Digitalizing sexual citizenship: LGBTI+ resistance at digital spaces in pandemic times

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on a digital ethnography of Istanbul Pride events in 2020 and in-depth interviews with LGBTI+ activists from Turkey, this study examines the transformations in the sites and practices of resistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the LGBTI+ community in Turkey, whose rights are already threatened by right-wing populist hegemony in politics, the pandemic brought further challenges and limitations to their public assemblies. While digital technologies afforded new sites for resistance, these spaces are not free from surveillance and inaccessibility, making their potential fragilities important to discuss. In this article, sexual citizenship is a central concept to analyse the resistance practices of the LGBTI+ community. By focusing on the affects and narratives of Pride participants, the article explores new opportunities and threats for the practices of LGBTI+ resistance caused by digitalisation. The analysis suggests that the assemblage of locations, technologies, and bodies primarily initiate novel forms of resistance. The LGBTI+ experiences show technological affordances make located experiences travel to a transnational digital, enabling affective interactions from afar, and that activists navigate their (in)visibilities via digital technologies to transform their resistance practices.