LGBTQI Online

The entry examines some crucial ways in which LGBTQI people take advantage of pervasive digital communications affordances in their struggle for achieving full recognition and their rights in the digital as well as in the offline social spaces. This entry proposes that an understanding of the possibilities and the challenges offered by digital media to the LGBTQI community can be reached by considering both the material and the social aspects that structure the multifaceted relationship between LGBTQI people and digital media.The entry provides an introductory overview on these two orders of aspects, beginning from material ones—that is, by accounting for the (still few) reflections on the role that digitalmedia affordances and working logics play in LGBTQI life. The entry then proceeds by focusing on the social aspects by looking at three broad sets of media practices that are particularly relevant to understand the potentialities and the risks that digital media bring forward to the LGBTQIworld: representation and identity construction, community building, and activism.