Accidental Orientations: Rethinking Queerness in Archival Times

Abstract

This paper critically interrogates the viability of “Queer” as an ontological category, identity, and radical political orientation in an era of digital surveillance and Big Data analytics. Drawing on recent work by Matzner (2016) on the performative dimensions of Big Data, I argue that Big Data’s potential to perform and create Queerness (or its opposites) in the absence of embodiment and intentionality necessitates a rethinking of phenomenological or affective approaches to Queer ontology. Additionally, while Queerness is often theorized as an ongoing process of negotiations, (re)orientations, and iterative becomings, these perspectives presume elements of categorical mobility that Big Data precludes. This paper asks: what happens when our data performs Queerness without our permission or bodily complacency? And can a Queerness that insists on existing in the interstitial margins of categorization, or in the “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, and overlaps” (Sedgwick 1993: 8), endure amidst a climate of highly granular data analysis?