Enmeshing the mundane and the political: Twitter, LGBTI+ outing and macro-political polarisation in Turkey

Examining the relationship between social media, anti-gender and everyday polarisation, this article identifies the ways social media platforms reflect the mundane amidst the interactions of users over social and political issues, showing how micro-stories can foreground macro-political tensions online. We examine a Twitter event over an outing that showed vigorous debates on issues pertaining to gender and its socio-political connotations in Turkey, employing textual and content analyses of reactions shared through hashtags and mentions. The outing involved a child custody battle in court and a secret recording, exposing the sexual identity of a woman popstar #Intizar. The paper shows how Twitter facilitated conservative, homophobic and patriarchal reactions that harnessed deep political polarisation between the AKP government's supporters and those declaring solidarity with LGBTI+ issues. A mundane divorce story exhibited the deep political tension in Turkey, which also exemplifies the depth of increasing online polarisation over gender on a global scale.