/trans women and non-binary Instagram users and community organisers across India, conducted February-April 2023 during my doctoral fieldwork, to explore the contours of these formations.

Digital space offers up new avenues and modalities for queer users to assert, contest, reformulate and negotiate ideas of queerness, as well as build relationships and intimacies (Dasgupta & DasGupta, 2018; Mitra & Gajjala, 2008). At the same time, the political economy of social media structures, limits, and reconfigures its use for queer/trans users in India, particularly women. Contemporary platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X (previously Twitter) function on an attention economy where virality equals profit (for the platforms and advertisers on them), where users are subject to algorithmic structures that privilege certain content over others (Paasonen, 2020), and where state-corporate nexuses of surveillance and control regulate its use (Dasgupta & DasGupta, 2018). Queer/trans users marginalised along the axes of caste, religion, dis/ability, language and location are particularly vulnerable to platform moderation practices, or deliberately targeted by state surveillance and censorship laws.

Drawing on participant experiences, I examine how the potentialities of Instagram as a site to mediate articulations of a radical politics of queer liberation are restricted, thwarted and reconfigured by platform design and policing.

In this study, we research the engagement on Ugandan LGBT+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bi- and Transsexual) organizations and activist’s posts from a multi-platform perspective. Focusing on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, our aim is to inform multi-platform research by studying how a historically underrepresented group in the global south navigates a complex communication ecology in an uncertain socio-political situation. We ask: 1) Which posts emerge as more popular regarding user engagement on the different platforms respectively 2) What characterizes highly engaged posts across the three platforms 3) What is the logic behind engagement practices? We approach our research questions using three different yet interrelated methodological approaches: A) Quantitative identification of highly engaged posts, B) Qualitative analysis of these posts and C) Qualitative interviews with organizational representatives. Our results show that different platforms have different logics when attracting engagement among activists. This has to do with platform affordances (such as Instagram pushing for photos and scrolling) and political realities such as Facebook being blocked, but also on the audience, that Twitter is perceived to be populated by international allies. There is not a lot of call for action because engaging with posts implies that you are seen, not only that you have seen the post, but that the posting organization sees you and sometimes even the government. We, therefore, conclude that engagement in this particular context is governed by visibility.

The release of the video game Breath of The Wild in 2017 ushered in one of the most popular ships that the Legend of Zelda series has seen, that of Sidon and Link. In Breath of the Wild Link travels to the kingdom of the Zora, a race of humanoid fish creatures, and meets their prince, Sidon. Sidon’s charm and enthusiasm for Link resulted in many fans claiming that Sidon was Link’s boyfriend. In the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, fans were faced with a new character, Yona, who was introduced as Sidon’s fiancée, thus contradicting their previous queer readings. However, there were also many subtextually queer moments that provided support for the queer readings of Sidon and Link. What is at stake here is understanding where these queer readings fit in relation to the heteronormative reading that the inclusion of Yona supports. To come closer to this understanding I analyzed examples of queer streamers on Twitch playing through the quest line with Sidon and the queer readings that the streamer and viewers in chat created. I argue that the co-creation of these queer readings is a form of play, allowing fans to change the game so it is satisfying and fulfilling, and thus cannot be separated from the game. Through play, these communities were able to create narratives maintaining Sidon and Link’s romantic relationship that drew on in-game elements to have a satisfying experience with the quest line thus making it a part of the game.

This paper explores how young queer women and sapphic people engage with queer elders and generational imaginaries through consuming historical content on social media. In recent years, digital spaces have facilitated an explosion of queer nostalgic content, digitised archival material, and historical education, rapidly shifting how queer pasts and cultures are transmitted. Scholars have begun to examine how this nostalgic boom has contributed to recalibrations of lesbian identity labels and community formations (Green and Crawley 2024) but there has been little empirical investigation into what this means for the young people enmeshed in these digital cultures. Drawing from an ongoing project conducted across the state of Victoria, Australia involving 21 young queer women and sapphic people aged 16-24, I examine the relationship between this content and young people’s affective investments in the concept of queer elders. I consider how access to elders is digitally mediated and argue that such engagements are both connective and disconnective in nature. Finding elders through historical content has the potential to generate cross-temporal solidarity and invigorate a deeply affective sense of belonging to a queer lineage. Yet, the fact this connection is limited to digital spaces and fragmented modes of recognition also magnifies feelings of loss and distance. I build upon queer theorisations of nostalgia and kinship (Bradway & Freeman 2022; Juhasz 2006; Kagan 2022) to conceptualise these relations as a form of “nostalgic kinship”—a relational, intergenerational structure of feelings that simultaneously binds and distances.