2023.Dec.11

REPORTS

Report on the 24th B’AI Book Club
Articles on Queer Digital Archives

The 24th B’AI Book Club took place on November 28th. Project Assistant Professor Kyoko Takeuchi presented the content of three articles that provide empirical and theoretical considerations on queer digital archives, and discussed what possibilities and limitations there are for queer digital archives.

The first paper, by Rob Cover (2019), examined how digital queer communities are affectively created and how this contributes to individual identity formation, using the Lost Gay Archives, which uses Facebook as a platform, as a case study. Digital archives are not necessarily digital preservations of archival materials tied to actual locations. Lost Gay archives such as Lost Gay Melbourne are based on Facebook groups, which are interactive digital archives where members share various queer photos and events and update their interpretations with tags and comments.

These social network-based archives share rules for recording place and time and for avoiding exclusionary postings in order to work with existing archives. In terms of identity, a sense of belonging to the LGBTQ community is also created by sharing symbolic culture through this archive. In addition, the archive has the potential to both fix certain temporalities and, through interactions such as commenting, lead to new interpretations and different memories and imaginations. In this way, Rob Cover attempts to elaborate on the experiences of the queer individuals who use this archive.

In contrast, the second paper by Watson et al. (2023) analyzes comments and interview data from the Queering the map archive, which has different characteristics from the Lost Gay archives. Queering the map is an open archive that allows users to specify a specific location on a world map and freely record their queer experiences. Submissions can be anonymous, and there is no requirement to record location or time. Interestingly, many stories have been posted on the sea and high mountains that would be uninhabitable. The authors do not discuss the implications of these narratives, but they are thought to enable unique practices, such as expressing emotional closeness to people who live far away, or showing that “ordinary” places still lack places where queers can feel safe.

The authors note that, first, participation in the archive allows us to recall events from our childhood and moments when we became aware of our own queerness by associating them with a place. It is also argued that by (re)discovering a particular place as queer, it is possible to reimagine places that were previously thought to be largely absent of queer people, such as the countryside, for example. Another feature of the archive, according to the author, is that it includes everyday, casual events. While existing archives tend to focus on special events and political activities, this archive queers the map by recognizing that people living with non-normative gender and sexuality are everywhere, and their everyday queerness deserves to be documented.

The third paper, by Brian Schram (2019), differs from these two empirical studies in that it is a theoretical attempt to examine how queerness can survive in a digital space where data is granularly divided. First, Schram positions the concept of queerness as a perspective that fundamentally challenges existing gender/sexual norms and social categorization, explaining that it is distinct from LGBTQ identity politics. In a digital surveillance society, however, such queerness is likely to be eliminated. This is because big data analytics are characterized by their ability to categorize subjects into homogeneous particles, rather than creating interstitial spaces. Furthermore, in commercial platforms, “queerness” is deliberately created with a structure that is actually binary. For example, the seemingly diverse gender identity options on Facebook are assigned to only three categories in a deeper algorithmic layer: male, female, and other.

In this situation, the author sees more potential in the queerness that can be accidentally created as a result of digital categorization, such as when an algorithm “mistakenly” assigns homosexuality to people who might otherwise be heterosexual. Of course, it is difficult for us to control the outcome, since we have little direct influence on the algorithm. But we can bring into the archive the collective memory or melancholy of queerness that remains even after elimination. We can also engage in practices such as obfuscation, which makes data more ambiguous and difficult for algorithms to handle; group identity, which takes our social networks and other digital identities as collective and separates them from our individual identities; and cloning, which pluralizes the self. The practice of cloning can be used to pluralize the self. In this way, the author sees the potential for confusion in the digital archive.

The overall discussion focused mainly on the possibilities and limitations of each case of digital archiving in relation to Schram (2019). For example, in what sense can Queering the map be considered an archive: posts to Queering the map often lack information that would normally be included in many archives, such as names and times. However, this does not mean that the archive is not authentic and meaningful: Queering the map is an “archive of feelings,” not based on evidence in the narrow sense, but on the process of participants layering their own experiences onto the mass of narratives. At the same time, it is a theoretical endeavor by its creator, Lucas LaRochelle, to challenge existing archives that are linear in time, rooted in identity categories, and easily controlled by their creators.

In this context, it was also discussed that the concept of archive is used in different ways in each paper. In the first two papers, “archive” often implies a queer community archive. In Schram’s paper, however, “archive” is used in a broader sense, such as the accumulation of information in a digital environment, and seems to resist the notion of an archive that assumes a specific category or timeline as self-evident.

Thus, this book review was a fruitful opportunity to learn about the affective and interactive characteristics of digital archives, to recognize the tension between community archives and queerness, and thus to open up the discussion of digital archives to different perspectives.