Queer Technologies
Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence

Queer media studies has mostly focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) visibility, stereotypes, and positive images, but media technologies aren?t just vehicles for representations, they also shape them. How can queer theory and queer methodologies complicate our understanding of communication technologies, their structures and uses, and the cultural and political implications of these? How can queer technologies inform debates about affect, temporality, and publics?

This book presents new scholarship that addresses queer media production and practices across a wide range of media, including television, music, zines, video games, mobile applications, and online spaces. The authors consider how LGBTQ representations and reception are shaped by technological affordances and constraints. Chapters deal with critical contemporary concepts such as counterpublics, affect, temporality, nonbinary practices, queer technique, and transmediation to explore intersections among communication and media studies and cutting-edge queer and transgender theory. This collection moves beyond considering LGBTQ representations as they appear in media to consider the central role of technologies in understanding intersections among gender, sexuality, and media. Even the most heteromasculine technologies can be queered, yet we can?t assume queerness works in the same way across different media. Emergent media technologies afford queer worldmaking, but these worlds are forged between normalization and niche marketing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Introduction – Queer technologies: affordances, affect, ambivalence1. Queen don’t compute: reading and casting shade on Facebook’s real names policy2. Making a name for yourself: tagging as transgender ontological practice on Tumblr3. Aesthetics of queer becoming: Comrade Yue and Chinese community-based documentaries online4. Lez takes time: designing lesbian contact in geosocial networking apps5. Trans(affective)mediation: feeling our way from paper to digitized zines and back again6. The queer case of video games: orgasms, Heteronormativity, and video game narrative 7. Disorienting guitar practice: an alternative archive8. "I Did It All Online:" Transgender identity and the management of everyday life9. Hacking Xena: Technological innovation and queer influence in the production of mainstream television

Katherine Sender is a Professor of Media and Sexuality in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Her written work includes Business, not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market (2004) and her documentary work addresses the history of LGBTQ representation on US television.

Adrienne Shaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production, and a member of the School of Media and Communication graduate faculty at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. She is the author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (2014).