Queer Digital Performance During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This ethnography traces the creation and evolution of digital performance spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic, following a group of queer and trans performers and artists as they created digital performance and community spaces across multiple virtual platforms. For these interlocutors, the pandemic was characterized by distinctive shifts in uses of technologies and artistic mediums, alongside shifts in how this community conceptualized queer performance, community, spacemaking, safety, care, and joy in the digital realm.

This research followed the trajectory of queer digital performance through seventeen months of digital fieldwork, participant-observation, and extensive interviews. This research also employed arts-based practices as ethnographic methods, partaking in what Pink (2011) terms “making visual representations”. These artistic methods enabled the visual representation of the absences and silences which came to characterize much of my interlocutors’ virtual worlds in this time.

Four core themes emerged in this research. The first examines how space and place are made and experienced online, arguing that my interlocutors engage in and understand spacemaking and community-building in hostile digital environments as both political tactics and radical acts of care. The second teases out a tension between the increased access digital performance provides to many queer people who could not attend in-person spaces or did not feel comfortable in them and the new barriers to access that arose in digital spaces for other community members. The third examines the policing and erasure of representations of queerness and transness in digital space, arguing that moderation and “adult content ban” policies have been increasingly weaponized to target and harass queer and trans users on these platforms, effectively erasing queer content and users from these platforms. The fourth engages with the storytelling choices my interlocutors made to refuse dominant narratives about queer life and instead center queer joy in their art, which I argue constitute a refusal of heteronormative framings of queerness which center pain and injury. Ultimately, I argue that my interlocutors’ efforts to build and maintain safe community-oriented digital performance and community spaces – which I call queer communities of care – were political, and often strategic, acts of care and of refusal.