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CompuQueer: Protocological Constraints, Algorithmic Streamlining, and the Search for Queer Methods Online
- WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly
- The Feminist Press
- Volume 44, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2016
- pp. 111-130
- 10.1353/wsq.2016.0038
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
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.