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- Title
Social Media Experiences of LGBTQ+ People: Enabling Feelings of Belonging.
- Authors
Eickers, Gen
- Abstract
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) people are experiencing increasingly varied visibility on social media due to ongoing digitalization. In this paper, I draw on social epistemology and phenomenological accounts of the digital (Frost-Arnold in: Lackey (ed) The epistemic dangers of context collapse online, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021; Krueger and Osler in Philos Topics 47(2):205–231, 2019; Hine in: Ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday, Bloomsbury, London, 2015), and argue that, for LGBTQ+ individuals, social media provides a space for connecting with people with shared lived experiences. This, in turn, makes it possible for social media to enable feelings of belonging. By interacting with other LGBTQ+ people online, LGBTQ+ individuals are enabled to imagine their own being in the world and to feel like they belong. This is especially important when we consider that, for LGBTQ+ identities, it may be more complicated to feel connected due to marginalization and (fear of) discrimination. This paper not only draws on literature from phenomenology and social epistemology on the digital, but also presents and analyzes interviews that were conducted in order to explore the social media experiences of LGBTQ+ people through a phenomenology and social epistemology informed framework.
- Subjects
BLOOMSBURY (London, England); LGBTQ+ people; SOCIAL media; OXFORD University Press; SOCIAL epistemology; LGBTQ+ identity; PHENOMENOLOGY; EMOTIONS
- Publication
Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy, 2024, Vol 43, Issue 3, p617
- ISSN
0167-7411
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11245-023-09994-3