Platforming Intersectionality: Networked Solidarity and the Limits of Corporate Social Media

Abstract

How do historically marginalized narratives spread on social media platforms? Developing research in collaboration with intersectional artists and community, or what we call “platforming intersectionality,” can reveal the promise and limitations of social media for bridging disparate, segregated communities, or “networked solidarity.” Using case studies of indie TV series about historically marginalized communities, we show that intersectionality can spread on corporate social media platforms, but the causes are largely visible outside of platforms, both online and offline. Basic conditions for spreading intersectional narratives may be met when the language used to describe them are simply communicated in ways algorithms and users can quickly understand. However, community members, including artists and publishers who produce for specific communities online and offline, serve as critical, under-appreciated nodes platforms leverage to spread intersectionality. We argue that reconceptualizing platforms as community-based media provides a better framework for understanding the power and limits of social media.

Every link on social media masks deeper intersections. In early 2017, hundreds of thousands of users watched two indie, low-budget, short-form narrative web series from Chicago. But how? A story about a Black women and queer Muslim woman, Brown Girls (Figure 1) was the brainchild of Fatimah Asghar, a poet, and Sam Bailey, a director and producer who had created You’re So Talented, a short-form drama series distributed and developed by OTV | Open Television, an online channel and Chicago-based platform. Ricardo Gamboa’s Brujos, a drama about gay Latino witches fighting descendants of New World colonizers, came to OTV by an introduction from Bailey, both Chicago natives. Both series would eventually amass over 100 articles in online and legacy media, nominations at the internet’s premiere entertainment awards in the Streamys, and, for Brown Girls, an Emmy nomination and development deals from networks like HBO. Without social media platforms, the scale of these series would have been limited to Chicago and that of a few hundred people. Instead, hundreds more watched in cities outside Chicago and tens and hundreds of thousands of people online. Yet it is rare for complex, indie, local representations to spread widely on corporate platforms. Of the 64 pilots and series OTV released from 2015 to 2019, only Brown Girls and Brujos achieved such spreadability (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Brujos trailer embed: https://vimeo.com/239747190.

Figure 2. Brown Girls trailer embed: https://vimeo.com/189724238.

How do voices and narratives that have been historically marginalized spread on social media platforms? Scholars have few answers. Social media platforms’ algorithms render invisible the processes and contexts from which representations emerge or disappear. This power over representation mirrors legacy media power in how it shapes and ascribes value to who and what can be known and discussed and how: “. . . the production of knowledge is always crossed with questions of power and the body; and this greatly expands the scope of what is involved in representation” (Hall, 1997, p. 51). To understand power in representation, scholars have historically employed textual analysis of how bodies (Black people, women, etc.) are encoded and decoded by media distributors (TV channels, newspapers, etc.). Deconstructing media power was simpler in the legacy era when the number of distributors was few and followed consistent production rules and codes to facilitate capital accumulation. Today, platforms have expanded access to the means of production and rapidly distribute a staggering number of representations. Yet they do so with opaque and ever-changing algorithms masked by proprietary codes. If power regulates meaning through codes or rules, then corporate social media platforms have challenged researchers in determining what the rules of representation are.

What we do know is platforms discriminate, quickly, discreetly, and with constant adaptation. Platforms value culture and information using algorithms that sort, segregate, or systematize our interactions. Ruha Benjamin (2019) describes the current networked environment as the “New Jim Code.” Wendy Chun (2017) argues, “we are segregated because networks put us into virtually gated communities.” Indeed, platforms’ discriminatory practices are occasionally made visible. Queer YouTubers and Tumblr users have publicly decried takedowns of their videos and posts by anti-queer content moderation, while queer Facebook users have fought the platform for their right to choose their own name. For years, Black YouTubers have complained about rising challenges to their visibility through ever-changing algorithms and shifting strategies of content moderation. Twitter and Facebook users consistently work to combat the proliferation of hate and conspiracy theories, which the Russian government spread during the period of Brown Girls and Brujos’ release. ¹

The complexity of platform power demands we pay greater attention to culturally complex representations (intersectionality) and adopt new methods for analysis that go beyond the text and identify alternative systems. We argue intersectionality is a critical framework for organizing critiques of platform power and “platforming” a method that exposes traces of algorithmic codes. Developed by Black feminist scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins from the 1970s through the 1990s, intersectionality theorizes that communities who identify with multiple identities—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and so on—experience specific forms of discrimination that cannot be disaggregated. In other words, as Lisa Bowleg (2008) simply states, intersectionality is “when Black + Lesbian + Woman ≠ Black Lesbian Woman.” Accounting for identities in all their complexity offers a framework for understanding how different communities live through difference in ways that cannot be separated and systematized in the way platform logics demand. Indeed, what spreads online may often be short, pithy, unscripted, and perhaps culturally reductive, especially if it is unrelated to corporate brand culture. ² In a social world increasingly reliant on networked platforms, we are less aware of how and why culturally complex narratives emerge and how to create value and empathy within and between disparate communities.

