Gay employees on social media: Strategies to
portray professionalism

Gay employees on social media: Strategies to
portray professionalism

gay male employees, professionalism, self-representation, social media, Brazil

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 com-
patibility 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 ob-
serve visible audiences’ reactions and change their online self-representations in response to these reactions. This study shows how worried,

conscious, and strategic LGBTQIAþ employees are about their use of social media, in new spaces that reproduce old workplace pressures.

Lucas Amaral

https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad001

18 January 2023

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