Editors’ Note

Roopika Risam and Jennifer Guiliano

Greetings from Reviews in Digital Humanities! We interrupt our team’s summer vacation to bring you an exciting and important special issue: Queer and Trans Digital Humanities, edited by Constance Crompton and Laura Horak.

This phenomenal issue sheds light on projects that are fighting back against the ongoing assault on queer and trans rights around the world. We’re grateful to our guest editors for their work on this issue, as well as their guest editors’ note, which provides valuable framing for the role of digital humanities in the critical movement for equality.

We hope you enjoy the issue.

Our team is on vacation until August 31, 2024. We will respond to request for review in early September.

Guest Editors’ Note

Constance Crompton and Laura Horak 

We are in the midst of a deep backlash against queer and trans rights in North America and around the world. The stakes of doing queer and trans work in the digital humanities is all the higher as digital tools are increasingly used to foreclose queer and trans lives. Why “queer and trans” and not just “queer”? Both terms coalesced as political and scholarly rallying points in North America in the early 1990s, though queer was institutionalized in academia in ways that trans was not, at least not for several more decades. Trans media scholar Cáel Keegan points out that queer has a universalizing tendency — often reading any form of gender non-normativity as a symptom of queerness.1 The result is that trans studies becomes legible only to the extent that it is “indistinguishable from queer” or “as a ‘bad object’ and therefore a source of trouble.”2 Rather than fold trans into queer studies, we consider them here side-by-side (or perhaps as an intersecting Venn diagram) so that each can, in Keegan’s words, “problematiz[e] and yet enlive[n] the other’s claims.”3

We are well into, and perhaps, well through and past the digital turn in the humanities. As digital tools and online resources have become ubiquitous in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, the contributions of the digital humanities remain the strengths and habits of mind cultivated in the humanities more generally. The humanities enrich cultural objects through interpretation and analysis4 and offer nuanced understandings of how the past informs our current moment and can shape future action. This type of cultural engagement is, of course, not limited to the academic sphere, as the projects reviewed here demonstrate. The projects in this issue do what queer media scholar Cait McKinney has called “information activism,” work born of an often “frustrated desire for information” that galvanizes activists to “generat[e] that information themselves,” underpinned by the “often unspectacular labor that sustains social movements.”5 As McKinney reminds us, thinking digitally, even before the rise of the internet, has been central to queer organizing in North America.

Since it was first opened to the public, the internet has been an essential space and tool around which queer and trans communities have formed. One 1994 Wired article proclaimed, for example, “We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got Email.”6 More recently, queer and trans studies scholar Avery Dame-Griff has traced trans uses of the early internet from BBS’s and Usenet groups to walled gardens (e.g., AOL) and homepages.7 Platforms from LiveJournal to Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have enabled an explosion of multimedia production by and for queer and trans people, often youth. Queer and trans people have also flocked to coding and gaming and other digital pursuits. Human-computer interaction scholar Oliver Haimson, et al., define “trans technologies” as technologies that “allow[s] trans users the changeability, network separation, and identity realness, along with the queer aspects of multiplicity, fluidity, and ambiguity, needed for gender transition.”8

At the same time, the fundamental structures of the digital and the uses to which they get put routinely do violence to queer and trans people, particularly queer and trans people of color. As Black studies scholar Jessica Marie Johnson points out, “Histories of slavery offer digital humanities a cautionary tale, a lesson in the kind of death dealing that happens when enumerating, commodifying, and calculating bodies becomes naturalized.”9 Care must be taken not to continue the violence of turning “flesh into integers,” as Johnson puts it.10 Reducing the complexity and fluidity of human identity into limited vocabularies — let alone binary options like male/female — can be symbolically violent, but also cause violence in the form of airport security scans, facial recognition, and algorithmic calculations of recidivism rates, hospital triage decisions, and credit scores.11 Indigenous digital humanities likewise warn us against making all information accessible to all.12 Queer and trans people, too (including Indigenous queer and trans people) struggle to maintain control over who can see and access what data about them.13

The work of many queer and trans digital humanities projects are at the hinge point between the imagined worlds of theoretical models and the particularity of individual lived experience. The work of interactive exhibits and online games, including Black Trans Archive, Mainichi, and Dys4ria, offer interactive ways of knowing that print-based work cannot. Other important projects, such as the Archive of Lesbian Oral Testimony, Wilde ‘82, AIDS Activist History, and the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, use the web and social media to keep the experience of past activists accessible to a broad audience.

Queer and trans digital humanities also creates novel intersections between digital and physical spaces. For example, Queering the Map invites users to record stories of queer encounter and pin them on a shared map. Refuge Restrooms collects user-generated information about public restrooms to enable transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming people to find safe restrooms to use. And micha cárdenas’s Sin Sol / No Sun, an augmented reality game, invites people to experience the world around them overlaid with a near-future climate catastrophe that emphasizes the impacts on immigrants, trans people and disabled people.

Many of these historically inflected projects rely on community archives that push back against the symbolic annihilation created by categorization in the service of computation. Information activists of the future will need access to digital content created by queer and trans people. We are, however, reaching a crisis point in the preservation and transmission of digital content.  We are in danger of losing contemporary records of queer and trans self-determination and representation, with digital resources lost forever when a server goes down; when content management platforms reach their end of life; when formats like Flash or Ajax are no longer supported; or when social media companies determine that platforms that have been the wellspring of resistance online in our current moment are no longer profitable. As the principal investigator on the Transgender Media Portal project and co-principal investigator on the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project, we are both committed to the development of durable online systems to preserve the art, the games, the language, and the voices of the past and present. When digital resources are turning out to be more fragile than the 16mm film reels, mimeographed fliers, and photocopied zines of years past, the need for information activism is more pressing than ever before.

In this issue:

• Avery Dame-Griff’s Queer Digital History Project (QDHP) preserves and serves records of queer community organizing online in the age before the rise of corporate social media. Inspired by the Digital Transgender Archive, the QDHP records language and taxonomies past, offering readers the chance to develop a nuanced understanding of past queer organizing online. The site features digitized and born-digital primary source material from 1980 to 2010, contextualized with contemporary exhibits and teaching guides. The QDHP is reviewed by Kat Brewster. 
  

• Started in the Netherlands in 1997, Homosaurus is an international standardized linked data vocabulary for LGBTQ terms. Linked data underpins many searchers’ online experience (if you have ever noticed the info boxes of related people, facts, and content that appears on the right hand side of a Google search result, you have interacted with linked data), and yet few linked data vocabularies have been designed with queer and trans experience in mind, with much of the non-normative content discarded as noise. The Homosaurus vocabulary is a practical intervention in the world of information science. Galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and digital resources can push back against the symbolic annihilation created by limited, binaristic, and heteronormative classification and information retrieval systems. The project is led by the Homosaurus Editorial Board and reviewed by Melissa Adler. 

• Un/tied invites users into trans nonbinary experiences slantwise, through stories by multimedia artist Evie Johnny Ruddy about finding the right shoes, which are accessed by navigating a fake online shoe store. While stories about trans people in the media often focus on transition or stories of dramatic violence, in this National Film Board of Canada interactive web documentary, Ruddy invites users into nonnarrative everyday encounters with oppression, gender dysphoria, and gender euphoria by selecting different kinds of shoes. The site also offers tongue-in-cheek commentary through available sizes and a “genderqueer” tax added to the shopping back to account for “additional costs — such as tailoring or custom orders — borne by people whose bodies violate sizing norms.” The digital platform of the shoe store creates a more interactive, personal experience than either a linear narrative or a table of data would. Users are invited to reflect on the similarities and differences between their own shopping experiences and Ruddy’s and how they open up into broader questions of identity and belonging. Un/tied is reviewed by Cynthia Wang. 

• Bipolar Journey uses a 2D single-player video game to invite users to try their hand at some of the structural challenges faced by trans Cree artist Theo Cuthand when he was institutionalized for bipolar disorder. Like his short films, the video game blends wry dark humor with vulnerable self-reflection and a purposefully amateurish DIY aesthetic. These aesthetic strategies make otherwise difficult content more accessible to a broad range of audiences. Like Un/tied, the game structure of Bipolar Journey invites new ways of thinking and understanding via play, a potentially powerful aspect of digital tools that digital humanities can take even more advantage of. Bipolar Journey is reviewed by KJ Cerankowski. 

We offer the projects reviewed in this special issue and linked in this introduction as a snapshot of contemporary of queer and trans digital humanities, largely centered in North America. There are voices missing here, of course, but we hope that it serves as an engaging record of what has and can be distinguishable, legible, thinkable, and livable both on- and offline.