Collaging Together-Apart: Representations of Queer Joy in Digital Spaces

Woolley, Dawn ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6958-5658, Are, Carolina, Brown, Genavee, Clinch, Sarah, Dalton, Ben, Steeds, Madeleine, Webster, Lexi and Wilson, Alice (2026) Collaging Together-Apart: Representations of Queer Joy in Digital Spaces. Journal of Gender Studies. pp. 1-25. ISSN 1465-3869

Abstract

This paper examines how queer joy in digital spaces is platformed, performed, and imagined through discussions and collages created during a participatory workshop in the North of England with 11 queer digital platform users. By exploring current and desired forms of queer joy in digital spaces, we evaluate opportunities and challenges for design, including selective anonymity and disclosure, and flexible group boundaries to protect safety whilst also signalling in-group belonging. Drawing on Barad’s (2014) notion of cutting together-apart we use collage as a queer methodology that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs relationships and meanings, enabling expression of complex, fluid, multiple and evolving selves. Collage allowed participants to examine digital platform affordances (including agency over disclosure, community building, and space to experiment with identities not yet possible offline) while navigating negative experiences and emotions. With roots in political critique and uncovering unconscious thought, collage is well suited to the examination of identity and joy. We foreground entangled assemblages as a collaging method that encourages creative collaborative thinking, conceptualising expressions of queer joy, and as an approach to interdisciplinarity that values the differences that matter in (between) our areas of expertise. The particular value of drawing on entangled assemblages for exploring queer identity – particularly in the online context we consider here – can be thought of in terms of collage: constructing self through an active assembling of relation, emotion and expressions better thought of not as a collection of pre-existing building blocks (concepts and bodies) but rather as always iteratively co-constituted and entangled. Ultimately, entangled assemblage is revealed as a method uniquely equipped to get at the performative aspects of gendered identity. Collaging-together-apart in this work is enlivened as an agential iterative and incessant doing that reworks meaning and relation intra-actively from within.

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