Researching LGBT+ Youth Intimacies and Social Media: The Strengths and Limitations of Participant-Led Visual Methods

Abstract

This paper draws on data from an exploratory study into the social media engagements of LGBT+ young people aged 16 to 20 years old, in the United Kingdom, and considers how participant-led visual methods generated insights into different modalities of digitally mediated intimacy. It outlines the methodological paradigms dominating current research on LGBT+ young people’s digitally mediated practices of intimacy and argues that visual methods have been underemployed to date. The participatory visual methods used in this study, including map-making and digital tours of participant’s digital worlds along with visual elicitation interviews, are documented and explored in relation to Berlant’s work on intimacy and theories of networked affect. It also reflects upon the ethical implications of re-presenting social media images and troubles interpretive imperatives within qualitative research.

Keywords

LGBT visual methods affect Tumblr young people

Introduction: LGBT+ Youth Intimacies and Digital Technologies

Hillier’s and Harrison’s (2007) study exemplifies much of the work on sexual minority youth online, contending that digital platforms are vital spaces to “rehearse” same-sex “identity, friendship, coming out, intimate relationships, sex and community” (p. 83). Although their data predated the advent of social media and mobile communication technologies, seen to define young people’s digital practices today, recent work on LGBT+ young people’s digital engagements continues to be preoccupied with the practices Hillier and Harrison identified.¹ However, there is now greater recognition that these are more entangled in the routines of everyday life than a rehearsal.

Over the last decade, studies have explored young people’s sexual or gender identity disclosure through personal profiles on social networking sites (De Ridder & Van Bauwel, 2015; Duguay, 2016; Taylor, Falconer, & Snowden, 2014) or “coming out videos” on YouTube (Alexander & Losh, 2010; Raun, 2012). This work highlights how digital platforms not only ease and accelerate “coming out” processes but also expose young people to harassment or premature “outing.” In a similar vein, scholars have explored the different experiences of trans young people who document their gender transition through blogs and YouTube videos (Raun, 2012; Wargo, 2015) or celebrate their gender expression with Tumblr selfies (Warfield, in press).

Attention has also been paid to the relationships fostered through social networking or dating sites (Downing, 2013; Van Doorn, 2010). Scholars note how these can play out solely online, enhance existing friendships, lead to sexual encounters, or foster offline socio-political gatherings (Downing, 2013). Recently, attention has shifted to the equally multiple functions of “hook-up apps” for young same-sex attracted men and, to a lesser extent, women (Albury & Byron, 2016). Handheld technologies are recognized as mobile sites of intimacy, which provide a means of social and sexual connection (Albury & Byron, 2016).

While the term intimacy is not employed consistently across the literature reviewed, all authors address how digital technologies enable LGBT+ young people to foster a sense of closeness or belonging with others. These discussions are articulated alongside wider theoretical concerns with gender, sexuality, and subjectivity in a digital age. In particular, queer theory and interactionism remain key theories in investigations of LGBT+ young people’s digitally mediated practices. The following section explores how these theoretical insights have played out methodologically and the gaps in existing approaches to studying LGBT+ young people’s practices of intimacy online.

This paper responds to the need for methods oriented to the visual modalities of digitally mediated intimacy. In critically examining the participatory visual methods employed in a small-scale study on LGBT+ young people’s digital practices, I outline the strengths and limitations of my methodology for attuning to intimacies within the research encounters. Considering the different modalities of these intimate practices, I make a case for exceeding the methodological reliance on discursive analysis and attending to the look, and movement of the digital.

Practices of Intimacy: Theoretical and Methodological Paradigms

Queer Theory

Since the emergence of Internet scholarship, scholars have been interested in the queer possibilities of digital technologies to re-order hegemonic regimes of sexuality and gender (O’Riordan & Phillips, 2007). LGBT+ youth scholarship drawing from a queer perspective has tended to explore the implications of social media for “queer socialities,” such as how sexual minority identity is signalled online (Macintosh & Bryson, 2008, p. 134; Alexander & Losh, 2010). Methodologically, this translates into discursive analyses of platforms and content, attending to the reframing of the “iterative moment” (Macintosh & Bryson, 2008, p. 138) where “vital identity signals” take the form of public displays of connection to people, profiles, and pages (Van Doorn, 2010, p. 585).

Macintosh and Bryson (2008) analyze the “identificatory toolkits” of Myspace profiles to illuminate how they alter the way LGBT+ young people are “interpellated and made visible” (p. 137). Similarly, Alexander and Losh (2010) examine the rhetorical actions of YouTube “coming out” videos for gay and lesbian young people: arguing that they can function as a “gesture of critique” toward “certain kinds of acceptable intimacies” and “authorized lives” (p. 48). Notably, these studies do not consult the views of the young people whose digital content they are analyzing and, therefore, do not argue that these subversions are intentional. Instead, they focus on how typical iterations of sexuality and gender elide, alter, and shift in digital spaces. It is argued that new modes of disclosure allow diverse sexualities and genders to be seen (Alexander & Losh 2010, p. 48), and facilitate “a momentary coming together of communities and users” (Macintosh & Bryson, 2008, p. 140). Thus, intimacy is found in public and potentially fleeting encounters online.

Interactionism

Solely discursive approaches to subjectivity have been critiqued for overlooking the salience of face-to-face personal relationships with significant others (Jamieson, 2013). While the aforementioned literature traces the queer potential afforded by new modes of categorization online, they provide little insight into the lived everyday experiences of LGBT+ youth using these technologies. Refurbishing classic interactionist accounts for the digital age has proved popular in recent empirical work on LGBT+ young people’s online practices (De Ridder & Van Bauwel, 2015; Duguay, 2016; Taylor et al., 2014).

Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman and Ken Plummer, these studies explore how sexual and gender meaning is constructed in the process of social interaction and how this interaction differs in digital spaces. Instead of queer socialities, their work appeals to more traditional ideas of intimacy in kinship and couple relations. For example, De Ridder and Van Bauwel (2015) investigate whether lesbian, gay, or bisexual teens go through the same intimate rituals, “such as celebrating their first love on social media” (p. 790), as their heterosexual peers. Methodologically, these accounts afford greater recognition to the embeddedness of social media in everyday life, employing in-depth Facebook elicitation interviews (Duguay, 2016a), online/offline interviews (Taylor et al., 2014), and focus groups (De Ridder & Van Bauwel, 2015). Similar to the queer literature, however, they focus primarily on verbal or textual modes of intimate interaction through comment exchanges, personal profiles, or online video calls.

Connections and New Directions

Of course, queer theory and interactionist perspectives are not always disconnected or distinct. A number of scholars combine theoretical and methodological insights from both traditions, which share an overall concern with language, meaning, and power (Downing, 2013; Van Doorn, 2010). Correspondingly analytic attention is routinely restrained to representation and signification where the textual becomes the dominant framework through which social life, and intimacies, are understood. Even when the visual features of social media are acknowledged (Duguay, 2016) or made a central focus in work on LGBT+ youth (Warfield, in press; Wargo, 2015), textual methods or modes of analysis dominate.² As I detail later, I sought to respond to the need for methods oriented to the visual modalities of young people’s social media engagements through co-producing visual data with participants. First, however, it is important to explicate how Berlant’s (1998) work on intimacy and theories of networked affect (Hillis, Paasonen, & Petit, 2015) offer productive tools for moving beyond textually oriented understandings of digitally mediated intimacy.

Attending to the Visual and Affective Dynamics of Intimacy

In thinking about digitally mediated intimacy, I join other social media scholars who find analytic promise in Lauren Berlant’s work (Kofoed & Charlotte, 2016; McBean, 2014). Asserting that intimacy may operate publically and at any distance, Berlant (1998) observes that the “kinds of connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living (if not ‘a life’), do not always respect the predictable forms” (p. 284). She works to unpick the normativities surrounding “utopian, optimism-sustaining versions of intimacy” and highlights the phenomenon’s inherent vulnerability, ephemerality, and “potential failure to stabilize closeness” (p. 282). By attending to those unpredictable and fleeting connections that affect people, Berlant’s conception of intimacy lends itself to investigations of the affectivity of digital cultures (Hillis et al., 2015).

Theories of networked affect shift attention from interactions between people online to the lived and deeply felt sociality of everyday encounters with selfies, memes, gifs, emojis, algorithms, and site architecture (Hillis et al., 2015). Understood as a pre-personal force that moves us, affect does not refer to personal feelings but experiential changes of state that exceed capture in language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. xvi). Attention to affect points to “the limits of semiotic meaning” as a “system of codes and containment” and focuses on surplus, intensity, and movement (Cho, 2015, p. 45). Considering the affectivity of digital content frequently involves moving beyond what content signifies to recognize its material, embodied, and sensory specificity. Furthermore, the visual is not only considered in occularcentric ways but how we relate to it through a range of other senses (Featherstone, 2010). It is an approach to visuality concerned not only with “the content of an image but in what that image does, that is in the kinds of inclinations that images produce” (Coleman, 2011, p. 84).

Raun (2012) considers lighting, facial expressions, bodily movements, and the flow of speech in his study of trans YouTube video-bloggers (vloggers), noting the circulation of “shame, anger, rage” in these films (p. 176). He suggests these videos function as a public “repository of feelings experienced by individuals in transition” (p. 178). Feelings are not bounded within these repositories but shared with “intimate strangers” (Raun, 2012, p. 173). Similarly, McBean’s (2014) analysis of lesbian vlogs notes how they function as “a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging” (citing Berlant, 2008, p. viii). Both studies observe that affect is relational, disturbing dichotomies of vlogger/viewer, online/offline, virtual/material to point to their continually permeable influence on one another.

In this paper, I draw on affect as a means of tuning into sensations of attachment, connection, closeness, and their “corporeal expression in bodily feelings” of belonging and affinity (Anderson, 2006, p. 736). Viewing intimacy as produced through affective relations between things as well as people, I consider how it is experienced through affective encounters with a variety of digital content. Adopting a relational understanding complements Berlant’s (1998) observation of the ambivalent nature of intimacy, as intimate encounters can affect or be affected in multiple and multidirectional ways (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

Mapping LGBT+ Young People’s Digitally Mediated Peer Cultures

This paper draws on data from a small-scale study, funded by the U.K.-based Economic and Social Research Council, mapping LGBT+ young people’s digitally mediated peer cultures through creative and participatory methods. Informed by networked affect theories (Hillis et al., 2015), the study sought to map participant’s everyday encounters with a range of digital content, contact, and conduct and consider how these technologies curated the shape of young people’s peer cultures. Here, I offer an account of the creative methods of data production used. This is followed by an analysis of the ways co-producing visual data with participants generated insights into their digitally mediated intimacies.

