This research set out to understand how sapphic meme culture on Instagram acts as a mode of social life through which contemporary English-speaking lesbians come to recognise each other, articulate desire, and produce forms of belonging through semiotic practice. Observed tensions between feelings of belonging for lesbian meme consumers and exhaustion of meme creators, as well as between recognition and exclusion, highlight that meme circulation is not only about humour but the ongoing negotiation of community and queer world-making in environments marked by fragmentation and algorithmic mediation. Within these limits, meme-making and follower interactions emerge as forms of affective and creative labour that sustain connection while remaining unevenly valued. Furthermore, sapphic memes play a vital role as informal pedagogical tools, transmitting ways of identification and desire across geographic and experiential distance. The circulation of these shared references and norms extend beyond the platform when semiotic references circulating through sapphic memes are taken up in offline life, shaping dress codes and embodied cues through which recognition and belonging are created in physical space.

Conducted on Instagram and shaped by my personal experience and algorithmic feed, this research offers a situated account of lesbian digital sociality rather than a comprehensive map of queer online life. The partial legibility of meme cultures contributes to an ethnographic interpretation that often relies on knowledge accessible only to those embedded within the specific social world. Expanding this inquiry across platforms, languages, and cultural contexts over a longer research period would allow a more indepth exploration paying closer attention to how intersecting forms of marginalisation shape digital world-making in divergent ways. What emerges from this project is an understanding of lesbian meme culture not as a site of overt resistance, but as a set of small-scale practices oriented towards persistence and existence within mainstream heteronormative structures. Through ordinary acts of scrolling, liking, and sharing, lesbian users find ways to inhabit digital environments that were not built for them, turning often unremarkable acts of engagement into meaningful forms of community and collective survival.