‘A Space to Vent’: Cultivating Indigenous Queer Digital Communities Through Relations of Care and Support.

Abstract

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander gender and sexuality diverse peoples are harnessing digital spaces to transcend territorially defined place-based communities of the past, and create new, informal, digital identity communities. These communities are composed of relatively homogenous subjectivities and are centred on shared identities, histories, experiences, practices and resistances.Drawing from in-depth qualitative interviews with Aboriginal Queer women who are content creators and the theory of the Cultural Interface, this article explores how participants agentically cultivate identity communities and kin through TikTok, Instagram and Spotify. Additionally, it exposes the significance of Indigenous Queer digital communities and chosen families to participants experiences of Social and Emotional Wellbeing. Through their digital cultures of care and kin-making participants reveal how Social and Emotional Wellbeing is relationally practiced online and how they harness media technologies to continue and augment existing Indigenous practices and Queer approaches to family that thrive and survive on reciprocity, responsibility and love. In doing so, participants demonstrate how they embody oppositional intimacies, kinship groups and Indigenous LGBTIQ+ identities which transgress and challenge settler norms of intimacy, family, identity, gender and sexuality.