Participants

Ten self-defining LGBT+ young people aged 16 to 20 years old were recruited from college-based societies in the United Kingdom, one based in a large urban further education college (hereon referred to as Eastland) and a second located in a coastal Sixth Form College (hereon referred to as Westland).³ Beyond identifying with the LGBT+ umbrella, I did not ask participants to individually categorize their sexuality or gender. Some volunteered how they identified, including two trans masculine young people, two gay young men, and one bisexual young woman. Others commented that they were not comfortable with labels or did not proffer their specific sexual or gender identity. In addition to the two trans masculine young people (pronouns he/him/they/them), three participants presented as boys (pronouns he/him) and five as girls (pronouns she/her).⁴ A larger number of participants were recruited from Westland, described by the participants as a largely White middle-class college. While this was reflected in my majority White British sample, the research also included two White central European participants and one Black British participant.

Affect and Creative Methods

Consideration of affect is critical in this paper for unpicking the normativities surrounding digitally mediated intimacy and attending to those unpredictable, fleeting connections online that affect young people. Attention to affect shifts focus from the content of social media images to what they do, enabling an exploration of the appeal of social media’s visual modalities for LGBT+ young people’s intimate practices (Coleman, 2011). However, the difficulty of capturing the ineffable quality of affect that is felt, rather than seen, has been widely documented (see Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Paasonen, Hillis, & Petit, 2015). This challenge has resulted in creative ways of undertaking research.

Childhood researchers note the value of creative methodologies for attending to ambivalent affects that can be difficult to articulate, such as bodily sensations, pleasures, and feelings of oppression (Austin, 2016; Coleman, 2009; Renold, 2017). For example, Coleman (2009) employed collage with teen girls to explore the different kinds of bodily experiences media, photographic, and mirror images make possible. In line with this work on creative and participatory methods, I was interested in how creative techniques might elicit insights into the complex ways social media’s visual modalities work in young people’s peer cultures.

Data were generated in three distinct but overlapping participant-led visual methods including mapping, digital tours, and elicitation interviews. While some contemporary childhood studies scholars have problematized the notion that ingenious, pre-planned techniques can upset entrenched power dynamics in research with young people (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008; Holland, Renold, Ross, & Hillman, 2010), I sought to consider how the critical, reflexive ethical framework of participatory research created space for young people to shape the focus of the study.

Mapping

Participants were provided with A0 white card, magazines, newspapers, social media icons, multicoloured pens, scissors and glue sticks and asked to assemble a map representing the things or people in their digital world as they imagine them to be (Mannay, 2016). All ten participants engaged in the mapping activity and assembled maps collectively with their college peers (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Eastland’s map.

Digital Tours

Participants were also invited to navigate significant websites, applications, or social media sites with me and capture the tour through screenshots. Digital tours have been previously employed in research with young people (Duguay, 2016; Renold & Ringrose, 2017). In keeping with my creative and participatory approach, I sought to work with participants to shape the technique and engage with the visuality of the screenshots. Four participants from Westland participated in the digital tours as an extension of the mapping activity.

Audio-Recordings and Elicitation Interviews

Research sessions were audio-recorded to capture the interactive conversations with and between participants as they produced their maps and screenshots. Engaging participants in “analytical talk” through the production of their visual data was an opportunity to elucidate the significance of the digital content, contact, and conduct they shared with me (Holland et al., 2010, p. 372). In addition to recording image-making sessions, three participants from Westland attended a follow-up elicitation interview. This interview was offered to further contextualize the visuals, allow for clarifications, and reflect on the research process.

Visual and Affective Analysis

Pauwels (2015) has critiqued the tendency for Internet research to overlook the web’s basic visual and multimedia features (p. 65). While his analytic model provides a useful inventory of features to attend to online, it is a “seductive pitfall” of social media research to treat online images as transparent phenomena rather than partial, ambivalent, and mediated (Hand, 2017, p. 217). Audio-recordings and elicitation interviews were key to understanding how the young people were making sense of the visual data they produced (Mannay, 2016). At the same time, I was concerned with attending to the feelings, forces, and intensities that flowed through the production of their visual and verbal data as well as the analytic process (Maclure, 2013).

Considering affective resonances attuned me to pauses, changes in intonation, speed, laughter, and exclamations, the movement of the map-making, the production of the screenshots, and their multimodality (e.g., captions, comments, likes, pictures, and emojis). This is an approach to analysis that shifts attention from visual data as objects to be “read” to the methodological processes of their production and recognizes the centrality of affect in meaning-making (Ringrose & Renold, 2014). Maclure (2013) argues that such affective analysis does not hasten to fix definitive interpretations of data. Instead, it encourages researchers to spend time considering affective relations to data that both disconcerts and creates a sense of wonder at various points throughout fieldwork, analysis, and beyond (Maclure, 2013, pp. 172-173). Tuning into affect underscores the political impetus of participatory research as it supports greater “attentiveness towards the objects, materials, environments and configurations that serve to compound relations and amplify a body’s capacity to speak and act” (Mayes, 2016, p. 119).

In the discussion that follows I focus on moments that evoked intimacies where sensations of attachment, proximity, or pleasure moved through the data as well as their modulation into feelings of belonging and affinity. At the same time, I recall my own affective responses to the research encounters including instances where data refused to render decisive meanings and how this also elicited intimacies. Although the young people detailed that their everyday social practices traversed a range of platforms, for the remainder of this article, I focus primarily on Tumblr. The young people’s talk, annotations, and illustrations revealed it to be a particularly key site for their intimate practices.

