Indigenous LGBTIQ+ ascendancy at the digital cultural interface

Abstract

Heteropatriarchal settler colonialism imposes subjugating mechanisms that regulate, deny, and try to dissolve the existence of Indigenous gender and sexuality diversity. These effects are exacted through symbolic and material enduring settler colonial legacies, such as the supplantation of Indigenous gender and sexual lived realities into Western-Christian ideologies. However, Indigenous LGBTIQ+ peoples are not submissive recipients of discrimination and oppression. Indigenous LGBTIQ+ anti-colonial resistance and remonstrance is being enacted in multiple ways, such as through digital spaces. This resistance, however, remains underexplored in the context of the land now called Australia. So too is the knowledge constellation that attends to and accommodates the intersectional Social and Emotional Wellbeing needs, desires and digital realities of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ peoples, nationally and globally. Drawing from in-depth elicitation interviews with seven Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander gender and sexuality diverse content creators, content analysis, and the theory of the Cultural Interface, this thesis reveals that participants provocatively embody their sovereign Indigenous LGBTIQ+ identities digitally. They do this as a means of visible agency to enact identity, fill the void of diverse and intersectional LGBTIQ+ representation, to exhibit the possibilities of a thriving future for like-identifying individuals and to assert their individual and combined ascendancy of their Indigeneity and gender and sexuality diversities. Participants additionally reveal how they individually and collaboratively fight settler colonial practices by engaging in an array of activisms; carry out cultural obligations and Indigenous LGBTIQ+ legacies; continue and augment existing traditional practices; and engage in collective moments of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ caregiving and world-making. Participants also share how their digital immersions can be curtailed by instances of platformed racism and can leave participants vulnerable to burnout and compounding forms of abuse, illustrating how the Digital Cultural Interface operates similarly, although distinctively, to its offline counterpart.

Date of Award	2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Karen Soldatic (Supervisor)