Digital Queerness: Leveraging Mobile Technologies and Social Media for Practices of Resistance and Reimagination

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium explores how queer and trans communities mobilize digital tools to navigate, interrogate, and transform systems of oppression. The papers in this session examine affordances of mobile technologies and social media for counterhegemonic knowledge production and practices of resistance in queer, trans, and undocumented communities (Brockenbrough, 2013, 2015). The authors also trace constraints of these activities in an atmosphere of homonormativity (Duggan, 2003) and increased surveillance. The authors employ a range of methods and mobilize theories in the digital humanities, U.S. Third World Feminisms, queer of color critique, and queer theory to examine digital queerness. In doing so, the session maps the role of digital technologies in queer public pedagogies, collective resistance, and imagination of new possible futures.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Queer Studies

Chairs

• Cindy Cruz, University of Arizona

• Addie Shrodes, Northwestern University

Papers

• Mapping Futures, Mapping Life: Digital Survival Skills for #QueerYouthGeographers - Cindy Cruz, University of Arizona

• "Watching My Freedom": Tracing the Microgenesis of Queer and Trans Critical Literacies on Social Media - Addie Shrodes, Northwestern University

• Queens! on Twitter: Dragtivism and the (Im)Possibilities of Queer Subversion - José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder; Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder

Discussant

• Jill P. Koyama, Arizona State University - Tempe