Queerness in the Digital Environment

Abstract

What does it mean to be “queer” in this age of digital technology, where much of our communication, indeed much of our lives, focuses on interacting with screens? This is a complicated question and we cannot begin to answer it without first exploring what it means to be or use the word “queer.” There are many readings, definitions, and interpretations of “queer.” Queer can be defined as ironic and playful, a way to perform identity that is defying gender/sexuality/sex binaries in a smart, campy way. It can also mean to adamantly defy and disrupt culturally sanctioned binaries, specifically, as they relate to sex/gender/sexuality, with no hint of irony or play but more along the lines of warrior-like defiance, as Leslie Feinberg writes in Transgender Warriors (1997). Queer can be an umbrella term, a way of creating a community of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersexed, and “other” people—not only a shortcut through the alphabet soup of acronyms, but as a way of uniting these groups as having similarities or kindred experiences as they defy the sex/gender/sexuality binaries. Adopting the word “queer” to name themselves, LGBT people are also linguistically reclaiming a word that historically (and still today, given context and purpose) was/is used to deride, wound, and insult. Others define “queer” as any behavior or ideology that rejects the heterosexual (or dominant) paradigm of heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is how the heterosexual culture positions itself as the primary human relationship, masculine male and feminine female. Heteronormativity is seeing straight, reading straight, and thinking straight. Relating this idea of heteronormativity to theories of race and culture, Edward Said has described the phenomenon of the dominant ideology permeating one’s conscious and unconsciousness as “the white man on my eyeball” or, as Toni Morrison has said, “the white man in my head.” According to Janet Halley, in her article “The Construction of Heterosexuality,” queer is a marker that refuses the “heterosexual bribe,” or the cultural perks awarded to those who perform a heterosexual identity.