**3. Concretising digital visual activism: instagram as site for queer visibility**

Instagram is a visually-driven social media application. The platform allows users to share photos, videos, and other multimodal materials – all of which are attuned to the propagation of human sociality. Unlike Twitter and most other social media platforms which heavily rely on text, Instagram's niche is its image and video sharing affordance. Indeed, the creator's description of the application give credence to this viz.:

Instagram is a simple way to capture and share the world's moments. Follow your friends and family to see what they are up to, and discover accounts from all over the world that are sharing things you love. Join the community of over 500 million people and express yourself by sharing all the moments of your day—the highlights and everything in between, too [29].

MacDowall and Budge [30] assert that Instagram's popularity and widespread use extends beyond its affordability of digital photography, videography and imagesharing, affirming that the architecture of Instagram represents a new relationship to the image and to visual experience, a way of shaping ocular habits and social relations. The authors foreground the contributions of the structure of Instagram – remarked as the tactile world of affiliation ('follows'), aesthetics ('likes') and attention ('comments') – and submit that the platform significantly contributes art spaces, audiences and aesthetics. These qualities, when aggregated, align with what Kristeva's ([31]: 163) remarks as 'semiotic language' and are fundamental to the appropriation of the platform for queer visibility and agency. The multimodal ensemble which Instagram avails implies that the 'verbal, visual and rhythmic aspects of semiotic compositions' ([32]: 209) on the platform become valuable resources in understanding the relationship that these semiotic materials can proffer within the narratives on gender and sexuality.

Images and words complement each other in different ways to create meaning, with such meanings critical to and reliant on the context of realisation. Consequently, like other social media sites, Instagram has been appropriated for activist purposes, especially as it provides multimodal affordances to its users. For instance, it has been used in the engagement and promotion of political movements like *Black Lives Matter* and *Marriage Equality* [33]. It has also been a contributor to queer rhetoric and discourses, allowing users to ventilate their perceptions and attitudes to issues around their sexuality and identities. Thus while physical visual arts for queer advocacy may be subjected to censorship and official restraints [5], the digital space circumvents some of such hindrances in the users' activist drive. The novelty of the manipulation of the digital enablement has motivated the upsurge of multimodal approaches to online engagements [34, 35]. This has in turn manifested within queer discourses [36, 37] where the analysis of non-heteronormative representations have been examined in multimodal data.

In view of the foregoing, I extend the application of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to images shared by Nigerian queer individuals on Instagram. MCDA is adequate and useful in the investigation of the identifiable issues of language use, power and inequitable relations construed in and through discourse by a combination of modes in a wide range of contexts, particularly in online spaces as in

#### *Weaponising Digital Architecture: Queer Nigerian Instagram Users and Digital Visual Activism DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108760*

this study. I submit that the queer images constitute ways of promoting queer visibility and courting social acceptance. Underlying these representations however is the activist orientation of challenging existing social structures which militate against queer existence. I operationalise visual digital activism in consort with Tessa [3] submission that this implies 'using the visual as a form of activism, or to catalyse or support other forms of activism'. One can contextualise this in view of the inhibitive reality of the physical space for queer-identifying Nigerians. Owing to this oppressive corporeality, the digital space has therefore grown to becoming a safe space for "the affirmation of gay identity and the validation of many forms of relationships" ([38]: 1098). For instance, on Twitter, many queer Nigerians have handles from where they represent their identities and do queer advocacies. Some others use these online ecologies to out themselves and seek queer communality. The use of images for positive queer representation and visual activism on Instagram also inscribes the space as critical to the framing of not only individual identities, but also to the constructed narratives around queering.

As Carnes ([39]: 1) avers, when queer people represent themselves, they attempt to reclaim the narratives around their identities 'in a world that continues to marginalize and oppress … sexually and gender fluid and non-normative people'. This sentiment is shared by Southerton et al. [40] and Opara et al. [41] as they adjudge that marginalised LGBTQ communities turn to the shared online communities in the contestation of gender hegemonies. These studies thus serve as motivation for the aim of my current inquiry.