Cultural intersections require complex storytelling to understand, and platform power is equally complex and differently experienced. Developing culture in collaboration with intersectional artists and community can test whether social media can bridge disparate, segregated communities, helping researchers deconstruct platform power and advance social connection. Participatory methods show us how narratives emerge, allowing scholars to track the distance between representation on platforms and broader contexts of its production or exhibition. We are queering research methods to see identity as technology for understanding how power regulates culture in the networked age, applying Kara Keeling’s theory of “queer OS,” or queering operating systems. For Keeling, a queer operating system is: “at odds with the logics embedded in the operating systems”; seeks to change that system through “scholarly inquiry and social activism”; and sees sexuality as inextricable from other forms of identity and from media technologies because social identities render visible power’s effects (Keeling, 2014, p. 154). This method is more nuanced—and difficult to control—than auditing (Sandvig et al., 2014) or tearing down (Eriksson et al., 2019) platforms; such methods often rely on simpler and computationally generated inputs for “field experiments in which researchers or their confederates participate in a social process that they suspect to be corrupt in order to diagnose harmful discrimination” (Sandvig et al., 2014, p. 5). Scholars must engage more complex inputs that center the body and its representations, as a core tenet of intersectionality is that reality is differently experienced based on the intersections of different social identities.

Creating intersectional counter-platforms illuminates platform power and the solidarity necessary to understand and challenge it. To experiment with “platforming intersectionality,” we founded a community-based platform distributing original intersectional TV programming to multiple social media platforms. OTV is a channel, releasing short-form, independently produced, intersectional pilots and series from Chicago artists (Figure 3). It is not the only indie, intersectional channel but is likely the only non-profit and research-based one. ³ Behind the online channel, the project assists artists in developing their stories, hosting screenings in Chicago to understand how their work is interpreted by communities, and co-marketing their work through platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Vimeo). Debuting in 2015, OTV has released over 60 original pilots, shorts, and series, nearly all from Chicago artists who identify with two or more communities marginalized by their race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, disability, citizenship status, or religion. With over 50 hosted screenings, in the city, OTV programs have attracted thousands of people in Chicago in screenings across the city and country and over 1 million plays on Vimeo.

Figure 3. OTV | Open Television 2019 trailer: https://vimeo.com/328313520.

This article offers preliminary insights into how and why intersectionality spreads. We rely on quantitative and qualitative data from exhibiting Brown Girls and Brujos online (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Vimeo), in Chicago, and in 17 cities in the United States and in the United Kingdom. This method of participatory action research (PAR) is robust but exploratory. Variables are interdependent and difficult to disentangle, just like intersectional identities. Local, in-person exhibition contrasts with distribution on networked platforms. Dedicated social media pages for each show along with press coverage across platforms contrasts with OTV’s social media efforts. Quantitative data from platforms contrasts with qualitative comments and conversations online and in-person. As an emergent method, platforming intersectionality audits and critiques, while expanding and deepening, our understanding of networked power.

From Networked Segregation to Networked Solidarity

Computational algorithms have emerged as useful tools for making sense of vast amounts of information, or big data. In media, this means dynamically produced film recommendations, targeted advertising, and endless analytics and metrics to track and evaluate the spreadability of digital content. Algorithms control the visibility of content and, in doing so, also control and threaten content’s invisibility (Bucher, 2018). This reality bestows enormous power upon the architects of algorithmic processes, who are wholly unrepresentative of the world population. Unsurprisingly, these systems can oversimplify complex narratives in ways that reinforce inequalities: “Google’s dominant narratives reflect the kinds of hegemonic frameworks and notions that are often resisted by women and people of color” (Noble, 2018, p. 14).

A core focus of algorithmically driven platforms is content moderation, which can be read as a form of categorization and simplification antithetical to the idea of individuals hailing from communities that are inextricably linked (Gillespie, 2018). Algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence must learn to identify specific inputs and constantly develop new rules to determine outputs. Categorization based on prior data and an historical context of inequality may limit the extent to which complex, intersectional experiences can be incorporated into machine learning processes. The promise of machine learning is not to capture all of the world’s complexities, but rather to capture enough similarities and patterns to provide useful insights. Therein lies a tension, however, between efforts to highlight images depicting complex, neglected identities, or experiences and the processes of categorization that necessarily reduce and limit their complexity in favor of broad interpretability or generalizability.

