Digital Gender Disidentifications: Beyond the Subversion Versus Hegemony Dichotomy and Toward Everyday Gender Practices

The 21st century has seen the emergence of new practices of gender diversity that eschew a rigid gender binary and proliferate new gender labels, including “nonbinary,” “genderfluid,” and “agender.” Digital media have played a crucial role in this process as the new labels often originate and become popular in online social networks. Academic discussions on digital gender diversity suggest that the new labels either resist or reproduce the dominant gender ideology. I contribute to these discussions by challenging the subversion versus hegemony dichotomy, and by demonstrating a wide spectrum of practices of gender diversity. Drawing on six interviews with gender-diverse migrants and building on the concept of disidentification, I update the concept to include increasingly digital societies and new gender practices, challenge the dichotomous thinking about digital gender diversity, and stress the importance of cultural and media contexts for understanding how new gender labels are being practiced in everyday life

Effective dynamics of the closed loop quantum cosmology

In this paper we study dynamics of the closed FRW model with holonomy corrections coming from loop quantum cosmology. We consider models with a scalar field and cosmological constant. In case of the models with cosmological constant and free scalar field, dynamics reduce to 2D system and analysis of solutions simplify. If only free scalar field is included then universe undergoes non-singular oscillations. For the model with cosmological constant, different behaviours are obtained depending on the value of $\Lambda$. If the value of $\Lambda$ is sufficiently small, bouncing solutions with asymptotic de Sitter stages are obtained. However if the value of $\Lambda$ exceeds critical value $\Lambda_{\text{c}} =\frac{\sqrt{3}m^2_{\text{Pl}}}{2\pi\gamma^3} \simeq 21 m^2_{\text{Pl}}$ then solutions become oscillatory. Subsequently we study models with a massive scalar field. We find that this model possess generic inflationary attractors. In particular field, initially situated in the bottom of the potential, is driven up during the phase of quantum bounce. This subsequently leads to the phase of inflation. Finally we find that, comparing with the flat case, effects of curvature do not change qualitatively dynamics close to the phase of bounce. Possible effects of inverse volume corrections are also briefly discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figure

Profiles, identities, data: making abundant and anchored selves in a platform society

The practice of profile making has become ubiquitous in digital culture. Internet users are regularly invited, and usually required, to create a profile for a plethora of digital media, including mega social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Understanding profiles as a set of identity performances, I argue that the platforms employ profiles to enable and incentivize particular ways and foreclose other ways of self-performance. Drawing on research into digital media and identities, combined with mediatization theories, I show how the platforms: (a) embrace datafication logic (gathering as much data as possible and pinpointing the data to a particular unit); (b) translate the logic into design and governance of profiles (update stream and profile core); and (c) coax—at times coerce—their users into making of abundant but anchored selves, that is, performing identities which are capacious, complex, and volatile but singular and coherent at the same time

LGBTQ #PolesinUK : Tożsamość, Migracja i Media Społecznościowe

What does it mean, what does it feel like to be a queer person who migrated from Poland to the UK? This question is particularly pertinent now, when the Brexit referendum has provoked increased anti-migrant sentiments in the UK and the ruling Law and Justice Party in Poland has picked on queers as part of its populist agenda. The lives and experiences of queer Poles in the UK―gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender as well as other gender- and sexuality-diverse people, or LGBTQs―are not all the same. Some are out to everyone who is important in their lives, others remain largely in the closet―for example, to their families in Poland―and need to carefully navigate their queer lives in different cultural contexts, especially on social media such as Facebook, which usually brings those different contexts together. Some are fluent in English, others possess only basic English skills and heavily rely on other Polish migrants to find a job or accommodation and to access public services. Yet others speak English well but prefer to date only Polish people (and they use a Polish dating app to find them) to ‘be able to fully share my passions and interests’ with a future partner, as one participant in this research put it. At the same time, queer Poles in the UK share many values, attitudes and opinions, often because they face similar struggles with anti-LGBTQ and anti-migrant discrimination. This report traces such similarities as well as differences, bringing to light the lives and experiences of queer Poles in the UK. It is based on the largest to date study of this group, which consists of 767 survey responses and 30 interviews with a diverse group of LGBTQs

