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Interview by Elias Alexander

Elias Alexander: In the preface of your work, you give us readers a wonderful insight into how your own positionality has uniquely affected your work. You also speak to the importance of looking at queer women’s lived experiences as they are often overlooked in the literature. With this in mind, can you speak further to why it is critical at this juncture to highlight queer women’s experiences and how you came to be interested in queer women’s use of online platforms in particular?

Stefanie Duguay: There are three intertwined reasons that I decided to focus on queer women’s use of digital platforms, defining queer women broadly as including a range of people who are transgender and cisgender women under the LGBTQ+ rainbow. First, as you mention, my starting point for the research was my own positionality; I came out in my mid-twenties and social media played a large role in that process, from notifying acquaintances to figuring out how I wanted to express queerness in my style and everyday life. By experiencing a context collapse among my different audiences, such as family, coworkers and close friends, it attuned me to the difficulty of conveying sexual identity through digital media in ways that reflected exactly how I wanted to be seen. This led me down the path of asking, how do people actually do this through their identity-related practices on platforms?

Secondly, the focus on queer women balances out what I observed most in the field of digital media and technology studies as a disproportionate focus on gay men. In the 2010s, there seemed to be an explosion of what could informally be termed Grindr studies. And while this research built meaningfully on careful work that looked into gay men’s online representation and sexuality in the 2000s, it seemed that one had to seek out studies about people expressing other sexual identities. With the more recent momentum gained by trans digital media studies and more scholars attending to queer women, I feel that the field of LGBTQ+ digital media studies is broadening out.

Lastly, the book stresses that a focus on queer women matters because digital platforms are integral to lives and experiences on these platforms have the capacity to impact their wellbeing. They exist at the intersection of gender and sexual identities that can place them in the crossfire of misogyny and homophobia, both of which are rampant on the internet. Given this, parts of the book ask how, then, do queer women create lives within and through digital technologies that persevere even within these conditions?  

Elias Alexander: In your work you forward the concept of identity modulation. This concept is extremely relevant, insightful, and adeptly presented. I was particular struck by queer women’s almost strategic use of stereotypes surrounding lesbian, bi, and queer experiences as a way to leverage identity modulation through the axes of personal identifiability, reach, and salience across dating apps and social media applications. Could you say more about the importance of identity modulation as a concept for queer folks and how the utilization of stereotypes can potentially and paradoxically produce effective outcomes for queer women on online spaces?

Stefanie Duguay: Identity modulation is the ongoing process through which individuals and platforms both modulate, or adjust, the volume on representations of identity. In this process, individuals can make decisions about how they want to show up, and who they want to show up for. At the same time, platforms provide the means for signaling aspects of identity and also tend to respond to our activity, such as through personalization and the curation of content.

Scholars have been thinking about stereotypes for a long time and so I’m not the first one to discuss their utility and constraints. But stereotypes showed up in my research as a way to be recognizable to others. Stereotypes aid the salience element of identity modulation, since they allow people to self-represent aspects of identity in ways that ping on others’ radars. In a sea of information, if you’re a queer person who is attuned to rainbow flags or plaid shirts as a means of finding other people like you, then others signaling identity in this manner is going to be very helpful. At the same time, stereotypes can narrow our perception of what constitutes acceptable or appealing ways of expressing identity. Platforms can also contribute to this narrowing by providing specific menus or categorizing people according to rigid identity labels. So, we need to watch for where stereotypes are useful and resist when they render identities one-dimensional.

Elias Alexander: In Chapters 3 and 4 you explore the ways in which queer women engage in identity modulation across various social media sites, artfully elucidating how women’s efforts at self-branding can rightfully be understood as a form of affective labour. It seems to me that such efforts, however, may work to reify forms of homonormativity that enfolds queer subjectivities into the logic of a heteronormative capitalist agenda. Yet, at the same time, you highlight how your interlocuters like Alex, Jaxx and Chrissy, as well as Mïta, utilize the affordances provided through applications like Instagram and Vine to engage in posting images and videos that seem to subvert and challenge heteronormative standards, taking pride in posting overtly queer or more sexually themed content for their audiences. You note that these practices hold a potentiality to foster a more personalized community among your interlocuters and their followers, producing publics and counterpublics. Can you speak further to how you view the tension between the ever-present specter of homonormativity and capitalist exploitation alongside the possibility for individuals to queer these online spaces?

