Stefanie Duguay
Biographic Data
| ID | 277157 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stefanie Duguay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stefanie |
| FAMILY NAME | Duguay |
| SIGNATURE | DUGUAY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Concordia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9796-0619 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 442 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
“Our Community's Algorithm, It Works Very Well Too”
Platform algorithms can pose issues of legibility and exclusion for LGBTQ + people, yet queer perspectives remain largely absent from public debates on artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems. This paper examines how LGBTQ + actors interpret, challenge, and reconfigure algorithmic logics to foreground their critical role in engaging with platform governance. Our analysis brings together the concept of algorithmic imaginaries as shared vis…
"Elderqueer is more than just an age thing"
While TikTok has garnered much attention for its rapid uptake by youth, it has also seen adoption by older age demographics. Given social media’s longstanding importance for convening LGBTQ+ publics and the rarity of intergenerational offline spaces, this paper examines the intersection of age and sexual identity on this short-video platform. It does so through qualitative analysis of 23 semi-structured interviews with elderqueer TikToker users. …
Exploring Appification
This panel offers a reflection on the evolution and transformations of apps and app studies over the past decade, emphasizing how apps have seamlessly integrated into our daily routines and shaped our cultural and economic landscape. This process, known as ‘appification’, involves integrating various aspects of daily life and activities into mobile applications, fundamentally altering how we communicate, access information, make payments, and use…
Hybrid constellations
Identity Modulation on TikTok
Background: LGBTQ+ people have long used digital media for self-representation but platforms present specific affordances and constraints for sexual identity expression. Analysis: This article applies the identity modulation framework to TikTok and the account of a user whose representation of lesbian identity is prominent. Conclusions and implications: While TikTok allows users to control their personal identifiability, it incentivizes them towa…
Sexual and geocultural algorithmic imaginaries
This study builds on theories of user imaginaries by examining how LGBTQ+ creators in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany respond to perceived algorithmic bias. Through observation and close reading of creators’ Instagram content, the study finds that expectations of discrimination based on sexual and gender identity, embedded in geographical and sociocultural contexts, shape these users’ understandings of threats posed by algorithmic governance…
How do we do that?” An analysis of TikToks by lesbians over age 30 representing sexual identity, lived experience over time, and solidarity
Lesbians have long turned to digital media and technologies for information, support, and to self-represent sexual identity in ways that have the capacity for building communities and gathering publics and counterpublics. TikTok is a short video platform popular with young people, which has increasingly seen the participation of comparatively older users. This paper investigates the self-representation of lesbians over age 30 on TikTok to underst…
If We Look at It From an LGBT Point of View…’ Mobilizing Lgbtq+ Stakeholders to Queer Algorithmic Imaginaries
This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that examines the social implications that platform algorithms raise for LGBTQ+ communities. We share the preliminary results of our Phase 2 group interviews, which were conducted with Canadian social media managers of LGBTQ+ non-profit organizations and with Canada-based LGBTQ+ tech workers. Algorithmic controversies relating to LGBTQ+ communities identified in Phase 1 were used as prompts …
Dear Baby Gays
Much scholarship and public discourse alike focus on TikTok’s widespread uptake by young people, including LGBTQ+ youth. However, LGBTQ+ people on the platform often experience challenges relating to visibility and censorship. As users of a variety of ages have joined TikTok’s youthful population, this paper explores the sociotechnical practices of older LGBTQ+ TikTok users as they emerge from, and are shaped by, the platform and its user culture…
Hybrid Constellations
This paper examines the role of social media in the definition and organization of lesbian sociocultural landscapes. Building from geographical studies that identify how lesbians’ dispersion across cities counters heteropatriarchal occupations of space, the study is anchored within Montreal/Tiohtià:ke to identify local approaches to visibility and gathering. This angle is combined with digital scholarship that considers how mobile technologies, p…
The hottest new queer club
