Jacob Gaboury Published in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities
Jacob Gaboury, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley's New Media department, recently published "Critical Unmaking, or Queer Computation as a Radical Practice" in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. This collection of papers is intended to demonstrate the intersection of media studies and the digital humanities and offer readers a critical guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the crossover between media, culture, and practice.
In his paper, Jacob touches base on topics such as protocols, failure, queer theory, and more.
He writes:
Simply put , queer theory has, for decades, engaged in the difficult and at times contradictory task of marking a political identity bound by a refusal to be made useful or productive. Deploying queer theory in this way asks us to think through failure as not only a disruptive technical practice but also a radical lived experience that might allow for an embodied critique of technological futurism. To compute queerly, then, is to acknowledge, embrace, and enact a practice of radical technological failure. It is to engage in critical unmaking: to make central those externalities — exploits, bugs, breakdown, abuse, and misuse — of our digital culture that, while pervasive, we nonetheless disavow. To compute in this way is to work against the neoliberal drive toward the capture and exploitation of self by technology.
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To compute queerness, we must begin by acknowledging what queerness offers to a critique of computation. In doing so, we are left with few clear answers and are instead asked to imagine new ways to work against the normaliziing influence of our technical culture while maintaining the general functionality of the systems we inhabit.
You can purchase the book here on the official Routledge website. And you can also read Jacob's contribution here!