Short Abstract

This panel explores how gender-diverse and sexually minoritized people use digital technologies to sustain informal economies, navigate visibility, and reconfigure care, recognition, and resilience across transnational contexts.

Long Abstract

This panel examines how gender-diverse and sexually minoritized people navigate, transform, and sustain digital informal economies across diverse geographies in the Global North and South. As smartphones and mobile internet become pervasive, everyday practices within these communities are reshaped by new constraints, expectations, and possibilities. We invite papers that attend to how digital technologies enable renewed livelihood strategies - such as online content creation, digital sales, influencer networks, romance economies, and informal services - while mediating affective and material exchanges that sustain relationality and community.

We encourage submissions that examine both visible public interactions and the less-visible processes of backstage negotiation, hidden transactionality, and strategic navigation of online platforms. By foregrounding gender and sexuality diversity, this panel reframes informal digital economies as spaces of care, visibility, and resilience, where practices of maintenance, self-presentation, and exchange become vital strategies for staying afloat. These economies reveal emergent modes of solidarity, resourcefulness, and belonging that intersect with multiple marginalizations—offering inventive responses to the persistent challenges of uncertainty, precarity, and sometimes stigma across diverse social environments.

Ultimately, this panel invites critical reflections on how informal digital economies unsettle the boundaries between economy, care, morality, and recognition. It also examines how they reconfigure the politics of visibility in a world shaped by inequality and uncertainty. We welcome focused case studies as well as cross-regional perspectives engaging with these themes.

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