#QueeringThePresent, #QueryingTheFuture: The Learning, Identity, and Performativity of New Possible Futures Through Digital Queerness Online

• In Event: 44.034 - Children's Books, Dungeons & Dragons, Twitter, and Coding: Tools for Ingenious Negotiations of Nondominant Learner Roles

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework:
We live in intensely political times where the struggle for rights to plurality of identity, expression, and representation in society has unprecedented visibility. Twitter and other digitized social networks provide a platform for these negotiations of self, and demands for social change to play out in public ways. Moreover, these networks serve as informal sites of learning and socialization for youth in the midst of negotiating their own identities as members of local and global communities (Silverstone, 2007; Stevenson, 2003).

This study examines public deployments of digital queer gestures (Rodriguez, 2014) as overtures for new dialogues and transformation of hegemonic discourses, both in the digital and physical realm, for non-dominant youth. Through this examination, we highlight how people from non-dominant populations, namely, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming individuals of color, draw on the past as performative to imagine new possible futures and un-prescribed utopias (Muñoz, 2009). This work brings together queer studies (Rodriguez, 2003, 2014; Muñoz, 1999, 2009) and socio-cultural studies (Cole, 1996, 1998) to explore how digital artifacts and gestures form part of repertoires of practice (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003) that socially organize communities and foster development of individuals as historical actors (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2009).

Methods/Data:
This study uses of web-scraping tools and textual analyses of tweets, as well as ethnographic analyses of interviews with four queer and trans artists and activists of color, their youthful followers, and expanded communities. The data sources were triangulated using two main processes. The first process was a social network analysis and mapping of tweets relating to activism and politics of queer people of color, as transmitted by the participants of this study. The second, was open-ended and focused thematic codings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of observational field notes, writing, and interviews.

Findings:
Our study elucidates the affordances and constraints of social media as sites for a queerness of the present and articulations of hope and possibility for the future for non-dominant youth, while drawing on the performative nature of the past. Our analyses revealed clear tensions between the radical and intersectional political enactments (gestures) of queer, trans, and undocumented individuals, and those that form part of the prevailing “gay agenda” which is predominantly informed by the hopes and desires of white, cis-gendered, gay men (Duggan, 2002). Despite these tensions, digital queer gestures show promise as cultural artifacts that mediate new understandings of the pluralistic nature of today’s society and visions of the not-yet-here (Muñoz, 1999). We document the spread and breadth of such queer gestures as syncretic testimonios (Gutiérrez, 2008) that capture youth’s dispositions and moves towards an awareness as agentive historical actors (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2009).

Significance:
We build on explorations of multi-sited ethnography (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014) by conceptualizing the digital environment as part of a learning ecology in everyday practice (Gutiérrez et al., in press). This study offers implications for how educators can draw upon the de-institutionalized and out-of-school spaces for understanding how ideas are developed, learned, and disciplined without constraints of traditional learning environments.

Authors

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of California - Berkeley

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder