Katharina Schütz

Video content by self-identified queer content creators will be collected and analysed to reveal strategies in knowledge-production and identity- or community-formation. In order to foreground the producers themselves, I will also contact individual creators to gage their own sense of cultural production and media use. This will be studied under the theory of queer world-making, which describes how queer materials and rhetoric can contribute to queer culture, and how this generates a sense of queer futurity as well as positive, hopeful affects for the queer community.

With this research, I will add to the intersections of queer theory, digital culture and youth culture and generate valuable knowledge on the formation of digital communities as well as on the creation and dissemination of cultural knowledge online. This will fill gaps in knowledge about the platforms in question, but also on the social media use of marginalised communities who may rely on these avenues to generate a sense of community and futurity crucial for their survival.