Communication Culture and Critique

Bayramoğlu, Yener; Szulc, Łukasz; Gajjala, Radhika

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae031pmid: N/A

Queer cultures have long been transnational and in times of rapid technological advancements, large migration flows, and intense cross-cultural exchanges, queer connections are evolving in new forms and meanings. These developments occur at the intersection of various intertwined geopolitical scales: urban, regional, national, continental, and global, as well as physical and digital. This introduction synthesizes various theoretical and methodological discussions to highlight the ambivalences of contemporary queer cultures, focusing on their intrinsic transnational and digital conditions. The authors contributing to this issue demonstrate that understanding queer cultures in the digital age requires examining the roles of various actors, including big tech employees, online platform volunteers, queer influencers, audiences, and migrants. They also highlight how queer digital cultures transcend national borders and challenge oppositional binaries, such as local vs. global and the West vs. the Rest, all while maintaining a critical perspective on the ambivalences of digitality.

Qiao, Peng; Hu, Yuqi

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae030pmid: N/A

Drawing on Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities, this article explores the various transcultural interpretations of queer opacity, a Chinese variant of queerness within dan’gai web series. This study reveals that while viewers employ a shared interpretive strategy of queer reading to identify queer opacity, the effect of queer interpretation is contingent upon the queer interpretive subcommunities’ familiarity with Chinese culture. Moreover, different cultures possess sub-strategies of queer reading: visibility reading is often practiced in the global northwest to initiate visibility politics in society, while opacity reading is used in the global southeast in an unconfrontational manner within fictional worlds. By examining a layered interpretive phenomenon that involves transcultural reaction videos towards the Chinese dan’gai web series The Untamed (TU), alongside the danmu from Chinese viewers on these videos, this study contributes to scholarship on transcultural queerness through the lenses of queer opacity and transcultural reader reception.

Kanchan, Tanvi

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae034pmid: N/A

This article explores transnational queer political flows and negotiations in Indian queer/trans communities on Instagram, situating this in its limits and restrictions as a public sphere that is corporate- and state-governed and subject to conditions of profitability, censorship, regulation, and algorithmic disciplining. Using insights from 23 in-depth interviews with queer/trans women and non-binary Instagram users and community organizers across India, I argue that binaries of Western/Indigenous, global/local, authentic/inauthentic are insufficient to understand Indian queer digital politics. I instead explore the political utility of agentic reclamations and negotiations of queer/trans identity by marginal queer/trans users. At the same time, drawing on participant experiences of content moderation, censorship, and corporate and state surveillance, I examine how the potentials 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.

Willard, Zane Austin; Dubrofsky, Rachel E

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae025pmid: N/A

We analyze RuPaul’s Drag Race: UK vs The World (UKVTW), part of the larger RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise—one of the most popular current media representations of queerness. UKVTW features participants from different countries competing to be “Queen of the Mother-Tucking World.” We examine the intersection of queerness and whiteness, exploring the tension between national identity, racialization, and drag performance. Building on scholarship about reality TV and authenticity, we argue the series queers conventional notions of authenticity in reality TV by privileging fluid gender identities. Developing the notion of “strategic Westernness” we examine how the series presents a postracial imaginary that obfuscates race by foregrounding nationality: seemingly progressive representations of gender ultimately privilege white and Western participants.

Chojnicka, Joanna

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae026pmid: N/A

This article explores genres and narratives of gender transition on two Polish YouTube channels (forming one collective) to illustrate negotiations between transnational and local understandings, performances, and interpretations of (trans)gender identity. “Trans YouTube” is a valuable performative and discursive space, allowing (especially young) trans creators to maintain, present, and communicate the desired sense of self. The article explores multilingual and multimodal practices on Polish trans YouTube and discusses their role in localizing the transnational LGBTQ+ discourse within the local socio-cultural context. Applying the perspective of translation studies and exploring the role of translation (and non-translation) in localizing the transnational concepts of gender and sexuality makes it possible to trace the process of trans-creating the new language of the Polish trans community, a language that emphasizes trans social media users’ agency and is capable of expressing their individualized and localized gender transition experiences.

Rachdi, Hatim

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae027pmid: N/A

Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted between May 2022 and January 2024 with queer migrants in Athens, Greece, I offer the conceptualization of “glitchy transnationalism” as a corrective to the transnational promise of queer digital media—the notion that these platforms can seamlessly facilitate connections across national boundaries among queer individuals (e.g., Grindr). I explore how this promise falters for two queer migrant individuals, Ziri and Tilila—both of whom I interpret as encountering two glitches. I argue that understanding these perceived transnational “failures” as glitches showcases the interplay of factors such as legal status, migrancy, race, sexuality, and gender identity in shaping the lived realities of queer migrants within transnational digital spaces. Ultimately, this research underscores the relationship between state dynamics and digital media in the lives of queer migrants, urging scholars to adopt a lens that recognizes glitches as diagnostic of power dynamics within queer digital realms.

Lupindo, Esihle

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae028pmid: N/A

Much research looking at Queer migration focuses on the movement of people between countries and continents, where countries of origin are deemed unsafe. However, literature shows that in South Africa there are more people migrating internally than those migrating into South Africa from other countries. In this article, I draw on 15 interviews with BlackQueers who moved from rural to urban areas in South Africa to explain their Queer-centric motivations for migrating internally, which enabled them to “confront what it means to be Queer” through physical and digital interactions. The digital world is important because it surpasses fixed geographies. Digital spaces offer a refuge that may not be available in offline spaces even when there are legal protections that state that this should not be the case. This article provokes transnational scholarship to pay equal attention to movements within countries and digital spaces as it does to cross-country flows.

Melis, Beatrice; Paolini, Chiara; Fioravanti, Marta; Metilli, Daniele

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae029pmid: N/A

The continuing digitization and datafication that our society is undergoing are having a significant impact on our daily lives, giving rise to new possibilities but also entailing significant risks for people who are discriminated against or marginalized. Queer communities are particularly affected by these processes; therefore, it is crucially relevant to research transnational digital projects that involve them. In the Wikidata Gender Diversity (WiGeDi) project, we are looking at practices of gender representation in the Wikidata knowledge base, a collaborative online project managed by a worldwide community. Working from the idea that gender is a complex social construct, we investigate how the Wikidata community has approached the complex issue of modeling and populating gender data, progressing from a very narrow interpretation of gender as a binary to a representation that is more inclusive of a multiplicity of gender identities.

Zhao, Jamie J

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae005pmid: N/A

This commentary focuses on a rising transnational queer Chinese digital culture—Girls’ Love (GL) webtoons. I consider this queer women-focused entertainment as an epitome of the queer convergence of transnational flows, women’s cultures, and digital platform technologies in today’s Asia. My discussion sheds light on its multilayered queer-transnational characteristics, as well as the controversies surrounding its transcultural mediation of queer women. Rather than simplifying it as an anti-heterocentric Chinese convergence culture in an age of globalization and digitization, I highlight GL webtoons’ role in stimulating various voices concerning women during transnational encounters of gender and sexual knowledge.

Camminga, B

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcae007pmid: N/A

From an online African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) news and information website, launched in 2000, called Behind the Mask (BtM) to Sokari Ekine’s foundational 2004 blog Blacklooks, the digital has been crucial to queer African studies and, indeed, queer Africa. In this brief exploration, I navigate through the realms of queer African studies, African digital humanities, and African literary studies, using them as my guiding framework to uncover the digital emergence of an African transgender refugee diaspora. I suggest that this diaspora is producing content explicitly aimed back at the African continent to shape and deploy the reality of what it means to be transgender and African. In so doing, they are actively authoring themselves into existence.