“I Bloody Love Tumblr”: The Intimate World of Tumblr Blogging

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking site that enables users to post text, images, audio, and video to a short-form blog. It was the subject of emphatic praise from the participants. Echoing other literature, there was perceived to be a “massive amount of LGBT people on Tumblr” (Charlotte, 16) with the site providing greater opportunities for participants to explore their sexuality and gender (Cho, 2015; Renninger, 2015; Warfield in press; Wargo, 2015). The participants highlighted that the site could be used privately away from the gaze of school peers as they could create their own usernames and keep these hidden. Unlike the person-like profiles of Facebook, sociability on Tumblr centers on shifting galleries of text, images and video curated by obscured users (Cho, 2015). They described their blogs as “everything that goes through my mind” (Charlotte, 16) where you can “say pretty much anything about yourself” (Charlie, 20) and “make it really weird” (Lily, 16). Tumblr trades on affect where users connect through the “felt register of suggestive imagery” (Cho, 2015, p. 44). It is a site for “sharing what you feel when you feel” (annotation, Westland’s map).

“. . . a Lot of People Share Their Own, Really Personal Things . . .”: Relationship Selfies on Tumblr

A number of participant screenshots illuminated the suggestive, affective register of Tumblr. The following excerpt from Lily’s feed appears curated around evocations of desire between and toward women (see Figure 2). Such screenshots presented challenges for re-presentation as they captured details of nonconsenting others in the participant’s networks (Mannay, 2016). For the purpose of this paper, I secured permission from the blogger to re-produce their image and digitally distorted the screenshot to ensure Tumblr URLs/faces are not identifiable. The implications of this strategy are discussed in detail below, but first, I will elucidate the practice of sharing relationship selfies (relfies) on Tumblr.

Figure 2.

Screenshot of Lily’s Tumblr feed (distorted for re-presentation).

The top post in this screenshot features a freeze frame of two young women snuggling in bed. The face of one woman is visible, she is smiling with her eyes closed, her chin rests on the other’s head, and her arms wrap around the other’s shoulders. A sense of collective intimacy is produced through the proximity of the camera. The viewer too becomes “wrapped within the arm of the image taker” as the close-up angle enacts a “visual embrace that draws us closer” (Warfield, 2014, p. 8).

The “439 notes” on the post indicate that it has been liked, commented on, and re-blogged across the Tumblr sphere, becoming a scene of attachment for a larger intimate public (Berlant, 2008). What is shared in this post are not only feelings between the two women, but feelings with and between their Tumblr followers (McBean, 2014).

For example, Lily explains,

On Tumblr, a lot of people share their own, really personal things, like gay couples will post like videos of them and stuff . . I think it’s good because it’s like when people put things of them together it is showing that they’re proud, and you can do this and it’s fine and it’s ok and there are other people that are doing this.

These comments reveal how same-sex relfies on Tumblr foster feelings of affirmation (“it’s fine,” “it’s ok”), extend lines of affinity (“there are other people that are doing this”) and augment Lily’s own capacity to act similarly (“you can do this”). Furthermore, Lily’s screenshot evokes same-sex desire without labelling it. In the fieldwork sessions, Lily expressed reluctance to fix a sexual identification: “I don’t like labels, like it’s all a big spectrum, why do I have to give myself a label?” The “visual vernacular” of Tumblr can be seen to offer opportunities to share in feelings of same-sex intimacy without these sedimenting into discrete categorizations (Wargo, 2015, p. 1).

“I Always Watch Rose and Rosie”: Tumblr Relfies versus YouTube Couples

Tumblr was not the only site where same-sex couple videos circulated. Lily and Charlotte also expressed affection for the YouTube vloggers Rose and Rosie: describing their videos of everyday life, as well as weddings and baby announcements as “cute” and “adorable” (Lily’s words). With more than 559,846 subscribers, the documentation of lesbian intimacy on Rose’s and Rosie’s YouTube channel differs from Tumblr. On YouTube, subscribers, video views, comments, and shares to other platforms can be “translated into celebrity status and monetary gain” (Lovelock, 2017, p. 4). Notably, Rose and Rosie have garnered a wider media presence through print media and publicity tours (Dix, 2016; Goorwich, 2015).

Rose’s and Rosie’s appeal was attributed to them being “successful,” “good-looking,” and “not like your stereotypical lesbian” (Lily’s and Charlotte’s words). In line with wider work on YouTube celebrities, the success that Rose and Rosie embody appeared tied to neo-liberal values of “entrepreneurialism and individual enterprise” as well as minority identities “deemed ‘acceptable’ for integration within the status quo” (Lovelock, 2017, p. 13). As self-described “girlie girls” (Goorwich, 2015, para 11), Rose and Rosie upset the heteronormative grid of female/feminine/heterosexual but only through recouping prevailing feminine gender norms (Mcnicholas-Smith & Tyler, 2017). For example, their widely viewed wedding video featuring big white dresses and fathers giving away the brides (Goorwich, 2015, para 11) affirms “ideals of hetero-patriarchal, white femininity” (Mcnicholas-Smith & Tyer, 2017, p. 315).

In contrast, the above relfie circulates the counterpublic of Tumblr in anonymous, ephemeral, and elusive ways (Renninger, 2015). This is not to suggest that Tumblr is free from the commercial heteronormativity of YouTube. Since 2013, Yahoo has been seeking to make the “notoriously unprofitable but popular” Tumblr financially lucrative (Renninger, 2015, p. 1519). Furthermore, both Rose and Rosie and the couple in Lily’s screenshot appear young, White, Western, and feminine-presenting. They also exemplify the ways in which “compulsory coupledom” can be “intensified through digital networked cultures” (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, p. 7). Nevertheless, the candid relfies of obscure Tumblr bloggers appeared to mobilize different kinds of intimate encounters for Lily than the telegenic celebrities of YouTube, affecting her bodily capacities to feel, to belong, and to act.

