Reading over all of the posts on this blog, I'm struck by how my thoughts have evolved around defining queerness and deploying it for my project.

Early on, I remember being guided by this idea of queerness as something that is not fully intelligible, not able to be fully grasped. Yet, I argued, some of this quality could be apprehended through formal manipulations, through abstractions, which the digital provides in digtized formats and structures.

In my research, I was drawn to critics who used the digital to create new forms. In literary studies, many of these critics descend from Jerome Mcgann's line of thinking, with a focus on materiality (of the appratus, as in Katherine Bode, or in performance as in Tanya Clement) and how that materiality affords opportunities for social critique by engaging what is not readily visible in data, such as assumptions about how the data was constructed or traces of what is left out (Johanna Drucker, Lauren Mandell, Lauren Klein). I found something really refreshing in the way that they turned to digital methods as to explore the mechanism of analysis and critique, its constraints, and the possiblities contained within these constraints. The most exciting thing, I argued, is how digital methods offers way formalizing textual data for analysis.

To do this work, I needed to find something in the tool that collapsed or reduced the complexity of queerness that was expressed in textual form. So pronouns and minor hints of gender in language, or layered revisions in manuscripts, or the relationship between sensation and cognition as it unfolds in narrative. That collapsing element, the constraint, as I call it, is a mechanism that evacuates subtlety or ambiguity in these language forms.

And then, I would re-imagine or in some cases even re-work the tool to get some of those details back. Or at the very least, to surface what has been lost.

The main intervention, the thing that makes it queer is about re-thinking our relationship to constraint. About working within constraints. Sometimes this works (as in chapters 1 & 3) and sometimes it does not (as in chapter 2).

So where am I, now that I have done this work? Technology and queerness and language as a constraint, but that can be revelatory, that can release meaning, as long as you find a way of working with it.