Lockdowns and preventative measures during the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of nightlife venues that have long served as outlets for queer sociality. This article examines queer people’s response to such measures through a study of Club Quarantine (Club Q), a series of online queer club nights established during the early days of Canada’s lockdown in March 2020. It draws on mixed methods to explore Club Q’s negotiation of Zoom videoconfer…
Pornhub and Policy
Background: In 2021, the Canadian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (ETHI) conducted an inquiry around Pornhub, following allegations that parent company MindGeek profits from non-consensual content. Analysis: This article offers a discourse analysis of the ETHI’s process, testimony, and report on Pornhub using Carol Bacchi’s policy analysis method, “What is the problem represented to be?” Conclusions a…
Mapping the social implications of platform algorithms for LGBTQ+ communities
LGBTQ+ communities were among the first to appropriate the Internet to experiment with their identities and socialize outside of mainstream society. Recently, those platforms have implemented algorithmic systems that curate, exploit, and predict user practices and identities. Yet, the social implications that platform algorithms raise for LGBTQ+ communities remain largely unexplored. At the intersection of media and communication studies, science…
Stumbling Blocks and Alternative Paths
The walkthrough method was developed as a way to trace an app or platform's technological mechanisms and cultural references to understand how it guides users. This article explores the method's enduring strengths and emergent weaknesses regarding technological advances and developments in app studies. It engages with adjacent methods for understanding apps' intensifying structural and economic complexity, datafication, algorithmic logic, and per…
TikTok's Queer Potential
This commentary piece considers TikTok's queer potential in terms of the platform's use and subversion for the purposes of queer movements and worldmaking. It considers how TikTok's affordances, features, and algorithmic functionalities both facilitate and hamper the expression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other diverse (LGBTQ+) identities and the formation of queer publics. As such, it proposes that queer methodologies, invo…
Personal but Not Private
Personal but Not Private is about how people put themselves out there on social media despite the challenges of negotiating overlapping and unknown audiences within platforms’ technological, social, economic, and political contexts. Focusing on queer women’s use of mobile apps, the book develops the concept of identity modulation: the processes through which people and platforms modulate—adjust or modify—personal and intimate information. Through…
The year of the “virtual date”
The coronavirus disease-19 pandemic introduced a crisis of safety and relevance for dating apps, as their affordances for facilitating in-person encounters posed the risk of viral transmission. This article examines how eight apps primarily catering to heterosexual markets responded to the pandemic through changes to socio-technical arrangements, new user prescriptions, and the curation of corporate data and success stories. By analyzing corporat…
Deplatforming Sex
Hosted by Northumbria and Birmingham City Universities, the Deplatforming Sex roundtable took place via Teams in October 2021. Participants included Danielle Blunt, Stefanie Duguay, Tarleton Gillespie and Sinnamon Love. Clarissa Smith chaired the discussion, which was transcribed and then edited to cut digressions and repetitions for publication. The roundtable provided the opportunity to reflect on recent moves to excise sex and forms of sexual …
Queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine
Leaked documents, press coverage, and user protests have increasingly drawn attention to social media platforms’ seemingly contradictory governance practices. We investigate the governance approaches of Tinder, Instagram, and Vine through detailed analyses of each platform, using the ‘walkthrough method’ (Light, Burgess, and Duguay, 2016 The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society 20(3).), as well as interviews w…
Intimacies and Digital Media Infrastructures
The breadth of what it means to study intimacies in the context of media has changed significantly in recent years because of current technological, social, and cultural changes. The digital mediation of intimacy - the changing attitudes, experiences, and practices of intimacy performed through digital media - demands that scholars look beyond well-established frameworks for studying intimacy and media, expanding their methodological and theoreti…
From “Interested” to Showing Up
Background This study investigates the role of digital media in LGBTQ social organizing through a textual and visual analysis of media produced by two Montréal-based event series: locally run open mic nights and dance parties hosted by an international company. Analysis The authors’ analysis identified three influences of digital media: a) Facebook pages and linked materials framed boundaries of inclusion for physical gatherings; b) platforms and…
You can’t use this app for that
