Black Data: Against the Hegemony of the Transparent (key-note lecture by Shaka McGlotten)
This performance lecture tracks a few of the ways queer of color critique might interface with network culture studies. Specifically, it looks to the ways the datafication of everyday life impacts queers of color. In part, these informatics processes can be tied to broader histories of empire—of colonization, expropriation, extraction, and the accompanying production of racialized difference. In the present moment, mass surveillance and big data more broadly transform the world into code. How to escape such informatic capture? Using cultural analysis and ethnographic research, I point to a few of the ways queers of color navigate between a performative hypervisibility and invisibility. The demand to be seen, to be visible, is in fact a dominant ideology of the West, and the hegemony of the transparent is a powerful contemporary technique of biopolitical control. Resisting or evading the hegemony of the transparent may, in turn, lead to new alter-geographies of sexuality. Where might new identities, pleasures, and politics emerge if not through screens, databases, and clouds?
This performance lecture tracks a few of the ways queer of color critique might interface with network culture studies. Specifically, it looks to the ways the datafication of everyday life impacts queers of color. In part, these informatics processes can be tied to broader histories of empire—of colonization, expropriation, extraction, and the accompanying production of racialized difference. In the present moment, mass surveillance and big data more broadly transform the world into code. How to escape such informatic capture? Using cultural analysis and ethnographic research, I point to a few of the ways queers of color navigate between a performative hypervisibility and invisibility. The demand to be seen, to be visible, is in fact a dominant ideology of the West, and the hegemony of the transparent is a powerful contemporary technique of biopolitical control. Resisting or evading the hegemony of the transparent may, in turn, lead to new alter-geographies of sexuality. Where might new identities, pleasures, and politics emerge if not through screens, databases, and clouds?
