Virtually Queer? Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings

Abstract

This article counters and complicates decontextualized, celebratory accounts of queer subjects and cyberspace. The authors explore the significance of communicative media for queer women, with a particular focus on the negotiation of complex identifications, communities, social networks, and knowledge practices. Using a critical, sociocultural approach, the authors make illustrative use of interviews conducted in British Columbia and Alberta that are part of an ongoing research project (www.queerville.ca) that situates media practices in the quotidian. The authors’ arguments concerning queer virtualities attend to (im)mobilities across multiple offline and online contexts; complex geographies of un/belonging; a paradoxical relation of intense suturing to, and disavowal of, mediation; as well as the problematics of a “politics of recognition” and of “visibility,” at work in sites of subjectification and sociality. (Click here for interview) (Click here for interview transcript)