Paper short abstract:

Cultural narratives deeply influence how each generation understands gender and sexual diversity. Using interviews and virtual social media tours with LGBTQ+ youth, we interrogate how narrative engagement in digital spaces impacts both individual identity development and broader cultural change.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary LGBTQ+ adolescents are approaching adulthood amidst rapidly changing norms surrounding gender, sexuality, and intimacy. The rise of digital communication technologies is integral in these cultural shifts, facilitating connection across traditional geographic and cultural boundaries and the formation of new communities for gender and sexual minorities. The cultural narratives used to support and oppose these changing norms can be understood as one aspect of cultural schemas, supporting both continuity and change in understandings of gender and sexual diversity across generations. To examine how LGBTQ+ adolescents are engaging with these shifting understandings, our project combines a master narrative framework with a virtual tour interview of participants’ posts and interactions across multiple social media sites. Our deductive analysis revealed engagement with multiple cultural narratives, including gender as biological, gender as binary/non-binary, and same-gender desire as sinful or abnormal. Our inductive analysis yielded three key navigational strategies used by LGBTQ+ youth: seeking and sharing information, creating queer community, and choices about visibility and permanence. However, the meaning and power of these strategies, particularly in relation to each participant’s intersections of privilege and oppression, could only be understood within the frame of three key navigational contexts: the traditional gender narrative, whiteness and liberalism, and digital platform affordances. Along with a broad overview of results, we illustrate these connections through participant portraits, highlighting key moments in their navigation of gender and sexuality narratives over time, along with the interplay between individual and cultural understandings of gender and sexuality in online spaces.