Crisis epistemologies: a case for queer feminist digital ethnography

Abstract

ABSTRACT Crisis marks our lives more than ever before. It defines the ongoing violence of capitalism, nationalism, neoliberalism, gendered and racialized oppressions, and life in the era of the Anthropocene. In addition to this, crisis plays a crucial role in queer and trans studies, which seeks to expose the crises inherent to regimes of ‘normativity’. Within this context, this article asks – what constitutes crisis epistemologies? How can we study the unpredictable effects of ongoing crises? What are the ethical imperatives of such research? I argue that queer feminist digital ethnographies can be one method to map crisis epistemologies, for three reasons. First, the interdisciplinarity of queer feminist digital ethnographies attunes them to the messiness of crisis. Second, these ethnographies reimagine the field as a rhizomatic network, enabling a mapping of how crisis resignifies relationalities. Third, queer feminist digital ethnographies deploy practices of speculation and fabulation that trace the ongoing resignations of crises alongside building imaginations of worlds without crises, therefore acting as a tool that constructs transformative futures.