Queer lives in the social media prism: Precarious LGBTQIA+ visibility and lateral surveillance in Azerbaijan

In countries where state institutions and the public largely reject LGBTQIA+ identities and issues, queer people struggle with visibility. Next to governments and technology providers, what queer people do, who they connect to, and how they express themselves is being watched and scrutinized by their families and proximate relations. This lateral surveillance is afforded by social media that establish, as we argue in this article, a prism. Here, LGBTQIA+ lives become refracted as extensive though incoherent patterns of digital traces. How queer people respond to this situation where the binary of visible versus invisible falls apart is poorly understood. To address that gap, we interrogate the precarious management of visibility attempted by LGBTQIA+ people in Azerbaijan with its heteropatriarchal, honor-driven culture. Based on our exploratory interview study, we find that queer Azerbaijanis were confronted with a highly ambivalent scopic setup where context collision loomed large. In effect, they supported LGBTQIA+ visibility but had personally decided not to live or promote it. Yet whilst their attempts to remain opaque may contradict their activistic compliancy, this was a logical reaction to too hard to handle terms of visibility.