As platforms move into the television business to profit from big data, they have largely viewed communities with intersecting identities too small for development or too complicated to target. This echoes legacy media’s 20th-century processes for categorizing audiences and selling them to advertisers. Market segmentation arose in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to demands from brands for more information about customers due to increased competition (product proliferation) and conglomeration. What followed was the integration of different identities at once marginalized and segregated by corporate, hegemonic corporations. Television followed suit with the possibility of greater cultural and interest-based specificity through cable, BET for Black people, Lifetime for women, and so on (Mullen, 2002; Smith-Shomade, 2008). Despite the apparent growth in cultural representation, broadcast and cable distributors have been critiqued for their failure to substantially deviate from norms or speak to the full range of life and struggles of specific communities, instead “dualcasting” or “multicasting” to a range of audiences with often contradictory social perspectives (Aslinger, 2009; Beltrán, 2009; Dávila, 2001; Means Coleman & Cobb, 2007; Molina-Guzmán, 2010; Ng, 2013; Sender, 2007; Smith-Shomade, 2004). Today, Facebook and YouTube develop and release serial stories in ways that may be at odds with Silicon Valley’s desire for “scale, automation, permanent beta, rapid prototyping and iteration” (Cunningham & Craig, 2019, p. 76).

Intersectionality encourages cultural specificity and nuance, the consideration of how power structures identities and experiences without segregating them from each other. As Bowleg (2008) writes, “Interdependence, multi-dimensionality and mutually constitutive relationships form the core of intersectionality, attributes that contradict the positivist assumptions inherent in most quantitative approaches” (p. 317). Focusing on these identities both complicates systems of categorization and reveals historically marginalized and specific forms of value from communities who must innovate to survive. For example, many of the most spreadable and politically significant social media-driven conversations and movements from and around #BlackLivesMatter have emerged from women, queer and trans activists (Bailey, 2016; Jackson, 2016).

Viewing algorithmic processes through an intersectional framework enriches our understanding of how culture shifts in response to new technologies. We ask,

How does intersectionality spread on platforms?

What power do algorithms have in rendering specific identities visible and invisible?

What are the limits or checks on that power?

We have found evidence complex cultural narratives can spread on platforms when community connections are visible in their production, exhibition, and reception, and when presented in ways recognizable to both algorithms and the communities addressed. ⁴ Cultural specificity matters across the entire life cycle of representations and can create the conditions for what we call “networked solidarity.” Narratives representing intersections across communities—queer, ethnic, religious, and so on—can bring together disparate communities in ways that may disrupt, or at least expose, platform power.

Platforming Intersectionality: Toward a Critique of Platform Power

How do researchers assess the scope of harm and value by opaque, proprietary technological systems? “Platforming” describes the practice of developing counter- or indie platforms, using PAR aimed toward “design justice” (Costanza-Chock, 2020). We use “platform” as a verb to describe the method of creating independent platforms on top of existing corporate platforms to fulfill the basic, definitional purpose of a platform: to lift up voices and perspectives that are historically suppressed or misrepresented. PAR involves designing interventions in the field in collaboration—or in solidarity—with stakeholders outside of academia, including artists and community leaders. Here, OTV is a different kind of TV channel: a platform using the skills and connections of artists, community leaders, and researchers to develop, produce, and release pilots and series. Platforming intersectionality utilizes the framework of intersectionality—the stories of those multiply marginalized—to understand platform power from the perspective of the historically disempowered. Algorithms encode identities and structure the process of decoding, and platforming intersectionality reveals complex traces of this decision making.

The value of PAR is its focus on process and its deeply inductive and contextual approach, potentially sacrificing the generalizability valued by scholars and big data analysts. Intersectional PAR is a “contextualized scientific method”:

. . . what counts as data becomes a less important consideration than the analyst’s epistemological framework and ability to analyze data in ways that elucidate how the sociocultural context of structural inequality based on the intersections of race, sex, gender, and sexual orientation shape participants’ experiences. (Bowleg, 2008)

By working with and for communities experiencing interlocking oppressions, researchers add a rich data set to pre-existing methodological tools, such as interviews, surveys, participant observation, coding and discourse analysis, and sentiment analysis, all of which were used in this study. Recently, scholars have been calling for greater use of participatory research in media (Billard, 2019; Christian, 2017) for the ways in which it builds multiple forms of knowledge, or what Robin Nelson (2013) calls “know how, know what, and know that”; focuses critical scholarship on the dynamics of power (Rodino-Colocino, 2016); and advances the “recognition of community participation in media production . . . as well as the importance of developing mediated storytelling skills in communities whose stories are often silenced” (Lopez, 2015).

Platforming blends theory and practice. It is what Herman Gray (2005) calls a “cultural move,” cultural strategies and tactics “that move beyond mere recognition to challenge, disrupt, and unsettle dominant cultural representations and institutions” (p. 3). Merging theory and practice allows us to see “the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits” of algorithms, and the ways their design “reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism)” (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Counter-platforming builds on queer theorists of intersectionality; for example, Lorde’s (1984) critique of the “master’s tools,” Halberstam’s (2011) insistence on the productive capacities of failure, and Muñoz’s (2009) theorization of queer utopia.

