Cyberspatial agency: Experimenting with gender expression in digital worlds amid the physical isolation of the United States COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

In this article, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated experimentation with gender expression via a process that we call cyberspatial agency. During the pandemic in the United States, millions of people were simultaneously physically isolated from one another while also experiencing an unprecedented level of digital hyper-connectedness. In avoiding the public gaze while also having the ability to carefully curate the online communities where they spent most of their days, gender-diverse individuals in our study experienced an enhanced sense of freedom to stretch and bend their gender expression. They collaborated with algorithms and platforms to access new models for linguistic and visual expression, resulting in considerable experimentation and the potential for longer-term changes in gender identity that may last well beyond the pandemic. Our findings from this exploratory study suggest a need to rethink the relationship between visibility and queerness in the post-COVID-19, Trump-era digital age in the United States.