Abstract
In this chapter Vivienne explores a case study in the formation of a community of trans* and gender-diverse (TGD) people in regional and urban centres in South Australia, both on and offline, during a social media storytelling initiative called Stories Beyond Gender. Vivienne considers some similarities and differences between self-making in traditional Digital Storytelling workshops, and the more dispersed and potentially incoherent fragments of selves that were shared across a variety of digital platforms during this project. This chapter covers tensions evident in curating complex, fluid, or multiple identities, both for oneself and as a community, in digitally mediated forms, arguing that negotiations over coherence (as judged by others) and congruence (as intuited by self) can be affirming, building the resilience required to undertake advocacy.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
boyd, danah. (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New York: Yale University Press.
Brown, J., & Isaacs, D. (1995). World Cafe History [Non-Profit Organisation]. Retrieved 13 June 2014, from http://www.theworldcafe.com/history.html.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Calderone, A. (2015, October 15). Aydian Dowling Loses Men’s Health Cover Competition [entertainment news and commentary]. Retrieved 12 November, from http://www.people.com/article/aydian-dowling-mens-health-cover-competition.
Devas, B. (2015, May 22). Photographic Tai Chi [Digital Art Project]. Retrieved 29 December, from http://photomediationsmachine.net/2015/05/22/photographic-tai-chi/.
Dreher, T. (2009). Listening Across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism Beyond the Politics of Voice. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23(4), 445–458.
Fink, M., & Miller, Q. (2014). Trans Media Moments: Tumblr, 2011–2013. Television & New Media, 15(7), 611–626.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Gillespie, T. (2010, May 1). The Politics of ‘Platforms’. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Green, J. (2004). Becoming a Visible Man. Nashville: Vanderbily University Press.
Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Los Angeles: Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hearn, G. N., Tacchi, J. A., Foth, M., & Lennie, J. (2009). Action Research and New Media: Concepts, Methods and Cases. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Ito, M., Davidson, C., Jenkins, H., Lee, C., Eisenberg, M., & Weiss, J. (2008). Youth, Identity, Digital Media (D. Buckingham, Ed.). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Jurgenson, N. (2011, February 24). Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality. Retrieved 20 November 2013, from http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/.
Lambert, J. (2013). Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. London and New York: Taylor & Francis.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. (1992, August 1). Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity. Systems Practice, 5(4), 379–393. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01059830.
Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Penney, J. (2012). Visible Identities, Visual Rhetoric: The Self-Labeled Body as a Popular Platform for Political Persuasion. International Journal of Communication, 6, 2318–2336.
Renninger, B. J. (2014, April 9). Where I Can Be Myself… Where I Can Speak My Mind: Networked Counterpublics in a Polymedia Environment. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814530095.
SHine SA, I. S. (2010). What’s Your Story: Facilitator’s Guide. Adelaide, Australia: SHine SA.
Vivienne, S. (2016). Digital Identity and Everyday Activism: Sharing Private Stories with Networked Publics. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vivienne, S. (2017, April 3). I Will Not Hate Myself Because You Cannot Accept Me: Problematizing Empowerment and Gender-Diverse Selfies. Popular Communication, 15(2), 126–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1269906.
Vivienne, S., Robards, B., & Lincoln, S. (2016). ‘Holding a Space’ for Gender-Diverse and Queer Research Participants. In Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest, Culture (pp. 191–212). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vivienne, S. (2018). Between Firefighting and Flaming: Collective and Personal Trans* and Gender-Diverse Social Media. In: Dobson, A.S., Robards, B., Carah, N. (eds) Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97606-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97607-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)