Stefanie Duguay: I think that so long as this activity is happening on commercial platforms, it’s going to be subject to capitalist markets in various ways. The policies and interests of platforms in appeasing advertisers and appealing to broad audiences means that they reward ad-friendly, marketable content, which can pressure social media users toward homonormativity. At the same time, there might be something to be gained by playing this game: individuals who I interviewed talked about how self-branding on social media gained them visibility and clients that were conducive to their career growth. Yet, they also often strived to post content that they felt still reflected their everyday lives. Therefore, I think we need to move away from attitudes that judge social media creators according to a dichotomy of supposedly selling out or being authentic, and rather consider how individuals are logically self-representing in ways that respond to the commercial conditions in which they’re posting. Of course, I’m not the only one saying this and I encourage folks to check out the work of Tobias Raun, Crystal Abidin and others working in this area.

Elias Alexander: Following the previous question, you further speak about how queer women’s practices of identify modulation on online platforms are buttressed, or rather constrained, by online platforms’ governance policies that are often guided by profit motives. You highlight how such polices are insufficient at protecting queer women from becoming targets of misogynist, homophobic, and racist harassment and discrimination. In today’s climate, and with the continued popularity of platforms like Instagram as well as the rise of applications like Tik Tok what particular challenges to do you see queer folks facing on social media platforms and what strategies do you see queer folks employing to navigate said challenges?

Stefanie Duguay: There are quite a few challenges that queer people face on platforms today, but I think they can pretty much be summed up as not knowing whether a platform has your back – not feeling or being protected.

This is reflected, for example, in the experiences of so many queer people who wonder if they are shadowbanned, which is a state of reduced visibility for one’s posts and activity. Alex Chartrand, a PhD Candidate at Concordia with whom I work, is looking specifically at the algorithmic imaginaries that queer people develop in response to what they observe as shadowbanning and other forms of algorithmic bias. Some of what we’re seeing, and what I heard from queer women in my interviews, is that it’s difficult to know if the platform is punishing you in this way and so you try to respond as best you can, but it really leaves you feeling uncertain.

The queer people I spoke to also didn’t feel that reporting accounts would be very effective in protecting them from harassment and they worried that others would maliciously report them for their queer content, using platform’s automated moderation against them. The main problem here is that platforms assert that they are being fair by treating all users the same. However, we know that in our society there are some people who have been historically (and presently) treated unequally. Certain groups of people, including queer people, have been targeted, discriminated against, and left to function within an inequitable social landscape. These people deserve greater forms of protection and often require specialized attention to these inequities and residual forms of prejudice. When platforms do not provide that, they become inhospitable to queer people.

Elias Alexander: I have been particularly taken by the methods you employ in your study. Your work applies a mixed methods approach with an emphasis on interviews alongside a walkthrough method. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic I have seen many of my collogues in the field of anthropology turn to online mediums to conduct fieldwork. It seems as though the pandemic has re-emphasized the importance of online spaces within the lived lives of individuals. At the same time, I have also been privy to the uncertainty expressed by many researchers of how to appropriately and ethically conduct research in online spaces. In this regard your work stands out as exemplarily. Could you speak to what challenges and possibilities qualitative research through online mediums presents for researchers, and why now, more than ever, understanding peoples use of such mediums is critical?

Stefanie Duguay: Since our lives are thoroughly enmeshed with digital technologies and media, what happens online can’t be ignored in our research. Indeed, it is extremely important to conduct this research ethically and many scholars spanning decades have thought deeply about this. I’d like to point readers to the Association of Internet Researchers’ ethics guidelines that set out key ground principles of ethical internet research.

When thinking about the walkthrough specifically, ethical considerations arise even though the method itself is meant to only engage with an app’s interface and not its users. The researcher must think about whether their profile is disruptive to activity on the app. They need to consider whether users’ personal data is being caught up in screenshots or field notes and how this needs to be protected. More broadly, researchers must reflect on their own positionality and what it means for them to be co-present in that space with others who may be using the app for very personal and intimate reasons. I’ve been thinking through such ethical implications with Hannah Gold-Apel, an MA student at Concordia who is adapting aspects of the walkthrough method to examine TikTok, and we’ve recently published our thoughts in an open access article. One main takeaway is that users must always be considered, since without them, there would be no social media.