“I Want to Know What People are Saying”: Trans Youth Learning Critical Media Literacies to Negotiate Hate on Social Media

Abstract

We draw on 37 interviews with a racially diverse group of 21 trans and queer teenagers to consider how they used social media to navigate dominant ideologies amid rapidly accelerating white supremacy, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, anti-transness, and anti-queerness in 2019-2020. The analysis emerges from a humanizing qualitative study of lgbtq+ youth digital life conducted in partnership with an interdisciplinary gender health program that provides holistic services. Employing grounded theory and intersectional theories of queer politics, we expand conceptualizations of queer critical media literacies. We find that youth in the study enacted critical media literacies to 1) anticipate the logics of hate by which they are oppressed; 2) unlearn dominant ideologies that structure privilege; 3) and rehearse responses to intersecting oppression. Understanding the ways youth negotiate dominant ideologies on social media can inform the design of critical media literacy teaching and learning to confront phobic forces in multiple youth-serving contexts.