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Chapter 12 - Queer Digital Cultures

from Part III - Representation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

By
Kate O’Riordan
Edited by
Siobhan B. Somerville
Siobhan B. Somerville
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

This chapter examines queer digital culture, a term that refers to the ways in which LGBTQ+ identities, practices, and theories have been mixed up in the emergence, design, and constitution of digital technology. It highlights significant shifts at the intersections of queer identity and politics and digital communication technologies from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century, including transitions from textual to audiovisual media; from subcultural to mainstream politics; from utopian political aspirations (Afrofuturism; cyberfeminism; cyberqueer) to commercialization; and from identity play and performance to consumer authentication. It concludes by drawing out the contradictory dimensions of queer digital culture which both exacerbate forms of oppression and offer liberatory trajectories. Alongside the rise of new forms of heteroactivism, commodified identities, and ubiquitous but unequal digital access, LGBTQ+ digital media continues to offer the promise of solidarity and intervention in relation to social justice.

Keywords

Queer studiesdigital mediacyberqueersexuality studies
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies , pp. 185 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Further Reading

Bryson, Mary. “When Jill Jacks In: Queer Women and the Net.” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 239–54.Google Scholar
Fleetwood, Nicole R. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011.Google Scholar
González, Jennifer. “The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage.” In Race in Cyberspace, edited by Kolko, Beth E., Nakamura, Lisa, and Rodman, Gilbert B., 27–50. New York: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Munt, Sally R., Bassett, Elizabeth H., and O’Riordan, Kate. “Virtually Belonging: Risk, Connectivity, and Coming Out On-Line.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7, no. 2 (2002): 125–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rambukkana, Nathan. “Taking the Leather Out of Leathersex: The Internet, Identity, and the Sadomasochistic Public Sphere.” In Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality, edited by O’Riordan, Kate and Phillips, David J., 67–80. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.Google Scholar
Raun, Tobias. Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube. New York: Routledge, 2016.Google Scholar

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