Routledge Queer Digital Lives: LGBTQ Realities and Resistance under Platform Capitalism

In an age where social media platforms structure the very conditions of visibility, this book investigates how LGBTQ lives are made, managed, and sometimes erased by algorithmic infrastructures. Bringing together voices from across the Global South and diasporic communities, this interdisciplinary volume examines how queer and trans individuals navigate digital platforms as spaces of expression, surveillance, resistance, and survival. Spanning geographies from Bangladesh to China, and Pakistan to the Philippines, contributors explore the affective, political, and economic entanglements of platformed queer life. The chapters interrogate how algorithms sort content, how visibility becomes conditional, and how queer resistance emerges not only through representation, but through subversion, invisibility, memory work, and infrastructural reappropriation. Foregrounding intersectionality, decolonial critique, and transnational feminist and queer theory, this collection reframes digital life not as a neutral terrain, but as one where queerness is contested, commodified, and continuously reimagined. This book is both an urgent critique of platform capitalism and a testament to queer world-building amid precarity and constraint. A timely exploration of the algorithmic, economic, and socio-technical undercurrents that shape queer lives online, this book will be of interest to students, researchers, and academics working in the areas of queer media, global digital culture, critical platform studies, and media and activism.