Queer Technologies

Lately one of my professors has been crowd sourcing ideas for his upcoming classes this fall from his Facebook friends. One of his classes, which I unfortunately cannot fit into my schedule (I’ll still audit the hell out of it), is called Genres of Affect and explores the idea of how affect is seen as a form of power. It’s going to be a film screening class exploring different genres and how those genres have an affect on the human being’s emotions and desires. He just posted his syllabus in a status today and I discovered this peculiar design project “Queer Technologies” as an at home reading assignment.

QT deploys “tracing” designs (a la Carl DiSalvo‘s notion of the creation of ‘publics‘) to create new technologies that engage a queer politics, and debunk the heteronormative nature of modern technology. The people behind the project are very well versed in the subject of Queer theory (even more so than I am) and I found this paragraph in their Gay Bombs manual to be very useful in understanding their MO:

“The discourse of queer theory operates as a rhetoric of freedom for those positioned outside of heteronormative configurations. Queer theory moves beyond
discourses of sexuality and gender to approach larger “way[s] of life . . . strange
temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices.”

Here are some videos outlining three of their “products” that they have hypothetically created to counter existing forms of technology that already exists:

Fag Face:

Gay Bomb:

transCode: