Dhoest, A. and Szulc, L. (2016) Navigating online selves : social, cultural, and material contexts of social media use by diasporic gay men. Social Media + Society, 2 (4).
Abstract
Social media not only create new opportunities but also pose new challenges for the ways people navigate their online selves. As noted by boyd, social media are characterized by unique dynamics such as collapsed contexts, implying that one’s distinct offline social worlds meet online. This creates particular challenges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, at least those who find it crucial to maintain distinct contexts in which they disclose or conceal their gender and/or sexual selves. However, the existing scholarship on social media use by LGBTQs is predominantly anchored in English-language Western contexts and tends to lose sight of the cultural specificities of Internet use. Therefore, in this article, we build on the scholarship to further investigate the role of context for disclosing or concealing gender and/or sexual selves online. More specifically, we ask, “How do social, cultural, and material contexts affect the ways LGBTQs navigate their selves on social media?” To investigate this question, we analyze in-depth face-to-face interviews with gay men who themselves, or whose parents, migrated to Belgium. Because their migration background forces them to negotiate different social, cultural, and material contexts, our focus on diasporic gay men helps to bring out the issue of context in social media use.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is correctly attributed. |
Keywords: | social media; gay men; diaspora; collapsed context; Facebook; dating sites |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 25 Sep 2019 11:28 |
Last Modified: | 25 Sep 2019 11:28 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/2056305116672485 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:151288 |