Queer Media Mobilities

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Our contemporary world is characterized as much by mobility as by traditional analytic frameworks such as social structure or identity. How may we think differently about sexuality and gender not from a perspective of arrival and stasis but motility and dynamism? How does movement among places and media platforms enable or produce queer experience? This high-density panel considers what might be queer about mobility: how embodied and mediated sexualities move across regional and national boundaries, and what happens when they do; how transnational migrations of sexual subjects reconfigure traditional labor and kinship relations; how mobile media and communication technologies enable contingent queer identifications; and how new contexts queer hetero- and gender-normative media and sexual materials. The panel considers the fruitful juxtapositions of sexualities and genders as these move among media platforms and across space and, conversely, how the movement of media and technologies queers the heteronormativity of their intended purpose. This panel introduces new research on how queer subjects in India, Taiwan, and China use media and mobile communication technologies in the processes of self-reinvention and social connection; moves on to consider how same-sex and transgender discourses and materials are capitalized as they migrate across transnational boundaries; investigates how the movement of media technologies produces queer contact zones as they are adopted in global sites far from their production; and arrives at the consideration of how the failures of mobile technologies—productivity apps and web archiving robots—may have queer outcomes. The eight papers collected here take mobility as an expansive heuristic that transcends geographical location, media platform, and human migration to reimagine spaces of queer possibility.

Sub Unit

• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies

Cosponsors

• Feminist Scholarship

• Mobile Communication

Chair

• Katherine Sender, U of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Individual Presentations

• Between Digital Spaces and Physical Places: Mobile Mediated Gay Cultures Between Urban and Semiurban India - Vishnupriya Das, U of Michigan

• Stretched Kinship: Queer Chinese Mobilities in the Twenty-First Century - John Wei, Media Design School

• No Happy Ending at Home or Abroad: Female Migrant Queerscape in the Taiwanese Documentary Lesbian Factory (2010) - Jing Zhao, China Youth U for Political Sciences; Celina Hung, New York U Shanghai

• Queer Mobility of Chinese Women: An Ethnographic Study of Mainland Chinese Queer Women in Australia - Lucetta Kam, Hong Kong Baptist U

• Sexual Mobilities, Cosmopolitanism, and Cultural Capital: Same-Sex Materials in Sex Museums - Katherine Sender, U of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Playing Queerness Across Time and Space: The Mobile Mutability of LGBTQ Game Content - Adrienne Shaw, Temple U

• Queering Productivity Apps: Movements of Wandering, Novelty and Failure - Sarah Anne Murray, U of Michigan

• Queering the Web Crawler: Algorithms, Automation, and the Politics of Archives - Megan Sapnar Ankerson, U of Michigan