This article reconceptualizes the pharmacological term “off-label use” in the context of platforms and apps. It combines literature on technological appropriation with research on platforms’ sociotechnical arrangements to understand off-label use as platform appropriation. This conceptual work is applied to an investigation of Tinder, involving analysis of the platform, media articles, and interviews. Findings show that off-label use, such as mar…
Tinder’s lesbian digital imaginary
Dating apps have received rapid uptake, with Tinder as one of the most popular apps in the heterosexual market. However, little research has investigated the experiences of women seeking women (WSW) on this app. This article combines two interview studies of WSW in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom to investigate their self-presentations of sexual identity on Tinder. By configuring settings to “seeking women,” participants perceived they …
Running the Numbers
Microcelebrity, as a set of practices contributing to personalized self-branding, has become an increasingly prominent component of self-representation on social media platforms. While 'influencers' who have built lucrative followings through microcelebrity give the appearance of having fun without much exertion, recent studies have uncovered multiple forms of labor involved in their practices of cultural production. In addition, scholars analyzi…
Social media's breaking news
This article draws on van Dijck and Poell's framework of social media logic to examine two platform news functionalities: Facebook Trending Topics and Twitter Moments. It uses the walkthrough method to investigate their technical features while also examining how they fit into platforms' economic interests and regulatory processes. While the framework of social media logic enables the identification of platforms' influential elements - programmab…
The walkthrough method
Software applications (apps) are now prevalent in the digital media environment. They are the site of significant sociocultural and economic transformations across many domains, from health and relationships to entertainment and everyday finance. As relatively closed technical systems, apps pose new methodological challenges for sociocultural digital media research. This article describes a method, grounded in a combination of science and technol…
He has a way gayer Facebook than I do
This study extends previous research into social networking sites (SNSs) as environments that often reduce spatial, temporal, and social boundaries, which can result in collapsed contexts for social situations. Context collapse was investigated through interviews and Facebook walkthroughs with 27 LGBTQ young people in the United Kingdom. Since diverse sexualities are often stigmatized, participants' sexual identity disclosure decisions were shape…
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer Visibility Through Selfies
This article investigates the relationship between social media platforms and the production and dissemination of selfies in light of its implications for the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people. Applying an Actor Network Theory lens, two popular visual media apps, Instagram and Vine, are examined through a comparative walkthrough method. This reveals platform elements, or mediators, that can influence the conver…
Tinder’s lesbian digital imaginary
Dating apps have received rapid uptake, with Tinder as one of the most popular apps in the heterosexual market. However, little research has investigated the experiences of women seeking women (WSW) on this app. This article combines two interview studies of WSW in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom to investigate their self-presentations of sexual identity on Tinder. By configuring settings to “seeking women,” participants perceived they …
The year of the “virtual date”
The coronavirus disease-19 pandemic introduced a crisis of safety and relevance for dating apps, as their affordances for facilitating in-person encounters posed the risk of viral transmission. This article examines how eight apps primarily catering to heterosexual markets responded to the pandemic through changes to socio-technical arrangements, new user prescriptions, and the curation of corporate data and success stories. By analyzing corporat…
Deplatforming Sex
Hosted by Northumbria and Birmingham City Universities, the Deplatforming Sex roundtable took place via Teams in October 2021. Participants included Danielle Blunt, Stefanie Duguay, Tarleton Gillespie and Sinnamon Love. Clarissa Smith chaired the discussion, which was transcribed and then edited to cut digressions and repetitions for publication. The roundtable provided the opportunity to reflect on recent moves to excise sex and forms of sexual …
Stumbling Blocks and Alternative Paths
The walkthrough method was developed as a way to trace an app or platform's technological mechanisms and cultural references to understand how it guides users. This article explores the method's enduring strengths and emergent weaknesses regarding technological advances and developments in app studies. It engages with adjacent methods for understanding apps' intensifying structural and economic complexity, datafication, algorithmic logic, and per…
Running the Numbers