Re-Presenting Digitally Mediated Intimacies

While my methods were informed by an ethico-political aim to foreground young people’s perspectives on their digitally mediated relationship cultures, the way these entangled with the intimate practices of others online raised other ethical concerns. Participatory research typically calls for participants to take a lead in how they would like their images re-presented (Wiles, Coffey, Robinson, & Heath, 2012). However, this process is complicated for social media images as multiple authors are involved in their creation. The screenshot presented earlier was framed and taken by Lily, sequenced according to Tumblr’s algorithms and incorporates posts authored by unknown bloggers (Hand, 2017).

Although relfies are shared with Tumblr’s counterpublic, they are not necessarily produced for a general or academic audience. Their incorporation into academic work must be weighed against the potential to cause harm to their producer. Anonymizing the image alone may have sufficed to minimize this risk, but I felt uneasy appropriating someone’s content for my own academic gain. Therefore, I specifically sought consent from the blogger to reproduce the anonymized version of their image to ensure they were not inadvertently made visible for “time immemorial” (Brady & Brown, 2013, p. 102).⁵

The anonymized screenshot illustrates the suggestive, felt register of Tumblr’s visual vernacular better than my writing alone. Nevertheless, anonymization raises further questions around the affective effects of re-presentation. Visual researchers have typically viewed the distortion of participant images as undesirable, noting that pixellation can criminalize an image (Wiles et al., 2012). These considerations illuminate the potential affective implications of anonymization. For example, my distortions may suggest a more illicit image than the original. Whether anonymized or not, however, the screenshot was always a partial, ambivalent, and mediated framing of Tumblr relfies, and its affective effects are not easily transposed into an academic paper (Hand, 2017).

Employing visual methods is not a simple process of capturing and conveying the affectivity of a digital encounter. Re-presentation is always “an act of mediation where bodily impressions . . . are translated in order to be brought into the representational space of the text” (Paasonen et al., 2015, p. 12), and often works to generate new meanings and affects. Correspondingly, scholars have begun to experiment with creative dissemination that communicates affective findings ethically, legally and impactfully (Mannay, 2016; Renold, 2017). For example, Renold (2017) maps how arts-based methods enabled teen girls to produce “da(r)ta” and “d/artaphacts” crafted from and carrying their experiences of sexual violence.

The relfie example highlights some of the challenges of social media data, particularly how ethical relations can extend beyond the immediate research site and the way affective data travels. The screenshots emphasized the importance of evaluating ethical relations as they emerge in the unfolding process of research, rather than judging them in advance (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013). Negotiating what is searchable and what should be gathered for research remains an ongoing, situated process. Participatory art-based modes of distortion and dissemination may, however, provide one way of navigating these tensions in future research (Renold, 2017).

Lost in Translation: Troubling Interpretation

Hand (2017) notes that a “daunting problem for the social media researcher is how to identify and select images for analysis.” Although he is referring to methods of digital data collection that can produce thousands of images, the two maps and thirty-one screenshots produced by my participants over three hours of fieldwork seemed equally vast. The paths participants laid out on their maps and digital tours sparked many moments of wonder that moved me beyond preconceived understandings of young people’s digital engagements (Maclure, 2013). However, not all of these paths could be followed, and the ones that were often left me feeling lost.

For example, Charlie (20) and Rory (19) detailed their enjoyment of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. They described at pace the evolution of the characters they created and played who each had diverse genders and sexualities, including a character Rory had “just figured out . . . was agender” and one that “started out as an aromantic gay sexual cis guy but now he is like panromantic, homosexual” (Charlie’s words). Their description of characters whose genders and sexualities evolved through play and offered opportunities to “vicariously experience . . . how having that kind of society would be” (Charlie’s words) raised a multitude of questions. Yet trying to get a grip on their talk of differing servers, game styles, guilds, cities, and characters was disorienting. Rather than being guided through their digital worlds, pouring over the data at times felt like I was a tourist “immersed in a language that didn’t quite make sense” (Cho, 2015, p. 44).

In the following examples, I address other moments of disconcertion in the research where participants ambiguous and incomplete accounts hinted at digitally mediated practices of intimacy. I argue that these moments of disconcertion exemplify the vulnerability of intimacy as it emerges in research (Berlant, 1998). On the one hand, it can be viewed as a sign of research success for participants to reveal intimate details of their lives. On the other, it can raise problematic ethical issues and trigger safeguarding concerns (Fraser & Puwar, 2008). By attending to those intimacies that bubbled under the surface of participant’s accounts, I consider how intimate encounters emerged in relation to different research materials and through “shifting registers of unspoken ambivalence” (Berlant, 1998, p. 286).

“It’s a Live-and-Let-Live Kind of Thing”: Tumblr’s Adult Content

In keeping with the suggestive register of Tumblr, the participants’ wavered between disclosure and concealment when discussing the site. Toward the end of fieldwork with Eastland, James (16) leaned across the map to annotate Tumblr with “+18” (see Figure 3). This prompted a brief discussion about Tumblr’s content policy:

James:

Just Tumblr, the fact that it is open content

Rory:

Because they don’t block like 18+ content so you can share and it can be like er a safe space for sex workers, sort of safe, well there are people

Charlie:

Well I don’t follow them

Rory:

Me neither, but I know about them

Figure 3.

