The paper explores how social media (such as Instagram and Facebook) increasingly become employed as tools of surveillance in migration processes.

Most LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, who are denied asylum in Denmark (as well as in the other Nordic countries), are denied asylum because of a lack of credibility. In other words, the authorities do not believe their stories of gender-related persecution, homophobia or transphobia in their homelands; very often, immigration authorities do not believe that the asylum seekers are ‘genuine’ LGBTQ people.

During the previous few years, social media have become integrated into most people’s social lives. For many LGBTQ people this has involved an increased self-expression (Thumin, 2012) of their gender and/or sexual identity on various online media. At the same time, and a consequence of this development, immigration authorities, such as the Danish Immigrant Services (Udlændingestyrelsen), have begun to increasingly examine asylum seekers’ self-expressions and online claims of gender and sexual identities through analyses of their postings and activities on social media.

The paper wants to explore this merging of migration and digitalisation – surveillance and self-expression – with a particular focus to how the categories gender and sexuality function in asylum processes involving LGBTQ refugees.

Digital connectivity and mobile technology increasing play roles in migration processes, as refugees, via mobile phones, navigate their ways through Europe (Leurs & Smets, 2018). Simultaneously, digital media (especially mobile phones) play a growing role as a tool of surveillance, as migration authorities begin to deny refugees asylum based on their digital tracks. This points to a tension, where digital technology simultaneous function as a resource for surviving, a means of self-expression, and an instrument of surveillance.

The paper discusses how social media – which have been celebrated as tools of imagination and as spaces where individuals can play with identity and sexuality – in this specific context, becomes an instrument of truth and facts – of right and wrong. This indicates serious inequalities in who have the privileges of playing with and expressing gender identities and sexualities in contemporary (online) times.

Referencer:
Leurs, Koen & Smets, Kevin (2918). Forced Migrants and Digital Connectivity. Special Issue of Social Media and Society.
Raun, T. (2016). Out online: Trans self-representation and community building on YouTube. London: Ashgate.
Thumin, N. (2012) Self-representation and digital culture. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Rikke Andreassen is Professor (mso) in Communication studies at Roskilde University, Denmark.
She is a researcher and teacher in the fields of media (‘new’ and ‘old’ media), gender, sexuality and race. She has recently published the books ‘Mediated Kinship. Gender, Race and Sexuality in Donor Families’ (2018), ‘Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays’ (2015) and the co-editor of ‘Affectivity and Race: Studies from Nordic Contexts’ (2015) and ‘Mediated Intimacies: Connectivities, Relationalities and Proximities’ (2018).

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