Weaponising Digital Architecture: Queer Nigerian Instagram Users and Digital Visual Activism

Abstract

The body and its portrayal are significant to the politics of gender identity and sexuality. As Instagram constitutes a public domain for self- and group-representation, I appropriate its affordances in the interrogation of queer visibility and digital visual activism within the Nigerian queer community. The central assumption is that the images and their accompanying texts are ideology-laden and consequently become entrenched in the battle for visibility against heteronormativity. I pay attention to six purposively selected queer Nigerian Instagram handles and cull ten representative images for analysis. I integrate the contextual affordances of hashtags and photo-tagging in my discussion of how Instagram contributes to and nourishes public queer discourses in a homophobic space like Nigeria. I conclude that these images as semiotic resources facilitate the decryption of queer marginality and mainstream queer narratives digitally.