Smirking face emoji.

In this exchange, the participants acknowledge Tumblr’s “live-and-let-live” policy toward adult content (Tumblr, 2016, para 1) without explicitly disclosing their own engagement. Their talk is marked with silences and denials. Rory notes the possibility of sharing 18+ content but overtly rejects, with Charlie, that they do follow this content. In contrast, James goes on to embellish his annotation with a smirking face emoji.

James’s contribution carries the networked affect of the emoji, which mediate sensations otherwise conveyed through facial expressions, gestures, or tone of voice (Paasonen, 2015, p. 30). Smirks are typically understood to express “satisfaction or pleasure about having done something or knowing something” (Smirk, n.d.), and the smirking emoji is noted for its smug and sexual connotations (Smirking Face, 2015). Employed in combination with the +18, the smirking face implies experience of Tumblr’s adult content and evokes a sense of embodied pleasure in connection with it. At the same time, the annotation refuses to render decisive meaning (Maclure, 2013).

In many ways, this encounter is characteristic of the hesitant ways in which pleasures emerge in sexuality research with young people, as they struggle to move out from under the weight of risk discourses (Austin, 2016; McLelland & Fine, 2008). There is a sense of these discourses in the speed with which Rory and Charlie deny engagement with Tumblr’s adult content, as well as the ambiguity of James’s contribution. The exchange points to a seeming failure to unveil the significance of Tumblr’s 18+ content. However, Maclure, Holmes, Jones, and MacRae (2010) encourage us not to see such silences as deficiencies. Instead, moments that teeter on the “threshold of knowing” are worthy of attention for resisting fixity and engaging us in the “ongoing practice of making sense” (Maclure, 2013, p. 181).

James’s contribution calls to mind Berlant’s (1998) focus on the “doing” of intimacy through communication “with the sparest of signs and gestures” that unsettle boundaries of being “known and incognito” (p. 281). By working the “gap between ‘what goes without saying’ and ‘what cannot be said,’” James’s emoji annotation provides a glimpse into his intimate Tumblr practices without exposing them completely (Visweswaran, 1994, p. 100, cited in Maclure et al., 2010, p. 498). Arguably, the visual method of mapping provided an opportunity for Tumblr’s adult content and the communicative potential of emojis to be raised while resisting subsumption into fixed codes of risky, dangerous, shameful, pleasurable, good (Etheridge, 2016).

Mobile Intimacies

Intimate encounters also emerged through the participant’s resistance and appropriation of the research methods (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008). While I had initially planned to undertake the digital tours with the research laptop, the participants chose to navigate the platforms from behind their own smartphone screens. In the moment, this was the most practical way to undertake the task, but it also produced a tangible shift in the dynamic of the room, from the collaborative mapping activity to the enclosed process of scrolling through their phones.

Albury and Byron (2016) note that phones and apps themselves can operate as “physical boundaries that promoted a sense of privacy and interiority” (p. 7). Similarly, the introduction of the mobile devices into the session produced a sense of distance between me and the participants as they retreated into the private world of their smartphone screens. The boundaries they produced were flexible, however, as intimate, semiprivate exchanges occurred between participants. For example, Rose (16) giggled and shared her screen with Lily (16) as she scrolled through Tumblr content she could not show me. The practice of sharing screens not only revealed a closeness and familiarity between Rose and Lily, but their giggles echoed the “wavering silence” of James’s annotation (Spyrou, 2016, p. 12). They intimated at something beyond the verbalized and visualized accounts of their online practices.

These acts of intimation highlighted the “contradictory desires” inherent to intimacy in research where curiosity meets the threat of participants revealing too much (Berlant, 1998, p. 285). Participants at Westland had also raised the topic of Tumblr’s adult content, stating that “Tumblr is just porn” (Gabby, 17) and “You can follow just normal things on Tumblr and porn will still come up” (Charlotte, 16). Had sexually explicit material been shared during the digital tours this would have raised issues around ethics and consent (see Hancock, 2016), as well as potentially invoked a “territory of protection and regulation” that troubled research relations (Ringrose & Renold, 2014, p. 4). Therefore, the boundaries the phones affirmed were welcome. They allowed participants to exercise choice in what they shared, with whom, and in what way (Holland et al., 2010). At the same time, these boundaries were porous as illicit content still made its presence felt through the giggles and gestures the Tumblr app elicited (Allen, 2015).

Both the emoji annotation and the sharing of screens exemplify the challenges of interpreting intimacies that are unspoken and in a certain sense unseen but still “recurrently present” (Allen, 2015, p. 124). My desire to foreground the young people’s perspectives made it difficult to analyze such seemingly opaque, incomplete accounts. However, as Maclure (2013) argues, it was the very ongoing practice of making sense that illuminated these “minor intimacies” where “glances, gestures, encounters” entangled with digital icons and devices to evoke closeness, familiarity, and interiority (Berlant, 1998, p. 285).

Conclusion

“I Didn’t Think It Would Turn Out This Way” Is the Secret Epitaph of Intimacy

This paper set out to make a case for visual and participatory approaches to researching digitally mediated intimacies (Berlant, 1998, p. 281). While I did not begin my study explicitly aiming to explore LGBT+ young people’s practices of intimacy online, co-producing visual data with participants provided insights into the way different digital modalities entangled with their intimate lives. Moving beyond a focus on verbal or textual self-disclosure, I have detailed how Tumblr was revealed to be a particularly intimate, private space for sharing inner thoughts and feelings through re-blogging images, videos, and gifs.

