Queer Sweet Home: Disorientation, Tyranny, and Silence in Digital Space

In: Cultural studies - critical methodologies, Band 14, Heft 2, S. 128-137

Abstract

This project draws together queer and phenomenological perspectives, stressing a critical orientation of digital interfaces and digital space. I investigate the surfaces of these digital geographies as well as the otherwise underlying orientations and disorientations of/in digital social place. More specifically, I use the It Gets Better Project as a case study to describe places of everyday practice in digital space as place and as home—turning, or queering, the idea of home away from normative conceptualizations of home as being physically situated and toward a possibility for home in the digital and mediated. While digital place can serve as digital home for transgender youth, there are also aspects of digital home in the popular online campaign that have the potential to do injury and create unrest. Those who find home in the digital also engage or contend with the current digital landscapes of surveillance, continued media conglomerates, digital divides, neoliberal ideologies, and circularly destructive political economies.