We find corporate social media platforms conditionally effective in spreading intersectional narratives, but these conditions are difficult for culturally complex representations to meet. According to this exploratory study, we argue these conditions are met when the identities represented and the language used to describe them are clearly communicated both to the platforms and to the specific communities for rapid interpretation. We find evidence that the more intersecting identities that are represented—and centered—in narratives, the greater its potential spreadability, for it can unite disparate social networks. The time and space context of the release, from local, national and online contexts, shapes spreadability in ways that are difficult to isolate.

In general, the 4-year OTV data set indicates the conditions for spreading complex intersectional narratives is a high bar few artists can attain, at least, not without paying platforms directly. We find evidence for this in the distribution of exposure of 64 OTV’s intersectional programs, including 30 series and 29 pilots or experimental pieces representing the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, disability, citizenship status, and class from 2015 to 2019. Overall exposure for OTV programs comprised 3.64 million loads (exposure to embeds) on platforms and other sites, and Brujos and Brown Girls’ exposure made up over 80% of every time an OTV program has been viewed. Seen another way, of the over 1.13 million plays on all OTV programs, these two series represent around two-thirds of total viewership—even after many series released after the two shows benefited from how they grew OTV’s exposure and social network connections. We see OTV as inputting a diverse set of complex intersectional narratives into algorithmically driven platforms and finding that most find it difficult to spread beyond the artists and their immediate local networks.

If we assume the most complex intersectional narratives fail to spread, how do the successful few? We find answers by centering specific bodies in time and space as critical to understanding power’s effects. Community leaders, including artists and publishers who consistently write for specific communities, serve as critical nodes in spreading complex intersectional narratives. Narratives can spread wider and outside these networks when artists or publishers with large, diverse followings disseminate them. But the larger the following, the more precarious the reception. “Mainstream” distribution online can foment dissensus without necessarily producing deeper, greater engagement with intersectional experiences. Finally, the role of place cannot be underestimated in an intersectional framework. Localized and identity-specific engagement, both in real life (IRL) and/with online, can produce meaningful engagement significant in scale compared with legacy/mass media offerings. Contrasting local, “in real life” (IRL) engagement with online engagement demonstrates what value cannot be captured by algorithmically driven platforms and how IRL experiences can advance the spreadability of intersectional representations.

If platforms lack a clearly identifiable political objective beyond the accumulation of multiple forms of capital for corporations, our findings suggest that we can learn more about their importance and impact by interrogating platform logics through the lens of community and PAR. This allows us to name the stakes and specific communities affected by machine learning. Ultimately, we must integrate this kind of small-scale, relational understanding of algorithmic power to deepen our understanding of how platforms are transforming culture.

Platforming Exhibition: How Cultural Specificity Supports Networked Solidarity

Platforming intersectionality shows how much of what is meaningful on a platform becomes so through means outside of it and how platforms’ systems for evaluating reception cannot fully capture this tight relationship between culture, language, and community. Corporate platforms are generally poor evaluators of impact outside of itself, whereas what is outside of platforms takes additional work to see and understand. We can see these dynamics in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of how Brown Girls and Brujos circulated on OTV, the social media platforms we and our artists distribute to, and in cities around the world. Cultural specificity brought different communities together, but this is mostly because of work done by artists and culturally specific media outlets.

Both Brown Girls and Brujos circulated widely via social media platforms. Why? After analyzing its exhibition, including thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of views and plays, we believe the simplest answer may be most likely, given the series’ comparable production value to OTV projects: both series explicitly cite the specific identities represented in the series in the title, thereby signaling to algorithms, and by extension potential fans, what the show is about and who it is for. The clarity of their titles likely allowed algorithms to identify exactly who should see them. This potentially deflates platform’s own claims to technological sophistication; any user who regularly talks about being “brown,” and “girl” or “women,” brujeria or witchcraft related to Latino/Latina/Latinx ⁵ identity could potentially engage.

Yet exposure to Brown Girls and Brujos on social media platforms represented a minority of total exposure. Excluding Vimeo.com, where the videos are housed, overall page loads on platforms were markedly smaller: 56,853 for Brown Girls and 16,420 for Brujos, on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. The series spreadability was likely driven by factors outside of social media exhibition.

