The Governance of Queer Visibility in Platformized Public Spheres

Abstract

Queer visibility in contemporary digital cultures is increasingly mediated by platformized public spheres, where it is both produced and governed through socio-technical infrastructures. While social media platforms provide important opportunities for queer users—including community formation, identity exploration, and circulation of counternarratives beyond traditional gatekeeping institutions—they simultaneously organize visibility in uneven ways. Platform infrastructures embed normative assumptions and capitalistic incentives that selectively amplify, suppress, or modulate queer expression through mechanisms of datafication, selection, and commodification. As a result, queer visibility is a structurally precarious condition marked by the simultaneous presence of hypervisibility, erasure, and surveillance. Bringing critical platform studies and social justice theory into dialogue, this conceptual article analyses how new regimes of queer visibility emerge and are shaped by platform mechanisms and considers their implications for representation, recognition, and redistribution. In doing so, it develops an analytical framework centered on three interlocking governance logics—quantification, normativity, and profitability—that organize visibility as a site of contestation and an object of control. Finally, the article introduces the concept of “platformized (in)visibilization” to describe the ambivalent role of platforms as both enabling and constraining environments for expression in contemporary digital cultures, affecting political legitimacy, social equality, and economic justice.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Media and Communication, 2026 · DOI ↗