[Last modified: November, 13 2024 07:47 AM]
My project is based on the observations on current situation of lesbians’ representations in the digital world. I am currently not decided yet if my project will focus on Chinese lesbians or not, but if I do, there will be a potential politics-related problem in this topics. In China, the homosexual marriage is still at a illegal position, the government also forbids including any kind of LGBTQ+ images in news and films and television works. Lesbians can only communicate on social media under a hashtag called “le”. However this “le” tag was not the very first tag lesbians use for online communication. The tags before were banned because of online censorship. This is clearly a marginalisation to the lesbians’ voice, or on the political perspective, a lack of freedom of speech and respect to lesbian groups’ human rights. This project’s aim is to make the lesbian group more visible, to some extend, could be viewed as against the current unfair policies to the lesbian or I can say to the whole LGBTQ+ groups.
By observing the posts under the “le” hashtag, I have discovered another quite interesting thing: not only the outside world create stereotypes for lesbians, lesbians also create stereotypes for themselves. For example, today’s Chinese lesbians today will categorised themselves as either “tomboy” or “the one more feminine”, as well as similar hair style for “tomboy” and the one more feminine may also with long hair. However, they cannot represent everyone. I remembered seeing people posting complaint saying that “not only the society tries to silence lesbians, there is 10% lesbians that active in the digital world tries to represent the whole lesbian group with their appearances and habits, the lesbian group is always been silenced in some ways”. Based on this situation, as I am aiming to make the digital representation of lesbians more accurate, I will need to find out those who not really post online to ask how they would like to be represented and ask why they do not posts themselves online (maybe). Therefore, I may need to know more people offline, as I know not everyone would like to post their faces online or portrayed their online images. Therefore, knowing more lesbians offline maybe a good choice for me to learn about some invisible voices. Overall, if my project really workout, I may bring more diverse lesbian images to the digital world, let more people know about this group, and hopefully can against the marginalisation and voice-silencing situation to lesbians today.