Instead, the clearest and largest exhibitors and distributors of these intersectional series were press websites and the artists themselves who used social media platforms as tools. These series spread for the ways they addressed multiple identities through sincerely represented central characters—Latinx, queer, brown, Black, woman-identified people. Here, we see spreadability conditioned on the specificity of how press (writers) and artists address their communities. To understand this, we categorized every website that embedded the two series’ trailers by each website’s primary target audience across 13 types: local, national, global, industry (trade), Black, women, queer, Latinx/Asian/Asian-American, artists, OTV, multicultural, intersectional, and platform (general social media). ⁶ For example, ABC 7 Chicago was labeled local, whereas AfterEllen was labeled as being for both “women” and “queer” audiences.

Identity-specific press was critical to the online circulation of these stories, at least equally valuable as platforms. The scale of exhibition on identity-specific sites constituted a strong plurality of Brown Girls’ trailer views at 295,059 loads, over five times on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr (Figure 4). For Brujos views on identity-specific sites reached 198,601, over 10 times than on social media platforms (Figure 5). This is not to downplay the role of social media platforms. Indeed, it is likely that many viewers found out about Brown Girls and Brujos from social media shares of articles from identity-specific press. Yet there is strong evidence that recognition by publications that consistently write for specific identities indicated to viewers, and potentially algorithms, that these shows were “for them.” For Brown Girls, women’s, Latinx, and Asian media drove the plurality of views, driven by coverage first from Remezcla (covering Latinx culture), then Elle (women), Autostraddle (queer women), NBC Asian America, and Jezebel (women). Fusion, a multicultural site, was also a strong driver. Meanwhile, for Brujos, Remezcla contributed more exposure than any site, followed by NewNowNext (queer), AfroPunk (Black), Out (queer); after those, Latino Rebels contributed almost as may views as Vice, a national site with a much wider reach. Remezcla, in fact, provided the most exposure to OTV programs overall because of their coverage of Brown Girls and Brujos, despite being a site without much mainstream recognition.

Figure 4.

Exposure (page loads) of Brown Girls trailer by website target audience.

Figure 5.

Exposure (page loads) of Brujos trailer by website target audience.

The data also suggest that artists are key drivers of viewership in networked culture, which Nielsen has also found of mainstream fare as well (Spangler, 2019). We speculate this is because artists are the most specific representatives of their intersecting identities. For Brown Girls, which received more press than most indie TV series at 86 articles from 2016 to 2017, and Brujos, which received 22 over the same period, their own websites, and social media presences, alongside those of their collaborators, delivered a disproportionate number of exposure: for Brujos, ranking second, and for Brown Girls, ranking fourth, among all exposure on embeds. ⁷ In their trailer, the Brown Girls team referred fans to their own website, which amassed 137,000 views, and Brujos’ website amassed most of the loads for the series after Remezcla embedded the episodes. We can also see the importance of intersectional artists’ own efforts at self-representation in their overall social media reach: Brown Girls had 9,360 followers on Instagram and Brujos 2,705 likes on Facebook, exceeding that of OTV, which had 2,009 followers on Instagram and 2,444 Facebook likes at the time. We can also see this in viewership. As noted above, the Brown Girls website was the most popular site for viewing its trailer, contributing 28% of plays versus 3.5% from OTV’s site.

Intersectional art and artists bring together disparate communities online to discuss the complexities of their specific identities, as will be explored in the next section. Yet platforms have few tools that allow artists to see, scale, and develop identities and conversations. As an example, consider the case of Brujos’ circulation on Tumblr. Tumblr has been widely recognized as a site for queer and intersectional community engagement and activism (Brouwer & Licona, 2016; Cavalcante, 2018; Cho, 2015; Fink & Miller, 2014; Jackson et al., 2018). OTV’s Tumblr had just 238 followers at the time, yet the first post about Brujos generated 2,790 likes and reblogs, driven by LatinxGeeks, “a community for Latinxs who love all things geeky and nerdy.” On Tumblr, statements of intersectional identification are commonly made in the profile section and titles of each user’s blog site; reblogs, where a user places a post on their own personal blog, can represent an affirmation of identity, add to an archive, or “spark image-centered conversations” (Fink & Miller, 2014, p. 613). Sites, such as LatinX Geeks are used to gather video, images, and other types of posts all under the heading of Latinx identity. Under the already specific identity of “Latinx geek,” we found complex identifications that can sometimes be captured by legacy TV ratings agencies (age, location), but more often are difficult to capture, including racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities (“agender,” “questioning,” and “panromantic,” indigenous tribes); specific pronouns outside the gender binary; fan and anti-fan affiliations (other texts/media they enjoy); zodiac signs; Myers-Briggs classifications; even specific attitudes about the platform itself. Most Tumblr users found the series through this network of users who are similar to them in terms of identity and cultural consumption.

