Dazzle camouflage and queer counter conduct

• In Event: Digital Sexualities, Biomedical Practice, and Queer Realities: Culture + Identity

Abstract

Visibility has long been fraught for queer folks: the same spaces (Abraham, 2009) and technologies (Gray, 2009; Hamer, 2003) that provide powerful sources of solidarity, community and recognition can easily transform into sites of surveillance, harassment and violence. Given tensions of wanting to be seen, but only by some and only some of the time, how have queers resisted, twisted and played with experiences of surveillance? Particularly in the context of the socio-technical, what practices of managed and staged visibility have emerged as forms of queer counter-conduct? Drawing on Simone Brown's theory of dazzle camouflage (2015), I discuss three modes of queer counter-conduct geared towards managing homophobic and transphobic surveillance:
• Chelsea Manning's anti-trolling on Twitter
• online exchanges of shade and reading in drag communities
• Zack Blas' mask exhibitions
Across these examples, we see deliberate arrangements of technologies and bodies as a means of coping with forms of surveillance, and specifically a gaze that is trans- and homo-phobic. In her analysis of surveillance theory and black bodies, Brown describes dazzle camouflage as a set of counter-surveillance tactics that rely on optical confusion: “rather than concealing … dazzle camouflage was intended to make it difficult to visually assess size and speed by way of optical illusion” (p. 163). These themes of spectacle, display and avoidance have provocative implications for other marginalized groups, including queer and trans people. This paper situates different socio-technical modes of counter-conduct within the framework of dazzle camouflage as a way of drawing together surveillance studies and queer STS.

Author

• jessa lingel