Conceptualization of a Queer Cyberspace: ‘Gay Twitter’

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate the digital transition from queer, physical spaces to queer, virtual spaces and its subcultural importance within the queer community. A trialectic spatiality approach (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996) will be applied to the cyberspace of Twitter in order to explore a particular subversion of a social media platform into a queer cyberspace through a user-established, unique, subcultural sign and code system. By researching the particular experiences of virtual, queer identities on Twitter, the social media platform is characterized as a thirdspace, using the example of ‘Gay Twitter’, conceived as a spatial phenomenon. The essay examines cultural semiotics and the ‘invisible,’ virtual confines of a queered Twitter realm by showcasing the linguistic, contextual and visual markers which create such an ‘imagined,’ exclusive, virtual Twitter community. Subsequently, the cyber-community creation and the establishment of norms and discourses reveal beneficial traits associated with a transition from physical to virtual spaces, but also negative aspects such as virtual gate-keeping, dominant gender and sexuality norms, internal discrimination and underrepresented groups and identities in a queer cyberspace.