Broadly, we can say that cultural identity matters in algorithmic culture, in complicated ways, and focusing on the intersections between multiple identities says a lot of algorithmic power and limits. To the variety of communities targeted on platforms, Brown Girls and Brujos became visible because of specific and intersecting communities connected by their identification along race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship status, and potentially other markers. These connections are not immediately apparent on platforms and require researchers have deep knowledge of what is circulating and how. We found disparate communities coming together, suggesting the possibility of a solidarity that exposes and critiques platforms’ opaque efforts to target and classify users.

Platforming Engagement: How Cultural Specificity Shapes Local Versus Networked Solidarity

Focusing on both IRL engagement and how community members engage online shines an even brighter light on what platforms obfuscate and the conditions for networked solidarity. Because identity is more specific, complex, interdependent, interpersonal than platforms can account for, it is important to examine how communities engage them in these different contexts. Platforming intersectionality allows us to see how and where identity matters both on and outside of platforms. We can see in Brown Girls and Brujos’ engagement how connections rapidly formed through identity-based communities online and through on direct relationships to creators online and in cities. Social media platforms facilitate artist–community relationships, similar to how television producers, creators, and actors engage fan communities via Twitter and Facebook (Navar-Gill, 2018). Artist–community connections matter on platforms and in-person. These different contexts can reinforce each other, structured by the artist’s own intersecting identifications. For example, during live, in-person premieres for Brown Girls, multiple users reached out to the co-creator Asghar with direct mentions on Twitter, describing how much the show meant to them, as well as live-tweeting their responses to the series content as they watched it. In addition, while in-person contexts reinforced artist–community connections online, online distribution yielded mixed results for engaging culturally complex communities compared with local, in-person engagements, where intersectionality’s value was clearer.

Tweets using #BrownGirlsTV and #BrujosTV show a sophisticated focus on intersectionality and the politics of representation, as other scholars have seen on Twitter, blogs and other forms of online cultural production (Brock, et. al, 2010; 2012; Chatman, 2017; Clark, 2015). Engagement is often communicated through GIFs that platforms may not be able to understand given their complex significations. For instance, several users used GIFs to highlight Leila’s “coming out” scene by quoting her sister who says, “all that hiding is going to kill you” (hiding from her Muslim auntie, specifically); “we have so much family that’s not blood family” (referring to queer chosen family); and “quit hiding.” Two users reacted to the same scene with two different GIFs, one of Mariah Carey as a judge crying after an American Idol performance and one of Rihanna crying, published by Eve Ewing, a prominent Black feminist writer in Chicago and the official tweeter for the premiere. Here we see queer users harnessing mainstream Black women’s iconography to comment on a queer Muslim scene. One user responded the series’ first scene revealing Leila’s “fat femme” Latinx lover in bed using an image of Pepperidge Farm’s “Very Thin” white bread, using it to describe what queer representation “usually” is. These moments, retweeted dozens of times, show most fans commenting specifically around moments tied directly to struggles around race, gender, and sexuality. Ewing and the lead artists were critical nodes in these conversations and highlights the importance of community leaders and artists who live through specific intersections in curating and spreading these conversations and discourses. The top tweeters for Brown Girls focused on specific communities: Ewing, the Brown Girls account, podcast host BlackGirlCheerleader, and blog Black Nerd Problems.

Examining the substance of what is said on platforms is critical to an intersectional approach and requires a mix of methods to gather and analyze. Analyzing quantitative data without the context of a qualitative reading can miss crucial information. We doubt quantitative analytics as a sole indicator of community engagement. For example, many of the Brown Girls retweets on premiere nights came from Twitter bots or spam accounts. As another example, we ran a sentiment analysis on a sample of 1,049 Brown Girls tweets from 2017 to 2019, and found overall engagement was positive. But the sample was more positive than the program estimated. Our re-coding of the data by researchers who identified with the community revealed many positive tweets rated negative by the machine, presumably for use of vulgarity or sarcasm. These tools, used by studios and networks to understand engagement, still struggle to intentionally interpret discourse through a specific cultural lens.

We must understand social media analytics outside of pure big data analysis or numbers of clicks, comments, and views. Qualitative engagement with press on Facebook offers clear support for this view. Facebook is an important site for disseminating press and coverage of these shows, broadcasting both identity-specific and non-identify-specific commentaries, from Time magazine’s profile of Brown Girls to Willow Smith’s endorsement of Brown Girls through an article on BET.com. Here, the value of mainstream, or identity non-specific media, confers visibility and legitimacy, but, reading the comments, not always networked solidarity. Indeed, mainstream press can cause dissensus as content spreads beyond specific communities and networks. When NowThis News promoted Brown Girls with an original video about the show, it produced the show’s most caustic commenting environment, with White men decrying the show’s focus on diversity behind the camera. Many of the comments came from viewers of the trailer who did not understand the story and the importance of representation for queer women of color; this fact was pointed out by the commenters and sparked discourse around identity politics in the era of Trump. Overwhelmingly, the response the video was positive, as nearly all of the 16,000 reactions were “like” or “love”; only ten people reacted “angry” or “sad.” Representative of that tiny minority, one commenter posted: “Imagine the reaction if there was a video boasting that a TV crew was 95% straight white males,” in response the video stating that “95% of the [Brown Girls] crew is female.” This comment sparked a debate lasting 110 comments, disproportionately focusing 10% of the total 1,500 comments on the video on White heteropatriarchy.

