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In this piece, which frames the special issue "Technocultural worldings," we build on previous editions of commentary and criticism in this journal. We propose a theoretically anchored way to systematically approach the dynamic, multidimensional, and heterogeneous technocultural communities that have created their own worldings and are engaged in complex dialectical dynamics within the contemporary media landscape. The technocultural communities that are part of these dialectical dynamics are constituted, on the one hand, by the complex collective sense-making of the emancipatory political programs of feminist and LGBTI+ initiatives and, on the other, by the retrogressive mobilizations of far-right and anti-gender movements. Hence, we argue that these worldings come into being due to the ability conferred by digital spaces to incorporate both material and virtual components in performances of gender and sexuality, in all their complex diversity. These issues are explored in more detail in eight articles, grouped into two discretely separate sections, one exploring emancipatory technocultural worldings, while the other describes retrogressive technocultural worldings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I conduct a multimodal analysis of videos of Las Tesis' performance "Un Violador En Tu Camino," posted on YouTube and Twitter, with the aim of obtaining deeper insights into how digital platforms encourage the creation of large-scale, transnational feminist mobilizations and how the encounter with narratives of multiple violences can enable new types of feminist radicality. Rather than locating the digital at the center point, a non-digital centric approach opens up for attending to the digital as part of something wider, and I analyze the interplay between the digital and non-digital in the building of a multifaceted feminist collectivity. I find that the variegated enactments "Un Violador" illuminate feminism as a transnational feminist collective through shared meanings and values, characterized by commonalities as well differences. These dimensions allow feminist performances to move across multiple scales and borders and become a radical, transversal social phenomenon on a macro scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the case of Barents Pride, an event organized collaboratively by Russian and Norwegian LGBT+ activists located close to the Norwegian–Russian border. The idea of the Pride is to bring LGBT+ people and activists from Russia, where state pressure limits possibilities of organizing prides, to Norway and to express solidarity across borders. We use this case to investigate pitfalls and promises of queer transnational solidarities, to contest notions of center/periphery, the North/South–East/West division and to analyze how sexuality simultaneously enforces and destabilizes these dichotomies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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While scholars have shown the significance of transnational exchanges for shaping feminist and LGBTI+ connectivities across borders to challenge national exclusions and global divides, less attention has been directed at exploring the complex and ambiguous ways in which transnational collaborations and cross-border exchanges also may facilitate and support national agendas. That is what this article sets out to explore. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTI+ actors in a Scandinavian context, this article uses the notion of strategic homonationalism to examine the ambiguous ways in which transnational, diasporic, and refugee LGBTI+ politics and locations in the Scandinavian region strategically engage with regulatory notions of liberal-mindedness and with exclusionary discourses of genuine LGBTI+ subjectivity in this context. Rather than being restricted to national contexts, I show, forms of progressive nationalism may be facilitated by cross-border exchange of various kind. Influenced by scholars who argue for the need to bring back a focus on racialization and national belonging in analyses of the making of sexualized and/or gendered difference, the article attends to the complex politics involved in inhabiting the impossible position of not being able to "not want rights." To this end, this article reworks homonationalism, from a concept that emerges or is rooted in a US context, to a concept that travels and is differently shaped and picked up in various located sites, showing that homonationalism in a Scandinavian context takes shape through a moralistically superior position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the discourses, actors, and cross-border exchanges that shape the broader landscape of contemporary transnational feminist and queer non-governmental organizations (NGOs). While several studies have pointed to the co-opted role of NGOs, fewer have explored the potential for NGOs to influence the conditions under which they operate. That is what this article sets out to do, with the goal of highlighting the potential for feminist and queer NGOs to engage in oppositional politics within contexts of neoliberalism. Based on material collected during ethnographic fieldwork with transnational feminist and queer NGOs, this article examines how NGOs position themselves in relation to the political and financial structures that condition their work; how and to what effect the emerging professional class of NGO activists navigate the contradictory landscapes within which they are located; and the ambiguities of cross-border exchanges among NGOs. The article shows examples of agency and small-scale resistance, but also illuminates the palpable risks of existing neoliberal tendencies among funders and NGOs. I conclude that transnational feminist and queer NGOs have much to gain from intervening more decisively in such ambiguities as those examined in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I want to illuminate a more diverse image of lesbian lives in the Nordic region than what is often assumed through Western-centric notions of the global queer community and of "out and proud" visibility. Moving beyond dichotomous divisions between visibility and invisibility, I approach in/visibility as an ambivalent, ambiguous, and performative concept. My fieldwork data illuminate that non-heterosexual migrant women in this context do not primarily subscribe to a so-called "Western" visibility paradigm. I analyze how non-heterosexual migrant women, primarily Muslim, exercise ownership of their sexual identities and how they negotiate the degree to which their romantic and sexual relations become—or do not—points of discussion. As these women were involved in multi-layered negotiations in relation to their families, queer communities, and nations, their positionings in relation to the visibility paradigm differed. However, on a general level, their positionings could be interpreted as simultaneously in and out of the closet, or neither in nor out. These ambivalences and ambiguities, I suggest, illuminate the need to challenge the visibility/invisibility divide, and highlight the importance of paying attention to multiple, context-specific, and intersecting forms of power. Drawing on these discussions, I propose the need to rethink notions of community, family, and home within a framework of queer livability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]