Digiqueer Activism, Advocacy and Allyship

Abstract

This chapter synthesizes practitioner and academic literature on LGBTQ organizing in the pracademic tradition. It analyzes the ways that advocates, activists and allies ‘queer it up’ and harness digiqueer resistance through participatory and policy advocacy against challenges to diverse LGBTQ expression. This includes new rituals of LGBTQ organizing through hashtag activism, crowdfunding advocacy, philanthropy through non-fungible tokens, and the continued commodification of LGBTQ identity through ecommerce for advocacy and allyship. The chapter considers where LGBTQ networked expression sits within the digital organizing landscape. On one level, political insecurity through the ‘hate feedback loop’ keeps LGBTQ organizers in the policy ‘trenches’ as they maintain the fight for basic relationship, expression and conduct rights that the general public might take for granted. On another level, increased recognition of LGBTQ expression through popular culture, relationship rights such as same-sex marriage, and social networks sees a related expansion of the social imagination of homosexuality as identity rather than conduct across health and welfare, religion, securitization, markets, nationalism, a sense of belonging, and other identifiers.