Hello, my name is Guo Freeman.
in this video I will present our CSCW paper "Acting Out" Queer Identity: The Embodied
Visibility in Social Virtual Reality on behalf of my student Dane Acena.
The Human Rights Campaign describes "queer" as "a term people often use to express a spectrum
of identities and orientations that are counter to the mainstream."
In particular, online social spaces have been an important part of queer social lives and
the leading platforms for them to learn about their gender identity and sexual identity
and connect with similar others, increasing their visibility online.
In queer research, a queer individual’s visibility refers to out-ness, which is the
level of disclosure of their queer identity to friends, family, and the public.
Existing research have especially highlighted selective visibility as regard to queer users’
online presence and social experiences.
With selective visibility, queer users can manipulate and adjust the level of their visibility
across different platforms and choose what aspects of their identity they decide to show
to specific groups of online audiences.
As social technologies evolve towards more natural and immersive interaction, there is
a growing interest in HCI and CSCW to explore how novel social spaces that have not been
extensively studied may both support and challenge queer users’ identity work and online visibility.
Therefore, in this paper we especially focus on embodied visibility emerging in social
Virtual Reality as a new lens to explore how queer users build and experience visibility
in nuanced ways.
We define embodied visibility as queer users’ conscious choices on presenting and/or disclosing
non-hetero or noncisnormative identity expressions to others through a sense of embodiment about
wearing and acting upon one’s virtual body, rather than merely viewing an on-screen visual
representation.
We explore the following research questions: First, what strategies do queer users use
to build and experience embodied visibility in social VR, and what are the limitations
of these strategies?
Second, How does embodied visibility in social VR affect queer users’ identity practices?
We focus on the social VR context because it offers novel and unique techniques to present,
express, and experiment one’s identity in ways that traditional online social spaces
such as social networking sites and online gaming/virtual worlds cannot provide.
Social VR refers to 3D virtual spaces where multiple users can interact with one another
through VR head-mounted displays.
Rather than just looking at avatars on a computer screen, it supports fully or partially body
tracked avatars.
This means one’s avatar’s movements will correspond to the real time movements of their
physical body.
Unlike in many online games and virtual worlds, the main communication method in social VR
is synchronous voice communication.
Social VR can also simulate physical touches such as grabbing, handshake, hugging, and
rich nonverbal communication such as body language.
To collect data, we conducted 29 in-depth interviews with queer social VR users across
various countries and cultures.
We then analyzed our interview data qualitatively.
Our findings highlight several main strategies that queer uses use to build and experience
visibility in an embodied way in social VR.
However, they also point out concerning limitations associated with each strategy.
For example, participants mention that they are able to further visualize their queer
identity through carefully customizing their avatar and experiencing various avatar bodies
to explore how they want to be seen by others.
But they also highlight the restricted avatar design offered by most social VR platforms
as a limitation.
it is challenging to fully express one’s non-hetero or non-cisnormative identity through
predefined avatar characteristics in social VR.
Male avatars also look strangely feminine.
Another key method is to act out queer identity via full body tracking and various embodied
immersive activities that simulate offline social activities.
Our participants highlight three focuses to build their visibility through this method,
first, seeking a natural and realistic way to build visibility; second, revealing emotions
and personalities through simulated physical behaviors; and third attending queer-focused
immersive events.
However, they also mention how acting out their queer identity through embodied may
lead to embodied harassment, which can be felt more immersive, physicalized, and destructive
than simply text- or voice-based harassment.
Finally, voice becomes another critical dimension for queer users to be both seen and heard
by others in social VR.
however, how to match one’s voice and avatar appearance is a common barrier to accurately
express their queer identity.
In general, our participants highlight that "social VR helps people understand their identity
in a way that any other social experience or platforms cannot do", including impacts
on self-awareness of queer identity; impacts on self-confidence to reinforce one’s queer
identity; impacts on building a supportive queer community beyond geographic limitations;
and impacts on queer visibility in the offline world.
To discuss the implications of this work, we provide new and unique perspectives of
queer visibility online by highlighting physically acting out a virtual body, being heard along
with an embodied avatar, and limited selective visibility as nuanced identity practices through
the sense of embodiment in social VR.
We also offer a critical reflection of how embodied visibility can be a double-edged
sword that creates new challenges and barriers for queer visibility online, including its
subjection to complex sociocultural and economic power dynamics and the tremendous time and
efforts required for fully representing queer identity.
These insights help us propose five potential design considerations for further supporting
diverse queer users’ visibility in social VR, including improving Accessibility to Diverse
Queer Communities by Fostering an Inclusive Culture, Easier Access to Customized Avatar
Design/Creation for Diverse Queer Identities, Adding Emotions to Full-body Tracked Avatars
to Expand Embodied Visibility, Diverse Voice Modulators to Accommodate Different Queer
Identities, and at last, Preventing embodied harassment.
Thank you for watching.
We want to thank our participants and the National Science Foundation for supporting
this research.