Olu Jenzen

Trans youth and social media: moving between counterpublics and the wider web

Abstract Today’s trans youth grew up with the internet and online LGBTQ resources and spaces are important to these communities. This article focuses on conceptualising the digital cultural strategies that trans and gender questioning youth adopt both as social media users and producers in order to cope and thrive. Drawing on ethnographic data detailing a group of trans youth’s engagements with LGBTQ social media counterpublics and the wider web, and their movement between these spheres, in combination with close readings of online material identified as salient by the participants, this article argues that in the face of rampant transphobia and cis coded online paradigms, trans youth respond both critically and creatively. More specifically, I highlight how they resist prescribed user protocols of mainstream social networking sites as well as employ pragmatic strategies for navigating a binary gendered online world, staking out their own methods and aesthetics for self expression and community formation. Having examined the content and style of social media examples highlighted by the participants, the article contends that trans youth’s consumption and production of types of online and social media is significantly more diverse than research to date has recognised.

Revolting Doubles: Radical Narcissism and the Trope of Lesbian Doppelgangers

This article is concerned with a repositioning of popular culture images and narratives that are, and have been, highly unpopular among queer audiences. This involves a re-engagement with the visual representation of lesbian lovers as doubles, ubiquitous in popular culture. It argues that by positioning the trope of the lesbian doppelgangers as it appears in popular culture on a continuum of visual representations of sameness and likeness that also includes feminist and queer art its qualities of radical or “absolute” narcissism are brought to the fore to be enjoyed as a subversive statement of highly self-referencing, auto-erotic, and self-sufficient economy of desire. In a reading of Black Swan (2010), a film that has attracted notable negative responses from feminist critics, it discusses how radical narcissism disturbs the heteronormative matrix through a refusal of its underpinning organization of desire and identification as exclusionary. It closes by engaging with contemporary artworks drawing on the doppelganger motif.

Mediatization and Sport: A Bottom-Up Perspective

The concept of mediatization has proved remarkably popular in the past decade, although recent critiques have challenged its media-centrism, ahistoricism, and conceptual clarity. In this article, we draw on the work of those who suggest that mediatization is best deployed as a means of understanding particular social domains and the ways in which institutions and actors orientate their activities towards media. Using association football, or soccer, as our focus we offer a bottom-up perspective using data gathered from research workshops with young people in England. These not only demonstrate the extent to which football is followed through a range of media platforms but also how broader understandings of the game are shaped by these engagements. Moreover, we adapt insights from recent phenomenological approaches to media to focus on the practical, embodied forms of knowledge and habit that shape how football is currently played, followed, and debated.

Make, share, care: social media and LGBTQ youth engagement

This article addresses the challenges and possibilities of social media to help generate and support outreach work with young LGBTQ people in the context of youth services. This involves among other things looking at how commercial, mainstream social media platforms are utilized in pragmatic and sometimes dissident ways to fit the needs of marginalized youth, highlighting in particular the praxis of making, sharing and caring online. Thus the article is of interest both for academics working in social media and youth research, as well as outreach support workers in the public and private sectors. Based on our collaborative research project with a community partner, the Brighton/UK based LGBTU [Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Unsure] youth project Allsorts, we examine the ways in which social media are currently utilized by a youth service provider to reach and engage with isolated, marginalized, vulnerable and at risk LGBTQ youth in their everyday campaign work and service provision.

Revolting Bodies, Desiring Lesbians: An Introduction

This introduction gives the background to this special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies that has its origin in the 18th Annual Lesbian Lives Conference of 2011. It traces the theme of Revolting Bodies: Desiring Lesbians across the ten articles of this collection and gives a brief summary of each.