A Chinese Queer Subtitling Community’s Digital Visibility Management: An Alternative Approach

This paper concerns Chinese queer subtitling communities’ digital visibility management. Queer subtitling communities are communities that focus on collectively and voluntarily subtitling queer audiovisual content including TV series and films that depict LGBTQ+ identities. Such communities have been actively facilitating Chinese people’s access to queer content and queer community building. Being both queer and online subtitlers in a heteronormative society and a restricted mediascape, such communities must have been managing their visibility across multiple levels, about which, however, little is known. This paper aims to address this gap in knowledge by exploring one Chinese queer subtitling community’s digital visibility management. It draws on data collected through a 12-month netnographic fieldwork including a survey and interviews in the community. It has been found that the community managed their digital visibility through three processes: creating, adjusting, and sustaining visibility. The paper argues that the community’s digital visibility management was centred on serving their activism to facilitate Chinese people’s access to diverse queer lives and that their nonconfrontational negotiation among various transnational and local, collective and individual factors offered a lived example of an alternative approach to queer activism in MC and potentially other similar contexts.