Review of Queer Data Studies

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies Volume 11 Article 4 2024 Review of Queer Data Studies Jordan Meyerl Historic New England, Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas Part of the Computer Sciences Commons, Data Science Commons, and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons Recommended Citation Meyerl, Jordan (2024) "Review of Queer Data Studies," Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 11, Article 4. Available at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol11/iss1/4 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact . Meyerl: Review of Queer Data Studies Patrick Keilty, ed. Queer Data Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023. Queer Data Studies is a critically important work examining the relationship between data and queer subjects. Published as part of the University of Washington Press’s Feminist Technosciences series, the volume grapples with the evolving role data plays in the lives of queer individuals, the friction caused by the binary categorization of data, and how ethical concerns related to topics such as privacy and consent materialize when analyzing queer data. Utilizing a generous definition of data, including “archival data, stories, intimacies, sounds, research data, medical data, police data, maps, and algorithmic modeling, to name only a few,” editor Patrick Keilty advocates for a nuanced and strategic approach to queer data studies (2). Acknowledging the queer community’s historic lack of bodily autonomy and subsequent lack of data sovereignty, and the increasing urgency surrounding contemporary data politics for queer individuals, Queer Data Studies highlights the often ambivalent, and at times hostile, relationship between queer individuals and data. In analyzing a variety of ways in which queer data can be harnessed by and for queer individuals, as well as its constant potential for reinvention, this volume encourages readers to rethink what constitutes queer data and how queer subjects choose to interact with a world where surveillance and datafication are increasingly regarded as the norm. Containing ten chapters from eleven contributors, most of whom are emerging scholars, the book touches on a wide range of disciplines, including, but not limited to, cinema studies, anthropology, communications, history, gender studies, and media studies (6). The concerted inclusion of emerging scholars serves as a form of queerness itself, providing largely unheard voices a platform in which to present novel research. Each essay provides a distinct, multidisciplinary perspective through the lens of a case study. At times, the volume feels disjointed due to the various disciplines discussed, with limited similarities in methodology surfacing across case studies. However, this diversity also underscores the wide-reaching implications of queer data studies across fields within the applied sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Originally published in 2016 in Black Queer Studies, chapter 1, “Black Data,” includes an added preface to account for Black and queer texts that have emerged since its original publication. In this chapter, Shaka McGlotten acknowledges the entrenched relationship between queer data studies and queer of color critique. Using examples of Black queer practices as forms of “black data,” the essay examines how these practices are “tied to opacity, defacement, and encryption” in reaction to the rise of big data (38). McGlotten concludes with an exploration of how Black queers interact with and challenge the exploitative operations of big data and considers how “black data” constitute forms of resistance against calls for increased surveillance and transparency. Written by Nikita Shepard, chapter 2, “‘To Fight for an End to Intrusions into the Sex Lives of Americans’: Gay and Lesbian Resistance to Sexual Surveillance and Data Collection,” examines historic queer movement’s relationship to the politics of queer opacity and data. The essay traces a path from increased sexual surveillance in the post–World War II era to the homophile movement’s resistance to sexual surveillance to the 1970s and calls for an end to all data collection by government bodies (52–68). Shepard ultimately examines the contemporary acceptance of datafication in exchange for greater societal acceptance and visibility, and ponders if the desire for Published by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale, 2024 1 Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Vol. 11 [2024], Art. 4 queer opacity in the 1970s can be reclaimed and serve as a path for queer liberation from modern sexual surveillance and data collection. In chapter 3, “Machine Learning and the Queer Technics of Opacity,” Gary Kafer places machine learning in conversation with the concepts of opacity and queer technics to understand their relationship to systems of power, specifically big data. Utilizing as a lens the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm, a non-parametric-supervised machine-learning method used for classification and regression, Kafer considers how the conditions of opacity intersect with machine learning, ultimately arguing that “opacity reveals how the technical limits of machine learning are bracketed by the way sociopolitical difference is made legible within computation systems of classification” (99). The essay concludes by contemplating how opacity in machine learning can serve to disrupt and oppose transparency in the economy of big data. Chapter 4, “Objectionable Nipples: Puritanical Data Politics and Sexual Agency in Social Media,” studies the content governance policies of Meta (formerly known as Facebook) in relation to the female nipple to understand a modern puritanical data politics that polices female bodies online and deems them as “sites of obscenity and risk” (122). Written by Susanna Faasonen and Jenny Sundén, the essay utilizes the Free the Nipple movement as a case study, exploring how the movement, while attempting to subvert prudish data politics, simultaneously reproduces them with its focus on desexualizing the female nipple. The chapter concludes with a call for transformative data politics, ideally ones based in “sex-positive, queer brands of feminism that embrace a wide variety of bodies, genders, sexual expressions, orientations, desires, and pleasures” (121). In chapter 5, “HIV Data as Queer Data: Biomedical Sexualities, Treatment-as-Prevention, and the New Sex Hierarchy for People Living with HIV,” Stephen Molldrem theorizes HIV data as queer data. In this model, “data are queer when they come to bear on the sexual subjectivity of a data subject” (133). Through analysi (...truncated)