Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

Digital media, digital technologies and digital infrastructures shape contemporary culture in many and far-reaching ways. This seminar examines their impact on 'queer' culture in particular – understood here as both LGBT (i.e. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) cultures as well as, more broadly, cultures that contest or subvert dominant norms around gender and sexuality. Students will explore recent efforts to theorise the relationship between transformations in information, digital and other technologies, and transformations in the fields of gender and sexuality. They will examine recent empirical as well as theoretically-informed work on the ways that digital media and technologies are shaping queer life and culture. And they will address the extent to which the study of digital cultures can be productively approached from a queer perspective.

Issues that will be explored include the following:
• The role of digital media in transgender self-representation
• How social media hashtags (like #lesbian) can facilitate both the production of community and the (de-)stabilisation of identity categories
• How LGBT and queer intimacies are being transformed through dating and ‘hook-up’ apps (such as Tinder and Grindr)
• Digital labour and online pornography
• The possibilities and limits of digital queer activism
• Histories of the transgender internet

Learning objectives
• Engage critically with queer and trans approaches to digital culture and to digital and information technologies
• Reflect on the role played by digital cultures, technologies and infrastructures in subjectivation, in the production and/or (de-)stabilisation of gender, sexual and other identities, and in shaping queer life (broadly conceived)
• Gain an introduction to recent empirical and theoretically-informed research in this field

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