Title: Queerly Platformed: LGBTQ Realities, Resistance, and Algorithmic Life in the Age of Social Media
Call for Chapters
Queerly Platformed: LGBTQ Realities, Resistance, and Algorithmic Life in the Age of social media
Editor: Paromita Pain: https://paromitapain.com/research/
Email: paromita.pain@gmail.com
Publisher: (TBD – Routledge/Taylor & Francis or other academic press)
Deadline for Abstracts: August 1, 2025
Full Chapter Deadline: December 15, 2025
Word Count for Abstracts: 500–600 words
Include: Title, author(s) name(s), affiliation, email, and a short bio (up to 150 words)
Notification of Acceptance: August 15
Full Chapter Deadline: December 15, 2025
Length: 5,000–6,000 words (including references)
Format: APA 7th edition; double-spaced, Word doc
Over the past two decades, social media has transformed from a space of connection to a critical site of identity negotiation, resistance, surveillance, and survival—particularly for LGBTQ individuals and communities. While prior scholarship, including the volumes like LGBTQ Digital Cultures: A Global Perspective and Global LGBTQ Activism: Social Media, Digital Technologies, and Protest Mechanisms, has explored LGBTQ advocacy and protest through digital media, this new collection proposes a shift in focus toward the algorithmic, economic, and socio-technical undercurrents that increasingly shape queer lives online. Queerly Platformed seeks to interrogate how platform logics—algorithms, moderation policies, monetization, and visibility protocols—are experienced, resisted, and co-opted by LGBTQ users in global contexts.
Rather than revisiting social media purely as a tool for mobilization or community building, this volume centers on how the architecture of these platforms themselves construct, mediate, and sometimes threaten queer existence. From shadowbanning of trans creators on TikTok, to the strategic deployment of queerness in influencer economies, to the silencing of queer content through automated moderation in the Global South, platform-specific dynamics have become inseparable from the lived experiences of queer people online.
Queerly Platformed will be among scholarly collections that focus specifically on the relationship between LGBTQ users and platform architectures. Its distinct contribution lies in shifting the analysis from digital expression to digital infrastructure—offering a timely, critical, and global look at how platforms shape queer life at the level of code, interface, labor, and desire. Queerly Platformed intervenes in urgent debates about algorithmic bias, platform economies, digital violence, and queer futures under platform capitalism. It aims to foster new theoretical and political insights into how queer and trans life is being both fostered and foreclosed by the very technologies designed to connect us.
This collection will prioritize contributors from the Global South and marginalized communities who can speak to the differentiated experiences of LGBTQ users across geographies. We especially welcome submissions from early-career scholars, independent researchers, activists, and artists—particularly those from underrepresented and Global South contexts.
This collection centers around certain important questions: How do platforms commodify or erase queerness under the guise of “community guidelines”? How are LGBTQ creators, users, activists, and communities adapting to, resisting, or reimagining their presence in a platformed digital world? What does it mean to be queer in an era of recommendation algorithms? And what are the emotional, economic, and political stakes of being hypervisible or invisibilized online?
Suggested Topics
We welcome theoretical, empirical, creative, and interdisciplinary approaches. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Platform Governance and Censorship: How moderation practices and algorithmic rules affect queer users, particularly non-Western, disabled, trans, and racialized creators.
- Economies of Queer Influence: The commercialization of queerness in influencer culture, brand partnerships, OnlyFans economies, and the rise of “rainbow capitalism.”
- Platform-Specific Cultures: The emergence of queer subcultures on TikTok, Reddit, Twitch, BeReal, or Discord and how these spaces differ in inclusivity, creativity, and vulnerability.
- Digital Trauma and Resilience: Emotional labor, burnout, trolling, doxxing, and the psycho-social effects of online harassment on LGBTQ users.
- Datafication and Surveillance: How LGBTQ users are targeted, profiled, or invisibilized through data-driven systems and the commodification of queer identity.
- Intersectionality and Injustice: How race, class, disability, religion, and geography intersect with platform power to create differentiated experiences of marginalization and survival.
- Algorithmic Erasure and Resistance
- Shadowbanning of queer/trans content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube
- Algorithmic bias, moderation, and censorship
- Queer Economies and Labor
- LGBTQ influencers and platform labor
- OnlyFans and queer sex work in a platformed economy
- Rainbow capitalism and corporate co-optation
- Platform-Specific Subcultures
- Discord servers, Twitch communities, queer Reddit threads
- TikTok trends and identity performance
- Digital Harassment and Vulnerability
- Cyberbullying, trolling, and mental health
- Platform responses to anti-LGBTQ hate speech
- Intersectionality and Inequality
- Race, disability, caste, religion, and class in platformed queer experiences
- Queer digital life in the Global South and diasporic contexts
- Datafication and Surveillance
- Privacy, data tracking, targeted advertising
- State surveillance of LGBTQ users
- Queer Joy, Resistance, and World-Building
- Memes, zines, fanfiction, audiovisual resistance
- Alternative platforms, mutual aid networks, digital intimacy
- Critical Platform Studies and Technoculture
- Theorizing queer digital precarity and platform power
- Historical perspectives on queer interaction with technology
About the Editor
Paromita Pain is Associate Professor of Global Media at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research centers on alternate media, digital journalism, and LGBTQ+ and feminist movements globally. She is the editor of LGBTQ Digital Cultures: A Global Perspective (2022) and Global LGBTQ Activism: Social Media, Digital Technologies, and Protest Mechanisms (2024). Read more about her work at: https://paromitapain.com/research/
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