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Between Firefighting and Flaming: Collective and Personal Trans* and Gender-Diverse Social Media

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Abstract

In this chapter Vivienne explores a case study in the formation of a community of trans* and gender-diverse (TGD) people in regional and urban centres in South Australia, both on and offline, during a social media storytelling initiative called Stories Beyond Gender. Vivienne considers some similarities and differences between self-making in traditional Digital Storytelling workshops, and the more dispersed and potentially incoherent fragments of selves that were shared across a variety of digital platforms during this project. This chapter covers tensions evident in curating complex, fluid, or multiple identities, both for oneself and as a community, in digitally mediated forms, arguing that negotiations over coherence (as judged by others) and congruence (as intuited by self) can be affirming, building the resilience required to undertake advocacy.

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Correspondence to Son Vivienne .

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Vivienne, S. (2018). Between Firefighting and Flaming: Collective and Personal Trans* and Gender-Diverse Social Media. In: Dobson, A.S., Robards, B., Carah, N. (eds) Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5_12

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