Paper short abstract:

In my work, “Queer STS” means challenging mechanistic, behaviorist, and positivist modes of description that dominate studies of human-computer interaction. It means taking seriously uncomfortable topics, bearing with their temporalities, and not moving to recuperate them or put them to good use.

Paper long abstract:

What is Queer STS? Fuck if I know. In my own work, this means challenging the reductively mechanistic, behaviorist, and positivist modes of description that have long dominated studies of human-computer interaction and interface design. It means taking seriously uncomfortable topics, bearing with their temporalities, not moving too quickly to recuperate them or put them to good use. It means examining exorbitant objects that can be linked to the excessive, romantic, perverse, and unreasonable rather than transforming them or reconceiving them as acceptable or normal. This form of analysis moves past the exposure of social constructs and strictly representational analysis toward an ecology, a zone between cultural systems, infrastructures, and human subjects. As an outsider to STS, my work sprawls across disciplines. I have had to invent for myself, in the spontaneity of great need, the tools for a formalist apprehension of a more ubiquitous and less prestigious kind of text (pornography and its industry). This sometimes means the existing naming conventions don't fit my work. So I name joyously and with abandon, or just make shit up, rather than getting stuck in others' discourses. I search out my audience and play to it, ensuring that no matter where it is, no matter now localized or scattered, my audience has a chance to find me. This means going to different kinds of conferences in different fields, which is partly how I find myself at 4S. I guess for me, then, Queer STS means intellectual promiscuity instead of intellectual monogamy.