Queer(ed) thought experiments for critiquing the cissexism of data under techno-capitalism

Abstract

A rapid proliferation of near-universally accessible technologies has spurred an ubiquity of crisis discourses surrounding data and the digital. Everyone and their mother now have an opinion on algorithms and their importance. Simultaneously, the mainstreaming of anti-gender and paternalistic politicking the world over, (re-)essentializing the cissexist order, is primarily platformed and propagated in digital environments. At present, there is limited critical engagement with the very human vulnerabilities that are reproduced by the cissexism underpinning socio-technical infrastructures. This paper engages thought experiments as a queer methodology for developing accessible interrogations of our relationship(s) with data and the digital under techno-capitalism. We contend that these thought experiments queer logics underpinning dominant understandings of data and the digital in the academy, which so often fall into a dichotomy between the overly technical and the overly theoretical. By drawing on the polysemous potential that queerness holds, we argue that queer(ed) thought experiments challenge such dichotomies, enabling grappling with logic in a way that both requires sitting with discomfort and engaging in a critically reflexive reckoning with our self-positioning. Ultimately, we propose a method for queering our understanding of data, fundamentally transforming the ways we engage with it and those who seek to procure it.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Lexi Webster: orcid.org/0000-0001-5721-8236

ORCID for Kristen Schuster: orcid.org/0000-0003-3201-7264

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