Neo-Identities and the Anti-Assimilationist Cyberqueer: How Microblogging Has Globally Redirected and Redefined LGBTQ+ Self-Advocacies (2010s–present)

This thesis explores how microblogging platforms, since the mid-2010s, have enabled voices previously marginalized within LGBTQ+ communities to globally democratically intervene in social justice conversations. In recent years, (youthful) queer counterpublics on such platforms have been particularly notable for their prolific coinage of neo-identity neologisms, which express counter-cis/heteronormative experiences of gender and attraction not easily captured by existing LGBTQ+ vocabularies. In this light, the thesis specifically inquires how affordances of the microblogging platforms Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram have assisted LGBTQ+ netizens—especially trans, non-binary, and A-spec users—to innovatively critique and introduce alternatives to marginalizing normative conceptions of gender and sexuality. After placing these affordances within historical and contemporary contexts of LGBTQ+ (self-)advocacy, the thesis interprets discursive patterns in LGBTQ+ self-advocatory microblogging practices through an exploratory critical discourse analysis of a corpus of 180 top posts, in equal parts retrieved from Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram and from six LGBTQ+-related hashtags. The thesis finds that tagging affordances of microblogging platforms allow LGBTQ+ users with polyvalent interests and (sub)identities to find like-minded others and collaboratively devise new frameworks for self-expression and self-advocacy. Although both the content styles allowed by a platform’s architecture and the social context of hashtags shape the articulations of microbloggers, LGBTQ+-related hashtags tend to accommodate a plurality of affective, political, and educative intents. Often, LGBTQ+ self-advocates engage politically in response to others unduly politicizing their social-affective expressions or perpetuating ideas that threaten their safety or wellbeing. Rather than locating the LGBTQ+ self-advocacy potential of microblogging platforms only in “debates” imposed through power asymmetries, this thesis concludes that substantial new possibilities for queer and trans self-expression lie in the social-affective dimensions of these platforms.