Microcelebrity, as a set of practices contributing to personalized self-branding, has become an increasingly prominent component of self-representation on social media platforms. While 'influencers' who have built lucrative followings through microcelebrity give the appearance of having fun without much exertion, recent studies have uncovered multiple forms of labor involved in their practices of cultural production. In addition, scholars analyzi…
Making Digital Cultures of Gender and Sexuality With Social Media
This article introduces a special issue concerning the interweaving of gender, sexuality, and social media. There are 10 articles included in the issue which together map out a landscape of diverse areas of interest covering topics such as sexism and harassment, health and wellbeing, relationships, and leisure
You can’t use this app for that
This article reconceptualizes the pharmacological term “off-label use” in the context of platforms and apps. It combines literature on technological appropriation with research on platforms’ sociotechnical arrangements to understand off-label use as platform appropriation. This conceptual work is applied to an investigation of Tinder, involving analysis of the platform, media articles, and interviews. Findings show that off-label use, such as mar…
How do we do that?” An analysis of TikToks by lesbians over age 30 representing sexual identity, lived experience over time, and solidarity
Lesbians have long turned to digital media and technologies for information, support, and to self-represent sexual identity in ways that have the capacity for building communities and gathering publics and counterpublics. TikTok is a short video platform popular with young people, which has increasingly seen the participation of comparatively older users. This paper investigates the self-representation of lesbians over age 30 on TikTok to underst…
TikTok's Queer Potential
This commentary piece considers TikTok's queer potential in terms of the platform's use and subversion for the purposes of queer movements and worldmaking. It considers how TikTok's affordances, features, and algorithmic functionalities both facilitate and hamper the expression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other diverse (LGBTQ+) identities and the formation of queer publics. As such, it proposes that queer methodologies, invo…
Mapping the social implications of platform algorithms for LGBTQ+ communities
LGBTQ+ communities were among the first to appropriate the Internet to experiment with their identities and socialize outside of mainstream society. Recently, those platforms have implemented algorithmic systems that curate, exploit, and predict user practices and identities. Yet, the social implications that platform algorithms raise for LGBTQ+ communities remain largely unexplored. At the intersection of media and communication studies, science…
Hybrid constellations
Sexual and geocultural algorithmic imaginaries
This study builds on theories of user imaginaries by examining how LGBTQ+ creators in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany respond to perceived algorithmic bias. Through observation and close reading of creators’ Instagram content, the study finds that expectations of discrimination based on sexual and gender identity, embedded in geographical and sociocultural contexts, shape these users’ understandings of threats posed by algorithmic governance…
Social media's breaking news
This article draws on van Dijck and Poell's framework of social media logic to examine two platform news functionalities: Facebook Trending Topics and Twitter Moments. It uses the walkthrough method to investigate their technical features while also examining how they fit into platforms' economic interests and regulatory processes. While the framework of social media logic enables the identification of platforms' influential elements - programmab…
The Aish review is a big joke’
Responsive and appropriate disability policy is ideally developed through the participation of individuals with disabilities. Using a case study methodology, we have examined the policy review process for a disability income programme in Alberta, Canada. We examined questions of participation and consultation and compared individual and agency involvement. Participation was characterized by sustained interactions with government, face‐to‐face col…
Augiefleras, the Media Gaze
He has a way gayer Facebook than I do
This study extends previous research into social networking sites (SNSs) as environments that often reduce spatial, temporal, and social boundaries, which can result in collapsed contexts for social situations. Context collapse was investigated through interviews and Facebook walkthroughs with 27 LGBTQ young people in the United Kingdom. Since diverse sexualities are often stigmatized, participants' sexual identity disclosure decisions were shape…
The walkthrough method
Software applications (apps) are now prevalent in the digital media environment. They are the site of significant sociocultural and economic transformations across many domains, from health and relationships to entertainment and everyday finance. As relatively closed technical systems, apps pose new methodological challenges for sociocultural digital media research. This article describes a method, grounded in a combination of science and technol…
