Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FACELOOK (Identity Management on Social Media by Diasporic LGBTQs)

Teaser

Digital media create new opportunities and pose new challenges for the ways people think about themselves as well as manage the expressions of their identities. In this research project, I analyse the transformations of identity in digital media landscape of the early XXI...

Summary

Digital media create new opportunities and pose new challenges for the ways people think about themselves as well as manage the expressions of their identities. In this research project, I analyse the transformations of identity in digital media landscape of the early XXI century by investigating those transformations from the perspective of migrant LGBTQs, that is, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Focusing particularly on Polish post-accession migrants to the UK, I examine what LGBTQ migrants and their social media uses can teach us about the relationship between digital media and identity, as well as what opportunities and difficulties social media create to a group that faces different challenges of exclusion and discrimination.

This project asks the following questions:
• What role do social media play for LGBTQ migrants in experiencing, exploring and expressing identities?
• How do LGBTQ migrants manage their digital self-presentations for diverse national and transnational audiences on different social media platforms?
• What is the role of Brexit and personal migration stories in how LGBTQ migrants use social media to create a sense of belonging?

To answer those questions, I am working with a diverse group of Polish LGBTQs who moved to the UK after 2004, when Poland joined the European Union. This project combines quantitative and qualitative methods, including an online survey with 767 respondents and in-depth interviews with 30 participants of different gender and sexual identifications as well as of different age, class and place of residence. Part of the project is also to bring the voices of LGBTQ migrants to the public during such events as ‘Polaktastic’ evenings of queer migrant performance and art, and the ‘Body Control’ event at the Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield.

Work performed

This project employs mix methods, which include a quantitative online survey with 767 respondents and in-depth face-to-face interviews with 30 Polish LGBTQs in the UK as well as the analysis of profile interfaces of popular in the West social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

My survey reveals, among other things, that the overwhelming majority of Polish LGBTQs in the UK do not support Brexit, yet they plan to stay in the UK at least for the next five years. Facebook and Instagram are the most often used social media by my respondents, and 60% of them indicate that they freely express their non-normative gender and/or sexual identifications on Facebook. The survey also points to the importance of social media for the growing popularity of non-normative gender and sexual identifications, such as ‘pansexual’, ‘non-binary’ and ‘genderfluid’, among young adults.

The results of my interviews with 30 Polish LGBTQs in the UK challenge the idea of digital echo chambers, that is, online closed groups of like-minded people who echo each other’s views and are kept (most often by algorithms) from being exposed to opposing views. I show how digital echo chambers may play an important role of safe spaces for marginalised communities. The interviews also indicate the importance of a broader geopolitical context in shifting belongings. In the context of Brexit in the UK and the rule of the homophobic Law and Justice party in Poland, Polish LGBTQs in the UK tend to attach their loyalties to the idea of ‘Europe’ instead of eagerly embracing Polish or British national identifications.

The analysis of social media interfaces, in turn, shows how big social media platforms such as Facebook embrace datafication logic (gathering as much data as possible and pinpointing the data to a particular unit); translate the logic into design and governance of profiles (update stream and profile core); and coax—at times coerce—their users into making of abundant but anchored selves, that is, performing identities which are capacious, complex, and volatile but singular and coherent at the same time.

Final results

One of the project’s aim was to engage with the public in Poland and in the UK to give voice to and share experiences of Polish LGBTQ migrants in the UK. In order to reach this aim, I collaborated with a diverse range of non-scientific actors to offer my expertise, promote my research results and engage in conversation with the larger public.

I organised three outreach events in collaboration with other academics, activists and artists. Two of them were the evenings of queer migrant performance and art called ‘Polaktastic’, organised in London (June, 2018) and Sheffield (November, 2018). The third one, ‘Body Control’, was organised in collaboration with the Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield in June 2019 and invited the festival’s visitors to engage with the stories of queer migration in the form of zine workshop, performance and art.

I also gave talks about my research at a number of non-scientific events in the UK and in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including talks on ‘Queer Eastern Europe’ at the Birmingham SHOUT Festival of Queer Arts and Culture (November 2017), and ‘Queer Zines in Communist Poland’ at the Katowice zine festival Art Bibula (March 2019). During the Baltic Pride in Riga in June 2018, I joined a panel discussion titled ‘Queer after Commies’, which was chaired by a Latvian journalist Rita Ruduša.

Another aim of this project was to look at the role of digital media, especially social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, for identity practices, particularly but not exclusively from the perspective of LGBTQ migrants.

I published two blog posts, in which I critically reflected on the design of social media interfaces and their governance, as defined in the media’s ‘Terms of Service’ and ‘Community Guidelines’. One blog post is titled ‘The Intimate (Self-)Regulation of Big Tech’ and was published on LSE Media Policy Blog in August 2017. The other is titled ‘Our Profile(d) Selves: How Social Media Platforms Use Data to Tell Us Who We Should Be’ and was published on LSE Impact Blog in February 2019.

I was also interviewed by BBC Radio 4 journalist, Maria Margaronis, for the programme ‘The Trans Revolution’, where I discussed the growing role of digital media for the popularisation of gender-diverse identity categories such as ‘non-binary’ and ‘genderfluid’.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/research/research-projects/Facelook.