A new publication from our scrollingbeyondbinaries.com project, co-authored with Paul Byron, Brendan Churchill, Benjamin Hanckel, and Son Vivienne. It’s titled ‘Tumblr as a Space of Learning, Connecting, and Identity Formation for LGBTIQ+ Young People’. The first few lines give you a pretty good idea of where the chapter goes:
There’s something queer about Tumblr. In our 2016 survey of how young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) people in Australia use social media, we found that—when compared to general population surveys of young social media users—our respondents were five times as likely to use Tumblr. Why? What is it about Tumblr that makes it so appealing to young LGBTIQ+ people? What do young queer and gender diverse people get out of Tumblr?
We wrote this chapter quite a while back, in 2017, so it’s great to see it out now. It’s in this really excellent collection of writing on tumblr, titled A Tumblr Book: Platform and Cultures, edited by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch. It is wonderful to be part of this book which is now a kind of history of tumblr, as most chapters were written after the NSFW ban.
The book has some really interesting looking chapters, on everything from tumblr porn and sexy selfies to fandoms, race, gender, sexuality, and GIF culture. And best of all, it’s open access and totally free to download here:
Brady Robards 