What is Queer Technology?

The Enkidu International Society for Cultural History and Cultural Studies (CHICS) in Mexico City invites the global community to a vibrant and exciting multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual and multi-cultural Queer Studies Easter Symposium in Mexico City in April 2007. The conference aims at exploring The conference aims at exploring recent developments in theory and method in Queer studies as well the broad themes of sexual diversities through time and space, gender constructions, sex-gender subjectivities, and sexual identity constructions from a wide and diverse range of perspectives.

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. Specifically, biological / technological intersections have formed not only new representations and expressions of gender and sexuality but also have created new genders and sexualities.

Today, as technology precariously balances between corporate power structures and subcultural activism, we must turn to examine exactly how these tools mark and position our bodies and identities as we use and interact with 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 subcultural technology that offers empowering, subversive structures and processes to all bodies, producing a freedom that exists as fact—a freedom that is foreign to no one?

The discourse of queer theory provides a rhetoric of freedom for those positioned outside of heterosexual formations. Today, in a life defined by and through technology, the effects of queerness on technology and technology on queerness must be accounted for. 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 empowerment. Technology follows a timeline from making to meaning, that is, a technology does / makes something (a process or product, for example) and then this act of doing / making is given to the world and interpreted (that is, the technological act of making / doing is given a meaning or cultural worth). Therefore, in order to attempt a formulation of queer technology, the critically queer must be evaluated alongside this technological timeline.

This paper will present formulations of queer technology through assessments of: 1) technological process (how the machine / system functions). In this section, David Halperin’s discussion of non-teleology and anal fisting is considered in relation to the process of video feedback. Secondly, the potential for a queer computer code is debated: by examining the coded language of Polari, how can the queer community create a new technological “anti-language”? 2) cultural representations (what the machine / system means). Once one looks outside of the technological processes potentially defining queer technology, a larger cultural context of queerness in technology is revealed.

As Judith Halberstam describes “technotopias” in trangsgendered art as moving in “mutual mutation” between the humanly queer and the technologically queer, it becomes evident that as queerness and technology constantly alter one another, queer technology is not necessarily universally definable as it is more akin to many specific embodiments throughout time, space, and history. This closing section will briefly examine two art works—Dennis Cooper’s use of code in the novel “Period” and Derek Jarman’s queering of the color blue in the film “Blue”—that expose different representations of queer technology in the 20th century.