IRL engagement at local premieres reveals the social and cultural value that drives online engagement in ways invisible to social media platforms. In February 2017, the Brown Girls team brought together roughly 1,000 people in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, Los Angeles, Providence, Baltimore, London (UK), Puerto Rico, Boston, Oakland, Richmond, Miami, Montreal, and Williams College. Brujos had four premieres, three in Chicago from 2017 to 2018 and one in Boston, with around 430 people in attendance across all three. Many of the people exhibiting Brown Girls outside of Chicago were friends of Asghar and inspired to host a screening when Asghar made a request to support Brown Girls on Facebook; many of these organizers were poets and writers like Asghar, and not all were Black, brown, queer, or woman-identified, though many shared a least one intersection.

Local artists and activists used Brown Girls and Brujos to: provide rare opportunities for women and queer people of color to come together; solidify bonds between communities of varying racial and ethnic identifications; celebrate and promote original art by women of color across the fields of music, fashion, visual art, comedy, dance, and poetry; inspire and educate youth and young producers; engage in discussions around local political issues related to their communities; and allow communities to engage culture through embodied, interdisciplinary performance. In Atlanta, Jovan Julien, whose friend tagged him on Asghar’s Facebook request, knew of Brown Girls beforehand and was present for filming: “It only felt natural to support my friend’s work in more ways than posting it online,” he said in an interview, indicating the significance of off-platform engagement. As a regional organizer for Project South, which advances social justice and governance, new economies, changing paradigms and narratives around the US south, Julien said the Brown Girls screening fit within a local series of events to create community and bring awareness to the group’s efforts: “The work we do works to promote safety for brown and Black communities,” Julien said, making Brown Girls’ intersectional representation especially potent given the dearth of mainstream programming that bridges Black and brown representation. A similar dynamic occurred at the Brujos screening in Boston, ⁸ organized by Tufts University professor Kareem Khubchandani for the Men of Melanin Magic community group: “It was a really great occasion to show up somewhere where people could actually talk and hang out,” as opposed to bars were the group typically meets. The Brujos screening offered the group rare programming for queer people of color: “There isn’t a queer of color performance scene, or creative scene [in Boston], so I think this was a really great opportunity for people to know the possibilities of working together,” he said. In Miami, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, who knew Asghar from an Asian American poetry retreat and works for the Miami Book Fair, wanted to organize a screening through the Fair, but it fell apart, so she convened five or six of her students at Florida International University. Although small, the screening had deep value for those who attended, many of whom went back to their homes to re-watch it with friends who did not attend: “I think it was important for the people that showed up that they were able to watch it other people . . . who might be struggling with being a queer brown girl in Miami. It can be very isolating,” Cancio-Bello said. The community-building aspect of screening the series also served as development for burgeoning, young artists, she said:

having it be that this was written by someone who was young and women of color, it was a new idea for them. They were used to seeing that you have to be 40 and established to do something like this.

Local screenings of intersectional web series can deepen engagement through vernacular, participatory performance, long understood by performance studies scholars to be a form of embodied knowledge. The Brown Girls premieres in Chicago and New York exhibited interdisciplinary arts from women and non-binary people of color. In Chicago, as prologue to the screening, the stars of the show danced to Bollywood classics (Nabila Hossain) and performed stand-up (Sonia Denis), whereas Jamila Woods, a Chicago-based singer-songwriter, performed original music she curated for the series (Figure 6). Black burlesque performers Jeez Loueez and Po Chop, both innovators in the form, also performed. Local vendors from activist group Assata’s Daughters to jeweler Mashallah, designer Samantha Jo, and bath and body brand Sugar & Scrub, sold their wares, connecting TV fans to local, small businesses run by women of color. New York featured similar arts, including live body painting by non-binary artist Anuva and stand-up from people like Aparna Nancherla (Late Night with Seth Meyers). Brujos had two premieres two weeks later. After a sold out premiere at the Chicago Cultural Center, producers and fans traveled to Pilsen, a historically Mexican American neighborhood facing gentrification, to premiere the show in a Latino-owned bar where series composer Sadie Woods DJ’d in between episodes, allowing fans to dance to the music connected to the cultures onscreen. Even without a DJ, attendees embodied the representations. Brown Girls’ Seattle organizer noted: “People were laughing. People were clutching the heart, dancing to the music.” Such deep, embodied connection to stories is invisible to platforms and their algorithms.