Navigating online selves : social, cultural, and material contexts of social media use by diasporic gay men

Social media not only create new opportunities but also pose new challenges for the ways people navigate their online selves. As noted by boyd, social media are characterized by unique dynamics such as collapsed contexts, implying that one’s distinct offline social worlds meet online. This creates particular challenges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, at least those who find it crucial to maintain distinct contexts in which they disclose or conceal their gender and/or sexual selves. However, the existing scholarship on social media use by LGBTQs is predominantly anchored in English-language Western contexts and tends to lose sight of the cultural specificities of Internet use. Therefore, in this article, we build on the scholarship to further investigate the role of context for disclosing or concealing gender and/or sexual selves online. More specifically, we ask, “How do social, cultural, and material contexts affect the ways LGBTQs navigate their selves on social media?” To investigate this question, we analyze in-depth face-to-face interviews with gay men who themselves, or whose parents, migrated to Belgium. Because their migration background forces them to negotiate different social, cultural, and material contexts, our focus on diasporic gay men helps to bring out the issue of context in social media use

Transcending Big Bang in Loop Quantum Cosmology: Recent Advances

We discuss the way non-perturbative quantization of cosmological spacetimes in loop quantum cosmology provides insights on the physics of Planck scale and the resolution of big bang singularity. In recent years, rigorous examination of mathematical and physical aspects of the quantum theory has led to a consistent quantization which is consistent and physically viable and some early ideas have been ruled out. The latter include so called `physical effects' originating from modifications to inverse scale factors in the flat models. The singularity resolution is understood to originate from the non-local nature of curvature in the quantum theory and the underlying polymer representation. Using an exactly solvable model various insights have been gained. The model predicts a generic occurrence of bounce for states in the physical Hilbert space and a supremum for the spectrum of the energy density operator. It also provides answers to the growth of fluctuations, showing that semi-classicality is preserved to an amazing degree across the bounce.Comment: Invited plenary talk at the Sixth International Conference on Gravitation and Cosmology, IUCAA (Pune). 13 pages, 3 figure

Non-singular Universes a la Palatini

It has recently been shown that f(R) theories formulated in the Palatini variational formalism are able to avoid the big bang singularity yielding instead a bouncing solution. The mechanism responsible for this behavior is similar to that observed in the effective dynamics of loop quantum cosmology and an f(R) theory exactly reproducing that dynamics has been found. I will show here that considering more general actions, with quadratic contributions of the Ricci tensor, results in a much richer phenomenology that yields bouncing solutions even in anisotropic (Bianchi I) scenarios. Some implications of these results are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, no figures. Contribution to the Spanish Relativity Meeting (ERE2010), 6-10 Sept. Granada, Spai

Classical Setting and Effective Dynamics for Spinfoam Cosmology

We explore how to extract effective dynamics from loop quantum gravity and spinfoams truncated to a finite fixed graph, with the hope of modeling symmetry-reduced gravitational systems. We particularize our study to the 2-vertex graph with N links. We describe the canonical data using the recent formulation of the phase space in terms of spinors, and implement a symmetry-reduction to the homogeneous and isotropic sector. From the canonical point of view, we construct a consistent Hamiltonian for the model and discuss its relation with Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies. Then, we analyze the dynamics from the spinfoam approach. We compute exactly the transition amplitude between initial and final coherent spin networks states with support on the 2-vertex graph, for the choice of the simplest two-complex (with a single space-time vertex). The transition amplitude verifies an exact differential equation that agrees with the Hamiltonian constructed previously. Thus, in our simple setting we clarify the link between the canonical and the covariant formalisms.Comment: 38 pages, v2: Link with discretized loop quantum gravity made explicit and emphasize