Queer Belonging: Digital, Embodied and Imagined Community at Autostraddle.com

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the imaginary and discursive borders of the 'queer women's community' online and what it means to relate to and with one another as queer women in the present. The contemporary reconfiguring of queer relationality has shifted the figure of the lesbian from one centred on non-normative sex or politics to one which gathers around common aesthetics and interests. Thus, this thesis examines queer women's navigatation of contemporary communities that span across on and offline spaces and investigates how queer belonging is being constituted in the digital landscape. Drawing on the flourishing literature on digital intimacies and feminist digital cultures, the thesis focuses on Autostraddle.com, the world's most popular queer women's website to explore the negotiation of gender and queer belonging and the constitution of community online. The extensive Autostraddle 'community' extends beyond the website onto social media and indeed also offline, where members attend regular meetups including an annual for-profit 'camp' (A-Camp) in California. The ethnography of Autostraddle and A-Camp in this thesis includes several elements: in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis, collage, narrative fiction and autoethnography. The thesis argues that Autostraddle exists as an imaginary queer utopia in which queer women are explicitly feminist, as well as sexy, dynamic, politically engaged and connected to one another through shared histories and literacies of gender, sexuality and popular culture. Constituting queer women in this way, as a 'taste community', allows for new modes of access. However, the rhetoric and imperative of belonging reframes the continued asymmetry of cultural literacy as personal failure. It investigates how we might utilise new technologies to build a strong base for feminist and queer collectivism in order to challenge structural norms whilst also resisting notions of the collective as common and critiquing belonging as a driving force that produces emotional attachments to borders and boundaries. Though this thesis is critical of contemporary digital queer relations, it acknowledges the possibilities of queer belonging as productive of valuable and meaningful moments of sociability and challenge to social norms. Show more