Figure 6. Brown Girls premiere in Chicago: https://vimeo.com/206437359.

Local audiences broadly desire cultural specificity and value intersectionality’s contributions to culture. An analysis of 1,529 survey responses to Chicago screenings of OTV series in 2017 and 2018 provide ample support for the power of cultural specificity. ⁹ Intersectional representation was not only appreciated, but also seen as one of the most important parts of what these stories offered. For instance, one viewer at a screening of Brown Girls noted that her favorite part of the series was seeing an honest representation of queer women of color on screen, writing that what stood out to her in the show was “the beauty of queer woc [sic.] (women of color) on screen! And unapologetically queer people.” Similarly, a survey respondent at a screening of Brujos who identified as a Latinx, cisgender male, age 32, wrote that what stood out to him was “the inclusion of a very large spectrum of the black and brown queer community.” A 24-year-old, Black cisgender woman noted that she appreciated “the emphasis on gender non-conforming characters.” Some respondents also commented on how unabashed representation of intersectional identities allowed for the stories to build discussions around greater societal problems around issues, such as gender, race, and sexuality. For example, one survey respondent said their favorite part of Seeds was “Black women’s friendships and solidarity in the face of racism and sexism.”

Here we see how platforming as a method and intersectionality as a framework offers deep insight to how differing communities come together, or fail to come together, in local and in networked contexts. On platforms, conversations that are led by community leaders or artists and centered around specific representations can advance a nuanced understanding of culture. These conversations can be easily derailed, however, when representations reach communities who do not live through challenging intersections. In local engagement, community leaders find it easier to intentionally bring communities together and deepen understanding through embodied performance and pedagogy.

Platforming Intersectionality: How to Challenge and Define Platform Power

Despite apparent openness, platforms’ algorithmically based processes operate like legacy media institutions in their regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive functions: “Algorithms . . . have the capacity to directly structure user behaviors, impact preference formation, and impact content production decisions” (Napoli, 2014, p. 343). Skeptical of the value of demographic information, companies like Netflix are targeting individual users based on their actions within its walled garden, and marketing agencies hope to bring this efficiency to the broader ad-based marketplace that supports the big social media companies (Turow, 2012). The rhetoric behind these efforts to sort and segregate engagement unencumbered by cultural identity dates back generations (Nakamura, 1995) in service of capitalism’s individualist focus on the consumer (Couldry, 2015). Yet systems impact communities as much as they do individuals; the individualization of media distribution is a myth because platforms rely on our connections through culture: “If Big Data predictive analytics work, it is not because everyone is treated like a special snowflake but because network analyses segregate users into ‘neighborhoods’ based on their intense likes and dislikes” (Chun, 2018). We see homophily, or the algorithmic tendency to value “like attracts like,” as the soft power variant of Noble’s “algorithmic oppression,” or the marginalization of the culture due to technological blindness or capitalist ambivalence, for example, marketers focusing less on gay culture and more on behavioral or locative data (Sender, 2017). But capitalism’s ambivalence masks that identity is itself a technology for organizing communities and their labor (Everett, 2002; Keeling, 2014; Saha, 2018). “Race itself is a kind of technology—one designed to separate, stratify, and sanctify the many of forms of injustice experienced by members of racialized groups, but one that people routinely reimagine and redeploy to their own ends”; like algorithms, “racism is . . . a means to reconcile contradictions” (Benjamin, 2019, p. 36). These systems are not perfect; in the distance between users’ identity and (un)predictable behavior we can “relish the failure of the algorithm to entirely colonize relationality and imagination” (Sender, 2017).

Platforming intersectionality reveals how “platform” as concept must be reconceptualized to center communities as they shape and are shaped by historical regimes of power. Brown Girls and Brujos spread in a specific context: as Black, brown, queer, Muslim, and immigrant communities grappled with the threats of violence and erasure amid the rise of Donald J. Trump, who gave a national platform to explicit White heteropatriarchy. These representations of intersectionality offered the world a small amount of artistic counter-programming. As a community-based platform within and outside corporate platforms, OTV raises up productions by and for historically disempowered communities. Such counter-platforms are necessary tools for understanding platform power (J. Clark et al., 2014, p. 1457).

Scholars are still exploring methods for understanding how platforms affect specific communities and how algorithms shape the flow of social and culture life for profit. At stake is our knowledge of how inequality persists amid the potential for solidarity and resistance in a networked society. Community-based platforms can help reveal the material consequences of platform’s algorithmic power by lifting up that which has been historically been cast down, segregated, misrepresented, and misunderstood. Like intersectionality, we aim not for generalizable rules for how to make content spread, but for solidarity, a deeper understanding how disparate communities come together to better understand each other.