Hybrid constellations: investigating the role of communication technologies in coordinating lesbian mobilities in Montreal, Canada
Article / Journal
Author(s) / editor(s):
Alex Chartrand
,
Stefanie Duguay
Year: 2025
Duguay, S., Trépanier, A. M., & Chartrand, A. (2025). Hybrid constellations: investigating the role of communication technologies in coordinating lesbian mobilities in Montreal, Canada. Gender, Place & Culture, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2473392
Keywords: social media, lesbians, sexuality, platforms, technology, constellationsLanguage(s): English
Abstract:
Lesbians’ movement has been constellated across cities and lesbians have long used communication technologies to relay information across dispersed networks. This article brings together perspectives from geography and media studies to examine how communication technologies feature in lesbians’ social organising across the urban space of Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. It does so through interviews with representatives from organisations and individuals who use communication technologies in the development, promotion, and circulation of lesbian events. Findings and analysis reveal that organisers’ actions contribute to, and liaise with, hybrid constellations as connections among fragmented groups and individuals formed through, and reinforced across, digital media and communication technologies as well as interactions in physical space. Organisers contributed to the formation of hybrid constellations through three focal practices: a) using multiple technologies concurrently to draw lines between events and people as stars that knit the constellation together; b) negotiating platform constraints to define events according to fluid and expansive definitions of lesbian identity and to prefigure expectations for physical gatherings; and, c) conducting platformed visibility labour involving negotiation of microcelebrity and algorithmic curation and moderation. This research demonstrates how platforms, as dominant coordinating structures for an identity-based network that is not fixed in space, facilitate but also constrain representation and connection, especially connections across different subject positions united through shared gender or sexual identity. However, if these connections across difference can be forged, hybrid constellations hold potential for resisting heteropatriarchal arrangements of technology and space.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2473392#abstract
Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein