ABSTRACT

YouTube is one of the most visited cultural archives of moving images. Although YouTube is increasingly another content distribution channel for major broadcast companies, hosting sponsored videos and ads, the platform also contains expressions of activism and cultural resistance. As social media scholar Megan Boler argues in the introduction to Digital Media and Digital Democracy: 'While the impact of interventions cannot always be easily measured, this does not mean they are only or merely absorbed into a model of communicative capitalism'. Digital media becomes a stepping-stone to counter-publics, enabling voices excluded from dominant discourses and critical-reflexive spaces of communication. Digital media can assist in group formation, activism, and contestation with a democratic subject that is moved by systematic exclusion and injustice In that sense, the trans vlogging culture reflects broader digital divides and socioeconomic structures both within and outside offline trans movements.