Gay employees on social media: Strategies to portray professionalism
研究巴西一家跨国汽车制造子公司中，男同性恋员工如何在Facebook和Instagram上调整自我呈现，以平衡专业性与同性恋身份，并提出了“试水”过程来解释其动态策略。
Abstract This study explores how gay male employees represent themselves on social media. Research shows that online self-representations vary according to imagined audiences and platforms’ affordances, but little is known about the possible roles of work in this process. In a qualitative study based on interviews and observations in the Brazilian subsidiary of a multinational automaker, I show how employees’ assessment of compatibility between professionalism and homosexuality leads them to adopt different strategies on Facebook and Instagram, platforms where work and other spheres of their lives overlap. These behaviors are dynamic, occurring in a process I label “testing the waters”: The gay men observe visible audiences’ reactions and change their online self-representations in response to these reactions. This study shows how worried, conscious, and strategic LGBTQIA+ employees are about their use of social media, in new spaces that reproduce old workplace pressures.