Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how a gender-nonconforming creator and their peers in Abidjan use social media to make possible lives visible and partly valuable, as posts circulate across publics, making recognisability both a resource and, amid rising hostility, an embodied risk.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how a gender-nonconforming creator and their close peers in Abidjan use social media as a terrain of aspiration and becoming, making possible lives visible, partly valuable and intermittently habitable. Drawing on long-term offline/online ethnography centred on one creator in their early twenties, it traces the collective labour through which videos are staged and circulated, while visibility generates clients, gifts, collaborations, relationships and public standing without securing a stable income or protection.

The paper takes as its entry point a luxury-van video filmed at a friend’s birthday in early 2024, within a repertoire of rented vehicles and rooms, parties and carefully chosen venues. Against a backdrop of insults, threats and restrictions in the street that long preceded it, the post generated further hostility towards the group. But as a homophobic campaign targeting visibly gender-nonconforming people intensified in August 2024 and drew international coverage, the images travelled beyond their intended publics and were recoded as evidence of sexual and socioeconomic illegitimacy.

Rather than a simple pendulum between visibility and withdrawal, the paper traces a cumulative sequence of circulation, value-making, attack, tactical retreat, return and relational repair. Friendship networks, maternal support, frequent but temporary access to varied spaces and forms of mobility, and backstage creative labour shape what can be shown, to whom and at what cost.