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1. "We Cried on Each Other’s Shoulders": How LGBTQ+ Individuals Experience Social Support in Social Virtual Reality

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581530  

   Li, Lingyuan; Freeman, Guo; Schulenberg, Kelsea; Acena, Dane (April 2023, CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   Although social support can be a vital component of gender and sexual identity formation, many LGBTQ+ individuals often lack offline social networks for such support. Traditional online technologies also reveal several challenges in providing LGBTQ+ individuals with effective social support. Therefore, social VR, as a unique online space for immersive and embodied experiences, is becoming popular within LGBTQ+ communities for supportive online interactions. Drawing on 29 LGBTQ+ social VR users’ experiences, we investigate the types of social support LGBTQ+ users have experienced through social VR and how they leverage unique social VR features to experience such support. We provide one of the first empirical evidence of how social VR innovates traditional online support mechanisms to empower LGBTQ+ individuals but leads to new safety and equality concerns. We also propose important principles for rethinking social VR design to provide all users, rather than just the privileged few, with supportive experiences. 

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2. Disturbing the Peace: Experiencing and Mitigating Emerging Harassment in Social Virtual Reality

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3512932  

   Freeman, Guo; Zamanifard, Samaneh; Maloney, Divine; Acena, Dane (March 2022, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Harassment has long been considered a severe social issue and a culturally contextualized construct. More recently, understanding and mitigating emerging harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) has become a growing research area in HCI and CSCW. Based on the perspective of harassment in the U.S. culture, in this paper we identify new characteristics of online harassment in social VR using 30 in-depth interviews. We especially attend to how people who are already considered marginalized in the gaming and virtual worlds contexts (e.g., women, LGBTQ, and ethnic minorities) experience such harassment. As social VR is still a novel technology, our proactive approach highlights embodied harassment as an emerging but understudied form of harassment in novel online social spaces. Our critical review of social VR users' experiences of harassment and recommendations to mitigate such harassment also extends the current conceptualization of online harassment in CSCW. We therefore contribute to the active prevention of future harassment in nuanced online environments, platforms, and experiences. 

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3. The Virtual Jail: Content Moderation Challenges Faced by Chinese Queer Content Creators on Douyin

   Shen, Caoyang; Haimson, Oliver L (April 2025, ACM)

   Queer users of Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, suspect that the platform removes and suppresses queer content, thus reducing queer visibility. In this study, we examined how Chinese queer users recognize and react to Douyin’s moderation of queer content by conducting interviews with 21 queer China-based Douyin content creators and viewers. Findings indicate that queer users actively explore and adapt to the platform’s underlying moderation logic. They employ creative content and posting strategies to reduce the likelihood of their expressions of queer topics and identities being removed or suppressed. Like Western platforms, Douyin’s moderation approaches are often ambiguous; but unlike Western platforms, queer users sometimes receive clarity on moderation reasons via direct communication with moderators. Participants suggested that Douyin’s repressive moderation practices are in!uenced by more than just platform policies and procedures – they also re!ect state-led homophobia and societal discipline. This study underscores the challenges Chinese queer communities face in maintaining online visibility and suggests that meaningful change in their experiences is unlikely without broader societal shifts towards queer acceptance. 

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4. "We Don't Want a Bird Cage, We Want Guardrails": Understanding & Designing for Preventing Interpersonal Harm in Social VR through the Lens of Consent

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3610172  

   Schulenberg, Kelsea; Li, Lingyuan; Lancaster, Caitlin; Zytko, Douglas; Freeman, Guo (September 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   As social Virtual Reality (VR) grows in prevalence, new possibilities for embodied and immersive social interaction emerge, including varied forms of interpersonal harm. Yet, challenges remain regarding defining, identifying, and mitigating said harm in social VR. In this paper, we take an alternative approach to understanding and designing solutions for interpersonal harm in social VR through the lens of consent, which circumvents the lack of consensus and social norms on what should be defined as harm in social VR and reflects the embodied, immersive, and offline-world-like nature of harm in social VR. Through interviews with 39 social VR users, we offer one of the first empirical explorations on how social VR users understand consent as boundaries, (re)purpose existing social VR features for practicing consent as boundary setting, and envision the design of future consent mechanics in social VR to balance protection and interaction expectations to mitigate interpersonal harm as boundary violations in social VR. This work makes significant contributions to CSCW and HCI research by (1) uncovering how social VR users craft novel conceptualizations of consent as boundaries and harm as unwanted boundary violations, and (2) providing three foundational principles for designing future consent mechanics in social VR informed by actual social VR users. 

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5. Queering Virtual Reality

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29489-2_17  

   Paré, D. (January 2019, Critical, Transdisciplinary and Embodied Approaches in STEM Education)

   null (Ed.)

   In this chapter, we investigate how innovations in STEM, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D Sculpting, can support the development of critical literacies about gender and sexuality. Our work arises from the concern that the assumed \naturalness" of male/female binary categories in biol- ogy is often at the center of the queer, trans, and intersex panics in public education. Echoing sociologists and critical scholars of gender and sexu- ality, we posit that transgender and queer identities should be positioned as realms of playful, active inquiry. Further, we investigate how new forms of computational representational infrastructures can be leveraged to support productive and playful experiences of inquiry about gender and sexuality. We present a retrospective analysis of a design group meeting of a small group of friends in their early thirties with gender nonconforming and queer identities and life histories. The group interacted in VR-based environments, where they engaged in two dierent forms of construction- ist learning experiences: creating 3D sculptures of personally meaningful objects, and re-creating their VR avatars in VR social media. Our analysis illustrates how such experiences can be productively analyzed using so- cial constructivist perspectives that situate knowing as boundary play and gured worlds, and the roles that play and friendship have in supporting deep and critical engagement with complex narratives and marginalized experiences of gender and sexuality. 

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