"I'm Constantly Getting Comments Like, 'Oh, You're Blind. You're Like the Only Woman That I Stand a Chance With.'": A Study of Blind TikTokers' Intersectional Experiences of Gender and Sexuality

TL;DR

The study investigates how blind women and LGBTQ+ TikTokers experience intersectional marginalization mediated by platform infrastructures. Through 41 semi-structured interviews and an infrastructure-theoretic lens, it reveals how classification, imbrication, residuality, and torque on TikTok shape identity visibility and harassment, producing offline harms and requiring infrastructuring work by creators. The authors propose design interventions—enhanced identity fields, context-aware moderation, advanced accessibility in creation tools, and safety presets—to reduce epistemic, emotional, and interpersonal harms and broaden creative range. The work contributes empirical evidence and a theoretical pipeline for understanding platform-mediated intersectionality and offers concrete, community-informed design guidance for more inclusive social media systems.

Abstract

Social media platforms are important venues for identity expression, and the Human-Computer Interaction community has been paying growing attention to how marginalized groups express their identities on these platforms. Joining the emerging literature on intersectional experiences, we study blind TikTokers ("BlindTokers") who are also women and/or LGBTQ+. Using interview data from \rev{41} participants, we identify their intersectional experiences as mediated by TikTok's socio-technical affordances. We argue that BlindTokers' intersectional marginalization is infrastructural: TikTok's classification and moderation features interact with social norms in ways that push them aside and distort how they are treated on the platform. We use this infrastructure perspective to understand what these experiences are, how they were formed, and how they become harmful. We further recognize participants' infrastructuring work to address these problems. This study guides future social media design with accessible creator tools, inclusive identity options, and context-aware moderation developed in partnership with communities.