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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes how non‑binary influencers in Abidjan use TikTok and Instagram to turn gender nonconformity into income and aspirational lifestyles, navigating algorithms, family negotiations, and backlash that make queer visibility both vital resource and persistent risk.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how non-binary youth in Abidjan navigate the digitalization of urban informal economies through social media as a terrain of aspiration, self‑making, and becoming. Drawing on long-term online/offline ethnography with a peer group of influencers in their twenties followed over several years, the analysis traces how self‑branding practices on TikTok and Instagram turn minoritized gender expressions into monetizable visibility and aspirational urban lifestyles, reconfiguring lived possibilities and the terms on which a “good life” can be imagined.

The entry point is an episode in late 2024, when staged displays of luxury, amplified by newspaper coverage and hostile daily livestreams from rival influencers, catalyzed a short but intense wave of digital outrage and anti-gender-diverse moral entrepreneurship targeting these youths’ socioeconomic and sexual legitimacy. Rather than a simple “pendulum” of openness and backlash, the paper conceptualizes a sequenced dynamic of queer visibility—gradual exposure, algorithmic amplification, moral panic, tactical retreat, and partial reconfiguration of audiences and gender performance—shaped by platform affordances and locally situated, classed aesthetics of ostentation.

By bringing debates on queer African media publics, anti–gender-diverse hostility, and “safe” online spaces into conversation with ethnographic attention to family negotiations, friendship networks, backstage labor, and practices of care and relational repair, the paper shows how gender‑diverse youth continually recalibrate what can be shown, to whom, and at what economic and existential risk, as they negotiate the frictions between the selves they must perform online and the precarious realities they inhabit offline.