The Distinguished Speaker Series

Can We Play Fun Gay?: Disjuncture and Difference, and the Precarious Mobilities of Millennial Queer Youth Narratives

Mary K. Bryson
University of British Columbia

Bio

Mary K. Bryson is Professor, Faculty of Education and Director, Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry, UBC. Mary Bryson’s program of research is designed so as to advance knowledge concerning the social, cultural and educational significance of new media and in so doing, to make significant contributions to theoretical accounts of gendered and sexual marginality. She has numerous publications on theoretical treatments of gender and technology, queer theory, and equity in education, including Radical Inventions (SUNY Press). In 2000, Bryson was a recipient of the Canadian Pioneer in New Technologies and Media award. Her current SSHRC research, "Queer Women on the Net," is focused on new media, identifications, and discursive emplotments of network formation, community and agency. http://ubc.academia.edu/MaryKBryson

Abstract

This research takes up the complex project of unthinking neoliberal accounts of a progressive modernity. The author positions anxieties about an ‘after’ to queer as an affect modality productive of both an opportunity, and an obligation, to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when queer, and therefore, gay, were organized in a relation of explicit politicization. The talk interrogates celebratory, modernist readings of millennial queer youth narratives where the potentially democratizing significance of the Internet as a cultural technology is deemed constitutive of mobility, play, and possibilities for a redistribution of rights of recognition, communality and knowledge in a significant public sphere. Drawing on an analysis of research interviews that is framed as “anecdotal theory”, the author discuss four properties of networked publics – searchability, replicability, persistence, and invisible audiences - not uniquely as properties of technological interfaces, but rather, as “technologies of otherness.” Within a modality of critically queer attention, the project considers the varied and complex precarious mobilities that constitute millennial queer youth narratives.