Abstract
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) people are experiencing increasingly varied visibility on social media due to ongoing digitalization. In this paper, I draw on social epistemology and phenomenological accounts of the digital (Frost-Arnold in: Lackey (ed) The epistemic dangers of context collapse online, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021; Krueger and Osler in Philos Topics 47(2):205–231, 2019; Hine in: Ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday, Bloomsbury, London, 2015), and argue that, for LGBTQ+ individuals, social media provides a space for connecting with people with shared lived experiences. This, in turn, makes it possible for social media to enable feelings of belonging. By interacting with other LGBTQ+ people online, LGBTQ+ individuals are enabled to imagine their own being in the world and to feel like they belong. This is especially important when we consider that, for LGBTQ+ identities, it may be more complicated to feel connected due to marginalization and (fear of) discrimination. This paper not only draws on literature from phenomenology and social epistemology on the digital, but also presents and analyzes interviews that were conducted in order to explore the social media experiences of LGBTQ+ people through a phenomenology and social epistemology informed framework.
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Notes
Name and name of avatar changed to preserve anonymity.
I take phenomenological approaches to be “a philosophical investigation of experience, subjectivity, and the lifeworld” (Køster and Fernandez 2021). This will be explored further in the methods section.
Social media, here, means all kinds of different social networking sites that allow for creating a profile, connecting to other users, and dynamic conversation (Shapiro 2010).
Abbreviations
- LGBTQ+ :
-
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer,+ (and further sexual or gender minorities)
- BIPoC:
-
Black, indigenous, people of color
- FTM:
-
Female to male (outdated term to describe trans masculine experiences)
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GE designed and conceptualized the study. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by GE, with occasional help of two student assistants, Thale Reitz and Michelle Tannrath. The manuscript was written by GE.
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Eickers, G. Social Media Experiences of LGBTQ+ People: Enabling Feelings of Belonging. Topoi (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09994-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09994-3