Building on literature that accounts for the ideological regimes such LGBT+ imagery puts in place (Lovelock, 2017) or considers its affectivity for broad online communities (McBean, 2014; Raun, 2012), combining affect theories with participatory visual methods elicited insights into the appeal of this imagery from young people’s own perspectives. The digital tours enabled a focus on the affective intensities driving the young people’s movements across different platforms and offered glimpses of the suggestive register of same-sex relfies on Tumblr. Lily’s account of these relfies further highlighted their affective power.

Exploring LGBT+ imagery online was not without its challenges. Social media data raise “novel ethical questions about the publicness, consent, and proper use of found visual materials” (Hand, 2017, p. 228), which challenge previous ways of working with participant-produced images. I argued that social media imagery requires further consideration of the affective effects of re-presentation. For my own evolving social media research, I find inspiration in recent work with arts-based methodologies for carrying and conveying young people’s experience of digital sexual cultures (Renold, 2017).

Attending to the visual and affective dynamics of digitally mediated intimacy also invited a consideration of the research process itself. As Berlant (1998) observes about intimacy, research encounters, too, carry tacit normativities around “good” data and the potential failure to stabilize a sense of “knowing” (Maclure et al., 2010). This was evident in the participants wavering silences around Tumblr’s adult content.

I argued that these acts of concealment not be seen as a failure of the research to uncover intimate details of the participant’s lives. Instead acknowledging my affective responses to these wavering silences worked to illuminate the role of emojis and screen-sharing in establishing intimacy, as well as the ambivalent nature of intimate encounters (Berlant, 1998). The feelings of alienation and distance these digital gestures evoked for me as a researcher simultaneously highlighted the sense of closeness, familiarity, and interiority they established with and between the participants. Furthermore, the emoji and screen-sharing operated in material, embodied, and sensory ways, rather than solely being visual tools and further exemplified the need to expand our methodological approach to intimacy and new media. By documenting my efforts to slow down and tune into the unfolding intimacies of the participant’s accounts, I have offered one way of making sense of Tumblr as a charged site for LGBT+ young people’s practices of intimacy as they emerged within the precarity of a fleeting research encounter.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under DTC grant number E/J500197/1.

Notes

Author Biography

Kate Marston is a Doctoral Researcher in Contemporary Childhoods at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. Her research draws on feminist, post-human and post-structural theories to explore UK young people’s digitally-mediated sexual cultures through creative and participatory methods.

References

Albury

Byron

(2016). Safe on my phone? Same-sex attracted young people’s negotiations of intimacy, visibility, and risk on digital hook-up apps. Social Media + Society, 2(4), 1-10.

Alexander

Losh

(2010). “A YouTube of one’s own?” “Coming Out” videos as rhetorical action. In Pullen

Cooper

(Eds.), LGBT Identity and online new media (pp. 37-50). New York, NY: Routledge.

Allen

(2015). Sexual assemblages: Mobile phones/young people/school. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36, 120-132.

Anderson

(2006). Becoming and being hopeful: Towards a theory of affect. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 733-752.

Austin

(2016). Dancing sexual pleasures: Exploring teenage women’s experiences of sexuality and pleasure beyond “sex.” Sex Education, 16, 279-293.

Berlant

(1998). Intimacy: A special issue. Critical Inquiry, 24, 281-288.

Berlant

(2008). The female complaint: The unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Brady

Brown

(2013). Rewarding but let’s talk about the challenges: Using arts based methods in research with young mothers. Methodological Innovations, 8, 99-112.

Cho

(2015). Queer reverb: Tumblr, affect, time. In Hillis

Paasonen

Petit

(Eds.), Networked affect (pp. 44-58). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

10.

Coleman

(2009). The becoming of bodies: Girls, images, experience. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

11.

Coleman

(2011). Transforming images: Screens, affect, futures. London, England: Routledge.

12.

Coleman

Ringrose

(2013). Deleuze and research methodologies. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.

13.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London, England: Bloomsbury Academic.

14.

De Ridder

Van Bauwel

. (2015). The discursive construction of gay teenagers in times of mediatization: Youth’s reflections on intimate storytelling, queer shame and realness in popular social media places. Journal of Youth Studies, 18, 777-793.

15.

Dix

R. E.

(2016, November 7). Huge Announcement! [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDwImx-rDBU

16.

Downing

(2013). Virtual youth: Non-heterosexual young people’s use of the internet to negotiate their identities and socio-sexual relations. Children’s Geographies, 11, 44-58.

17.

Duguay

(2016). “He has a way gayer Facebook than I do”: Investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site. New Media & Society, 18, 891-907.

18.

Etheridge

(2016). Complex and creative intimate and sexual citizens: Mapping a study that seeks to understand children outside the binary of sexual innocence or sexual contamination. Continuum, 30, 547-556.

19.

Featherstone

(2010). Body, image and affect in consumer culture. Body & Society, 16, 193-221.

20.

Fraser

Puwar

(2008). Introduction: Intimacy in research. History of Human Sciences, 21(4), 1-16.

21.

Gallacher

Gallagher

(2008). Methodological immaturity in childhood research: Thinking through “participatory methods.” Childhood, 15, 499-516.

22.

Gilbert

(2014). Sexuality in school: The limits of education. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

23.

Goorwich

(2015, March 24). Two girls named Rose and Rosie got married and it was beautiful. Metro. Retrieved from http://metro.co.uk/2015/03/24/two-girls-named-rose-and-rosie-got-married-and-it-was-beautiful-5118886

24.