Making Digital Cultures of Gender and Sexuality With Social Media
This article introduces a special issue concerning the interweaving of gender, sexuality, and social media. There are 10 articles included in the issue which together map out a landscape of diverse areas of interest covering topics such as sexism and harassment, health and wellbeing, relationships, and leisure
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer Visibility Through Selfies
This article investigates the relationship between social media platforms and the production and dissemination of selfies in light of its implications for the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people. Applying an Actor Network Theory lens, two popular visual media apps, Instagram and Vine, are examined through a comparative walkthrough method. This reveals platform elements, or mediators, that can influence the conver…
Dressing up Tinderella
Mobile dating applications (‘apps’) have increased in popularity over recent years, with Tinder among the first to break into the mainstream heterosexual market. Since mobile dating intensifies the need to confirm that potential dates are not misrepresenting themselves and are safe to meet in person, Tinder’s success indicates that it has allayed these concerns regarding the authenticity of its users. This article combines Giddens’ conceptualizat…
Social media's breaking news
This article draws on van Dijck and Poell's framework of social media logic to examine two platform news functionalities: Facebook Trending Topics and Twitter Moments. It uses the walkthrough method to investigate their technical features while also examining how they fit into platforms' economic interests and regulatory processes. While the framework of social media logic enables the identification of platforms' influential elements - programmab…
Tinder’s lesbian digital imaginary
Dating apps have received rapid uptake, with Tinder as one of the most popular apps in the heterosexual market. However, little research has investigated the experiences of women seeking women (WSW) on this app. This article combines two interview studies of WSW in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom to investigate their self-presentations of sexual identity on Tinder. By configuring settings to “seeking women,” participants perceived they …
Running the Numbers
Microcelebrity, as a set of practices contributing to personalized self-branding, has become an increasingly prominent component of self-representation on social media platforms. While 'influencers' who have built lucrative followings through microcelebrity give the appearance of having fun without much exertion, recent studies have uncovered multiple forms of labor involved in their practices of cultural production. In addition, scholars analyzi…
Queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine
Leaked documents, press coverage, and user protests have increasingly drawn attention to social media platforms’ seemingly contradictory governance practices. We investigate the governance approaches of Tinder, Instagram, and Vine through detailed analyses of each platform, using the ‘walkthrough method’ (Light, Burgess, and Duguay, 2016 The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society 20(3).), as well as interviews w…
Intimacies and Digital Media Infrastructures
The breadth of what it means to study intimacies in the context of media has changed significantly in recent years because of current technological, social, and cultural changes. The digital mediation of intimacy - the changing attitudes, experiences, and practices of intimacy performed through digital media - demands that scholars look beyond well-established frameworks for studying intimacy and media, expanding their methodological and theoreti…
From “Interested” to Showing Up
Background This study investigates the role of digital media in LGBTQ social organizing through a textual and visual analysis of media produced by two Montréal-based event series: locally run open mic nights and dance parties hosted by an international company. Analysis The authors’ analysis identified three influences of digital media: a) Facebook pages and linked materials framed boundaries of inclusion for physical gatherings; b) platforms and…
You can’t use this app for that
This article reconceptualizes the pharmacological term “off-label use” in the context of platforms and apps. It combines literature on technological appropriation with research on platforms’ sociotechnical arrangements to understand off-label use as platform appropriation. This conceptual work is applied to an investigation of Tinder, involving analysis of the platform, media articles, and interviews. Findings show that off-label use, such as mar…
Deplatforming Sex
Hosted by Northumbria and Birmingham City Universities, the Deplatforming Sex roundtable took place via Teams in October 2021. Participants included Danielle Blunt, Stefanie Duguay, Tarleton Gillespie and Sinnamon Love. Clarissa Smith chaired the discussion, which was transcribed and then edited to cut digressions and repetitions for publication. The roundtable provided the opportunity to reflect on recent moves to excise sex and forms of sexual …
