What is Queer Technology?

Panel: Queering Media and Technology: Identity through Public and Private Consumption

With Irmi Karl, Changchang Wu, Yu Zhao, Sharif Mowlabocus, and Yow-Jiun Wang

Moderator: Ellen Riordan

Abstract:

In a time and place of dis-alignment, ambiguity, and de-centralization, bodies and identities are continuously marked, shifted, and re-assembled at the speed of contemporary telecommunications. As life becomes further infused with technology on every level of existence, formations of body and identity bare the mark of technological networks, systems, and machines. Today, as technology precariously balances between corporate power structures and sub-cultural activism, we must turn to examine exactly how these tools mark and position our bodies and identities as we use and communicate through them. If, historically and traditionally, technological progress has been routed in heterosexist discourse, are all bodies bound to heterosexual control and ideology? If not, how do marginalized bodies react to / resist these power paradigms and reconfigure them? Or, is there a sub-cultural technology that offers empowering, subversive communicative structures and processes to all bodies, producing a freedom that exists as fact? The discourse of queer theory provides a rhetoric of freedom for those positioned outside of heterosexual formations. Attempts to formulate a queer technology implicates the urgency in carving out a queer freedom in hi-tech culture and providing the queer community with discursive /practical tools for activism, resistance, and communication. Technology follows a timeline from making to meaning, that is, from a technological process or product to a cultural worth or meaning. Therefore, in order to attempt a formulation of queer technology, the critically queer must be evaluated alongside this technological timeline. Yet, as this timeline progresses, an attempt at ontological grounding is not the goal: rather than attempting to define queer technology, different methodological approaches are used in order to consider the ways in which queer technology could be potentially defined.