‘I wouldn't want my family to cop anything’: examining the family of origin and its place in LGBTQIA+ young people’s social media practices

ABSTRACT

Social media practices are situated within the contexts that people are located in, including family and peer relationships. LGBTQIA+ young people carefully curate social media spaces to find similar others in careful ways. However, less is understood about how existing connections to families of origin (re)shape social media practices. Drawing on interview and focus group data with 65 LGBTQIA+ young people, we examine family considerations in social media practices and curation strategies. Findings reveal that considerations about familial relations play an important role in how young people use social media for maintaining and fostering ties with family members. Young LGBTQIA+ people narrativise their social media practices as intensely affective experiences, where issues of care, concern, and love for family, (re)shapes their social media use. We argue that queer young people’s social media practices can be conceptualised as family practices and consider the implications this has for making sense of social media for queer young people.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital practices
• families
• LGBT
• queer
• social media
• wellbeing

Acknowledgment

A version of this paper was shared at an Institute for Culture and Society seminar, and we thank colleagues for their feedback. We also extend a huge thank you to the young people who generously gave up their time to participate in this research and share their experiences with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the purposes of this study, family of origin refers to the family one has grown up in, which can include biological or adoptive families.

2 We use the acronym LGBTQIA+ to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual and aromantic as well as other meaningful identity labels. The respondents in this study included representation from individuals from all these different groups. We use LGBTQIA+ interchangeably with ‘queer’ throughout this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The study received funding from Facebook (Meta), which was provided as a foundational gift. The study was also supported by internal funding from Western Sydney University.