Enchanting Technology: Obfuscation, Play, and Other Queer Strategies for Countering Surveillance Capitalism

FAIN: FEL-289016-23

Harris Kornstein
Arizona Board of Regents (Tucson, AZ 85721-0073)

Research and writing leading to a book about how queer and trans people expand traditional approaches to privacy and counter surveillance by creatively exploiting the features of mainstream technology.

This book project introduces a concept I entitle “digital enchantment”: a framework that explores how diverse queer and trans users subvert and expand traditional approaches of privacy by creatively exploiting the features of mainstream technologies and creating their own platforms. Prevailing counter-surveillance strategies uncritically celebrate visibility and representation while positioning privacy as an individual right rooted in concealing information. Drawing on San Francisco case studies including drag queens, trans taxi drivers, cruising gay men, and femme witches, I look to LGBTQ+ histories that complicate these assumptions. Digital enchantment describes the hyper-visible glamour, mischievousness, and mystical intuition that many queer/trans subjects employ to playfully dazzle both the human senses and computational sensors.