Gregg

Seigworth

(2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

25.

Hancock

(2016, October 18). Why we shouldn’t show porn in SRE [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://bishtraining.com/shouldnt-show-porn-sre/

26.

Hand

(2017). Visuality in social media: Researching images, circulations and practices. In Sloan

Quan-Haase

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social media research methods (pp. 215-232). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

27.

Hillier

Harrison

(2007). Building realities less limited than their own: Young people practicing same-sex attraction on the internet. Sexualities, 10, 82-100.

28.

Hillis

Paasonen

Petit

(2015). Networked affect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

29.

Holland

Renold

Ross

Hillman

(2010). Power, agency and participatory agendas: A critical exploration of young people’s engagement in participative qualitative research. Childhood, 17, 360-375.

30.

Jamieson

(2013). Personal relationships, intimacy and the self in a mediated global digital age. In Orton-Johnson

(Ed.), Digital sociology: Critical perspectives (pp. 13-33). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

31.

Kofoed

Charlotte

(2016). A snap of intimacy: Photo-sharing among young people on social media. First Monday, 21(11). doi:10.5210/fm.v21i11.6905

32.

Lovelock

(2017). “Is every YouTuber going to make a coming out video eventually?” YouTube celebrity video bloggers and lesbian and gay identity. Celebrity Studies, 8, 87-103.

33.

Macintosh

Bryson

(2008). Youth, Myspace, and the interstitial spaces of becoming and belonging. Journal of LGBT Youth Studies, 5, 133-142.

34.

Maclure

(2013). Classification or wonder? Coding as an analytic practice in qualitative research. In Coleman

Ringrose

(Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 164-183). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.

35.

Maclure

Holmes

Jones

MacRae

(2010). Silence as resistance to analysis: Or, on not opening one’s mouth properly. Qualitative Inquiry, 16, 492-500.

36.

Mannay

(2016). Visual, narrative and creative research methods: Application, reflection and ethics. London, England: Routledge.

37.

Mayes

(2016). Shifting research methods with a becoming-child ontology: Co-theorising puppet production with high school students. Childhood, 23, 105-122.

38.

Mclelland

Fine

(2008). Writing on cellophane: studying teen women’s sexual desires, inventing methodological release points. In Gallagher

(Ed.), (pp. 232-260). London: Routledge.

39.

McBean

(2014). Remediating affect: “Luclyn” and lesbian intimacy on YouTube. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 18, 282-297.

40.

McNicholas Smith

Tyler

. (2017). Lesbian brides: Post-queer popular culture. Feminist Media Studies, 17, 315-331.

41.

O’Riordan

Phillips

(2007). Queer online: Media, technology and sexuality. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

42.

Paasonen

(2015). A midsummer’s bonfire: Affective intensities of online debate. In Hillis

Paasonen

Petit

(Eds.), Networked affect (pp. 27-42). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

43.

Paasonen

Hillis

Petit

(2015). Networks of transmission: Intensity, sensation, value. In Hillis

Paasonen

Petit

(Eds.), Networked affect (pp. 1-26). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

44.

Pauwel

(2015). Reframing visual social science: Towards a more visual sociology and anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

45.

Raun

(2012). DIY therapy: Exploring affective self-representations in trans video blogs on YouTube. In Karatzogianni

Kuntsman

(Eds.), Digital cultures and the politics of emotion: Feelings, affect and technological change (pp. 165-181). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

46.

Renninger

(2015). “Where I can be myself…where I can speak my mind”: Networked counterpublics in a polymedia environment. New Media & Society, 17, 1513-1529.

47.

Renold

(2017). “Feel what I feel”: Making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters. Journal of Gender Studies, 1, 20. doi:10.1080/09589236.2017.1296352

48.

Renold

Ringrose

(2017). Selfies, relfies and phallic tagging: Posthuman part-icipations in teen digital sexuality assemblages. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49,1066-1079.

49.

Ringrose

Renold

(2014). “F***k Rape!” Exploring affective intensities in a feminist research assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 772-780.

50.

Smirk. (n.d.). In Cambridge dictionary. Retrieved from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/smirk

51.

Smirking Face. (2015). In Emojipedia. Retrieved from http://emojipedia.org/smirking-face/

52.

Spyrou

(2016). Researching children’s silences: Exploring the fullness of voice in childhood research. Childhood, 23, 7-21.

53.

Taylor

Falconer

Snowden

(2014). Queer youth, Facebook and faith: Facebook methodologies and online identities. New Media & Society, 16, 1138-1153.

54.

Tumblr. (2016). Adult content. Retrieved from https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

55.

Van Doorn

. (2010). The ties that bind: The networked performance of gender, sexuality and friendship on Myspace. New Media & Society, 12, 583-602.

56.

Visweswaran

(1994). Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

57.

Warfield

(2014, March). Why I love selfies and why you should too. Public talk presented at Kwantlen Polytechnic Library, Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.

58.

Warfield

(in press). “Reblogging someone’s selfie is seen as a really nice thing to do”: Metaphors of place within a non-dominant platform vernacular on Tumblr. In Markham

Tiidenberg

(Eds.), Remixing life online, 20 years later. CA: AltaMira Press.

59.

Wargo

(2015). “Every selfie tells a story . . .”: LGBTQ youth lifestreams and new media narratives as connective identity texts. New Media & Society, 19, 560-578.

60.

Wiles

Coffey

Robinson

Heath

(2012). Anonymisation and visual images: Issues of respect, “voice” and protection. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15, 41-53.