Queering Productivity Apps: Movements of Wandering, Novelty and Failure

• In Event: Queer Media Mobilities

Abstract

Recent scholarship on mobile media cultures (Farman, 2013; de Souza e Silva, 2016) demonstrates how movement afforded by untethered ubiquitous connectivity is articulated to mobilities of progress, efficiency, and success. The dominant frame through which users are encouraged to take up mobile media is productivity, and the app, with its promise of constant customized attentiveness, is increasingly the digital platform of the aspirational everyday. App marketplaces proliferate with software that track productive mobilities – everything from step counts and sex life to infant sleeping patterns, family calendaring, and retirement bucket lists. Meanwhile, queer theorists have long conceived of alternative mobilities through time, space, reproduction, and capital (Edelman, 2004; Halberstam, 2005; Muñoz, 2009; Freeman, 2010; Sender, 2012; Rodríguez, 2014). Queer movement accounts for wandering, playfulness, failure, rejection, and longing. This paper uses the app as a bridge to link parallel conversations in queer theory and mobile media studies. How do queer theories of movement prompt new considerations of productivity, and in turn, in mobile software marketplaces where no LGBTQ apps are categorized under “productivity,” what is the potential for queer mobilities? Taking cues from the counterproductive movements of wandering, novelty, and failure apps, I offer an initial frame for queering productive mobilities.

Author

• Sarah Anne Murray, U of Michigan