Personal but Not Private
Personal but Not Private is about how people put themselves out there on social media despite the challenges of negotiating overlapping and unknown audiences within platforms’ technological, social, economic, and political contexts. Focusing on queer women’s use of mobile apps, the book develops the concept of identity modulation: the processes through which people and platforms modulate—adjust or modify—personal and intimate information. Through…
The year of the “virtual date”
The coronavirus disease-19 pandemic introduced a crisis of safety and relevance for dating apps, as their affordances for facilitating in-person encounters posed the risk of viral transmission. This article examines how eight apps primarily catering to heterosexual markets responded to the pandemic through changes to socio-technical arrangements, new user prescriptions, and the curation of corporate data and success stories. By analyzing corporat…
If We Look at It From an LGBT Point of View…’ Mobilizing Lgbtq+ Stakeholders to Queer Algorithmic Imaginaries
This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that examines the social implications that platform algorithms raise for LGBTQ+ communities. We share the preliminary results of our Phase 2 group interviews, which were conducted with Canadian social media managers of LGBTQ+ non-profit organizations and with Canada-based LGBTQ+ tech workers. Algorithmic controversies relating to LGBTQ+ communities identified in Phase 1 were used as prompts …
Dear Baby Gays
Much scholarship and public discourse alike focus on TikTok’s widespread uptake by young people, including LGBTQ+ youth. However, LGBTQ+ people on the platform often experience challenges relating to visibility and censorship. As users of a variety of ages have joined TikTok’s youthful population, this paper explores the sociotechnical practices of older LGBTQ+ TikTok users as they emerge from, and are shaped by, the platform and its user culture…
Hybrid Constellations
This paper examines the role of social media in the definition and organization of lesbian sociocultural landscapes. Building from geographical studies that identify how lesbians’ dispersion across cities counters heteropatriarchal occupations of space, the study is anchored within Montreal/Tiohtià:ke to identify local approaches to visibility and gathering. This angle is combined with digital scholarship that considers how mobile technologies, p…
The hottest new queer club
Lockdowns and preventative measures during the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of nightlife venues that have long served as outlets for queer sociality. This article examines queer people’s response to such measures through a study of Club Quarantine (Club Q), a series of online queer club nights established during the early days of Canada’s lockdown in March 2020. It draws on mixed methods to explore Club Q’s negotiation of Zoom videoconfer…
Pornhub and Policy
Background: In 2021, the Canadian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (ETHI) conducted an inquiry around Pornhub, following allegations that parent company MindGeek profits from non-consensual content. Analysis: This article offers a discourse analysis of the ETHI’s process, testimony, and report on Pornhub using Carol Bacchi’s policy analysis method, “What is the problem represented to be?” Conclusions a…
Mapping the social implications of platform algorithms for LGBTQ+ communities
LGBTQ+ communities were among the first to appropriate the Internet to experiment with their identities and socialize outside of mainstream society. Recently, those platforms have implemented algorithmic systems that curate, exploit, and predict user practices and identities. Yet, the social implications that platform algorithms raise for LGBTQ+ communities remain largely unexplored. At the intersection of media and communication studies, science…
Stumbling Blocks and Alternative Paths
The walkthrough method was developed as a way to trace an app or platform's technological mechanisms and cultural references to understand how it guides users. This article explores the method's enduring strengths and emergent weaknesses regarding technological advances and developments in app studies. It engages with adjacent methods for understanding apps' intensifying structural and economic complexity, datafication, algorithmic logic, and per…
TikTok's Queer Potential
This commentary piece considers TikTok's queer potential in terms of the platform's use and subversion for the purposes of queer movements and worldmaking. It considers how TikTok's affordances, features, and algorithmic functionalities both facilitate and hamper the expression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other diverse (LGBTQ+) identities and the formation of queer publics. As such, it proposes that queer methodologies, invo…
Sociology (24 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology (17 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · World Wide Web (14 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Queer (12 works) · Lesbian (9 works)