Queer technologies: affordances, affect, ambivalence

What happens when we consider communication technologies as having sex and gender, when we queer media architectures and circuitry? Larry Gross and others have productively investigated the conditions in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people appear, how they are represented, and what they are allowed to do—or not (Becker, 2006; Benshoff & Griffin, 2006; Gross, 2001; Russo, 1987; Walters, 2001, among many others). Scholars have also investigated the increasingly complex intersections of LGBTQ production and reception in contemporary mediaspheres (Gamson, 1999; Henderson, 2013; Ng, 2013; Sender, 2004; Shaw, 2015). This work has been fundamental to understanding the changing conditions of both mediated sexuality and everyday experience: in much of the world it is no longer possible to grow up as a person with same-sex desires or whose gender identity does not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth and believe oneself to be “the only one.” Yet LGBTQ media scholarship often treats the medium of delivery—television, radio, film, the internet, and so on—as neutral, universal, or presumptively masculine. Inspired by queer investigations of technology in other disciplines such as gender studies and the history of science (see, for example, Chun, 2006, 2011; Haraway, 1991; Nakamura, 2012; Nguyen, 2003), we invited scholarship that moves beyond representation and consumption towards a third framework for understanding intersections among gender, sexuality, and media. 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? And how can queer technologies and their uses inform debates about affect, temporality, and publics? This Critical Studies in Media Communication special issue collects new scholarship that addresses queer media ontologies and practices, as well as the limits of queer possibility, across a wide range of media: television, music, zines, video games, mobile applications, and online spaces. Together, the authors consider how LGBTQ representations and reception are shaped by technological affordances and constraints. These articles are connected by a web that spans queer engagements with mainstream media to form “counterpublics” (Warner, 2002); queer affect and its relationships to mediated spatiality and temporality; technological affordances for thwarting heteronormative and masculinist technologies, as well as the limits of these affordances; and the shifting meanings of production and reception through new technological practices. Most of the articles address US–based media, a happenstance of submissions despite our efforts to cast a wider net. The collection considers the intersectionality of queer experiences: of gender and gender identity, sexual identifications and desires, and productive iterations of queerness with critical race theory and globalization. Each of the papers in this special issue resists the gravitational pull towards heteronormativity and binary thinking in the ways technologies are imagined, narrativized, redesigned, and used. Some of the articles here explicitly or implicitly draw upon the idea of queer affordances of communication technologies. “Affordances” originates from cognitive psychology to describe the “action possibilities” of environments and how people use objects (Gibson, 1979/2015). Psychologists, designers, and others have consolidated the term to describe human–machine