International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on
Queer Cultures in Digital Asia

What are the challenges and opportunities offered to queer communities and practices by social media and digital platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, Grindr, Blued, Butterfly, and more, in the context of Asia? 

Inspired by Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Berry, Martin, Yue, & Spigel, 2003), published in 2003, and the subsequent two decades of critical scholarship on Queer Asia, this Special Section on Queer Cultures in Digital Asia aims to renew our critical interrogation of the intersection between queerness and Asia at a time when digital media and platforms are inseparable from social lives. Asia provides a complicated context for the development and survival of queer communities as social norms and laws regarding same-sex relationships and gender transition vary across regions. 

Guest-edited by Lik Sam Chan, Jia Tan, and Elija Cassidy, this Special Section examines how contemporary queer lives are platformized, investigating an array of issues from amateur gay porn cultures, lesbian and gay dating apps, trans men’s self-representation, to Boys’ Love fandom, as well as how these are mediated through specific digital platforms. 

While platformed digital media undoubtedly offers new opportunities for queer communities and practices, community-based regulations and internal stratification and discrimination also close off certain forms of queer expression and queer potential. Contributors to this Special Section offer empirical analyses of queer digital cultures, platforms, practices, and communities from one or multiple Asian regions. They highlight how regional specificity has contributed to the manifestation of queer practices and cultures. With new digital phenomena emerging—live streaming, games, robots and AI, non-fungible tokens, health tracking—and social and legal environments evolving, Queer Cultures in Digital Asia will always be in a state of flux. This Special Section can hopefully open further conversations about digital media and queerness among scholars working across a range of diverse Asian contexts. 

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on March 19, 2023. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback! 

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Queer Cultures in Digital Asia—Introduction
Lik Sam Chan, Jia Tan, Elija Cassidy

Digital Sexual Publics: Understanding Do-It-Yourself Gay Porn and Lived Experiences of Sexuality in China
Runze Ding, Lin Song

Attention Economy, Neoliberalism, and Homonormative Masculinity in Amateur Gay Porn Circuits on Twitter: The Case of Manila and Hong Kong
Ruepert Jiel Dionisio Cao 

“I Look at How They Write Their Bio and I Judge From There”: Language and Class Among Middle-Class Queer Filipino Digital Socialities in Manila 
Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza

Strategic, Conflicted, and Interpellated: Hong Kong and Chinese Queer Women’s Use of Identity Labels on Lesbian Dating Apps 
Carman K. M. Fung

Tracing Dystopian Insta-Emotions Among Hong Kong Trans Men 
Denise Tse-Shang Tang 

Participatory Censorship and Digital Queer Fandom: The Commercialization of Boys’ Love Culture in China
Yiming Wang, Jia Tan 

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Larry Gross, Editor 
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Lik Sam Chan, Jia Tan, and Elija Cassidy, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 9th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level.