Cyberqueer Techno-practices: Digital Space-Making and Networking by Swedish Gay Men     This study aims to highlight intersections of queer experiences and new media, by focusing on the use of digital platforms and communication practices among Swedish gay men. This is being carried out using a netnographic approach including an online survey and in-depth interviews among the target group, as well as field observations on gay catering online forums and GPS application software. Special attention is paid to the blur between online and offline, increasingly underpinned by innovations such as smartphones, tablet computers and GPS techniques, and how it may challenge and reconfigure concepts of public and private in relation to sexuality and sexual identity. Using a rich combination of queer theory and media and communication theory, the study intends to illuminate the underdeveloped potential of cross-fertilization between the fields. The concept of space has a central position, as the cyberqueer practices performed by gay men are argued to produce queer space that extends their social scope in a heteronormative environment. The interviews and the survey indicate that the use of digital media among gay men fulfill group specific purposes, for aspects such as social and sexual networking, as well as senses of community. Further, the possibility to visit digital spaces seems to have a particular significance during “coming-out processes”, since most of the informants have been dealing with their sexual identity and/or practice online, long before doing so offline. This is valid for individuals from both urban and rural areas, as the queer spaces online also are prioritized over offline alternatives when available.

The fairy tale of Cinderella is known for its romance, but she seeks independence while being confused by her identity in a new version by Marissa Meyer called Cinder. This essay will present how Meyer’s Cinderella, Cinder, confuses the gender roles by taking on both feminine and masculine ones. This blend makes Cinder not entirely compatible with the norms, and her identity confusion makes it even harder, which results in her losing her conception of self. While she is trying to conform to the gender norms and receive recognition from others (be accepted by society), she denies her heritage and cyborg self to the point of creating a false identity. However, her cybernetics and abuse prevent her from being recognized – she even loses her only source of recognition, which indicates that a norm breaker is not worthy of having it. Nevertheless, Cinder shows signs of what a queer cyborg would do if forced into an identity; as queer, Cinder is not meant to be embodied or forced into an identity and should also have the ability to be free and change her identity as she pleases. Regardless of being queer, the abuse and society’s views prevent her from escaping her identity confusion.

Employing institutional ethnography as an analytic frame, this study explicates the disjuncture felt by bisexual-identified individuals between their lived actualities and the textual realities stemming from the binary model of sexuality. This study also explores the role of online journal communities, including the capabilities and limits of this type of venue, as a rolling text that coordinates the narratives created there around bisexuality and bisexual-identification. Finally, this study critically examines the collaborative development of an experience-based discourse on bisexuality as produced by text-based identity work. Through the coordination of bisexual identity work taking place online, the venue facilitates the production of an alternative discourse that is differentiated from other sexuality discourses in its demonstration of fluidity, multiplicity, and resistance to order. In its differences from, rather than its similarities to, governing sexuality discourses, this bisexual discourse-in-production creates the possibility for a radical reconceptualization of sexuality and sexual-identification.