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Article Queer Lives in the Social Media Prism: Precarious LGBTQIA Plus Visibility and Lateral Surveillance in Azerbaijan(Sage Publications Inc, 2025) Seyidov, Ilgar; Pentzold, ChristianIn 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.Article Citation - WoS: 3Citation - Scopus: 4As Quiet as a Mouse: Media Use in Azerbaijan(de Gruyter Mouton, 2020) Seyidov, IlgarDuring the Soviet period, the media served as one of the main propagandist tools of the authoritarian regime, using a standardized and monotype media system across the Soviet Republics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, 15 countries became independent. The transition from Soviet communism to capitalism has led to the reconstruction of economic, socio-cultural, and political systems. One of the most affected institutions in post-Soviet countries was the media. Media have played a supportive role during rough times, when there was, on the one hand, the struggle for liberation and sovereignty, and, on the other hand, the need for nation building. It has been almost 30 years since the Soviet Republics achieved independence, yet the media have not been freed from political control and continue to serve as ideological apparatuses of authoritarian regimes in post-Soviet countries. Freedom of speech and independent media are still under threat. The current study focuses on media use in Azerbaijan, one of the under-researched post-Soviet countries. The interviews for this study were conducted with 40 participants living in Nakhichevan and Baku. In-depth, semi-structured interview techniques were used as research method. Findings are discussed under six main themes in the conclusion.
