CompuQueer: Protocological Constraints, Algorithmic Streamlining, and the Search for Queer Methods Online

How has the concept of a queer method achieved coherence and popularity online, without becoming synonymous with an ethos of extreme, indiscriminate inclusivity—with a sense that “anything goes,” especially on the Internet and especially under the banner of “queer”? How do digital-networked technologies both manufacture and undermine the intelligibility of specifically queer methods? This essay considers these questions through the close analysis of specific social-networking services and a broad framework for identifying queer media and other inscriptions of queerness online: machine reading, which involves specialty search engines designed to circumvent human interpretation for the sake of discovering the avowedly queer.