Queer Technologies

Queer media studies has mostly focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) visibility, stereotypes, and positive images, but media technologies aren’t just vehicles for representations, they also shape them. How can queer theory and queer methodologies complicate our understanding of communication technologies, their structures and uses, and the cultural and political implications of these? How can queer technologies inform debates about affect, temporality, and publics? This book presents new scholarship that addresses queer media production and practices across a wide range of media, including television, music, zines, video games, mobile applications, and online spaces. The authors consider how LGBTQ representations and reception are shaped by technological affordances and constraints. Chapters deal with critical contemporary concepts such as counterpublics, affect, temporality, nonbinary practices, queer technique, and transmediation to explore intersections among communication and media studies and cutting-edge queer and transgender theory. This collection moves beyond considering LGBTQ representations as they appear in media to consider the central role of technologies in understanding intersections among gender, sexuality, and media. Even the most heteromasculine technologies can be queered, yet we can’t assume queerness works in the same way across different media. Emergent media technologies afford queer worldmaking, but these worlds are forged between normalization and niche marketing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Queer media studies has mostly focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) visibility, stereotypes, and positive images, but media technologies aren’t just vehicles for representations, they also shape them. How can queer theory and queer methodologies complicate our understanding of communication technologies, their structures and uses, and the cultural and political implications of these? How can queer technologies inform debates about affect, temporality, and publics? This book presents new scholarship that addresses queer media production and practices across a wide range of media, including television, music, zines, video games, mobile applications, and online spaces. The authors consider how LGBTQ representations and reception are shaped by technological affordances and constraints. Chapters deal with critical contemporary concepts such as counterpublics, affect, temporality, nonbinary practices, queer technique, and transmediation to explore intersections among communication and media studies and cutting-edge queer and transgender theory. This collection moves beyond considering LGBTQ representations as they appear in media to consider the central role of technologies in understanding intersections among gender, sexuality, and media. Even the most heteromasculine technologies can be queered, yet we can’t assume queerness works in the same way across different media. Emergent media technologies afford queer worldmaking, but these worlds are forged between normalization and niche marketing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.

Textbook

Queer Sites in Global Contexts showcases a variety of cross-cultural perspectives that foreground the physical and online experiences of LGBTQ+ people living in the Caribbean, South and North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. The individual chapters—a collection of research-based texts by scholars around the world—provide twelve compelling case studies: queer sites that include buildings, digital networks, natural landscapes, urban spaces, and non-normative bodies. By prioritizing divergent histories and practices of queer life in geographies that are often othered by dominant queer studies in the West—female sex workers, people of color, indigenous populations, Latinx communities, trans identities, migrants—the book constructs thoroughly situated, nuanced discussions on queerness through a variety of research methods. The book presents tangible examples of empirical research and practice-based work in the fields of queer and gender studies; geography, architectural, and urban theory; and media and digital culture. Responding to the critical absence surrounding experiences of non-White queer folk in Western academia, Queer Sites in Global Contexts acts as a timely resource for scholars, activists, and thinkers interested in queer placemaking practices—both spatial and digital—of diverse cultures.

This book argues that there are some important implications of the role the voice plays in popular music when thinking about processes of identification. The central thesis is that the voice in popular music is potentially uncanny (Freud's unheimlich), and that this may invite or guard against identification by the listener.

This timely collection of accessible essays interrogate queer television at the start of the twenty- first century. The complex political, cultural, and economic milieu requires new terms and conceptual frameworks to study television and media through a queer lens. Gathering a range of well-known scholars, the book takes on the relationship between sexual identity, desire, and television, breaking new ground in a context where existing critical vocabularies and research paradigms used to study television no longer hold sway in the ways they used to. The anthology sets out to confound conventional categories used to organize queer television scholarship, like “programming,” “industry,” “audience,” “genre,” and “activism.” Instead, the anthology offers four interpretive frames – historicity, temporal play, ideological limitation and industrial contextualization – in the interest of creating new queer tools for studying digital television in the contemporary age. This collection is suitable for scholars and students studying queer media studies, television studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies.

This volume offers a socio-technical exploration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it reflects and reproduces certain normative representations of gender and sexuality, to ultimately guide more diverse and radical discussions of life with digital technologies. Moving beyond the examination of empirical examples and technical solutions, the book approaches the relationship between queerness and AI from a theoretical perspective that posits queer theory as central to understanding AI differently. The chapters pose questions about the politics and ethics of machine embodiments and data imaginaries on the one hand, and about technical possibilities for a production of social identities characterised by shifting diversity and multiplicity on the other, as they are mediated by and through digital technologies. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries to engage a diversity of conceptual tools, critical approaches, and theoretical traditions, this book will be an important resource for students and researchers of gender and sexuality, new media and digital cultures, cultural theory, art and visual culture, and AI. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.