A map that contains utopia: Locative media and Queer world-making


Darryl Pieber, Western University

Locative media are mobile apps that depend upon users’ location as the central organizing principle of the information collected and presented. These apps present and collect information about the specific location of a user in the specific moment that they are in that location. There is an inherent ephemerality to locative media use: Information can change from moment to moment, and from place to place. The anchoring of digital information in physical space allows for a broader, potentially richer, understanding/imagining of these spaces. But, as Özkul (2021) observes, the location data that is being collected through these apps is increasingly being combined with other data to develop an understanding of—and to shape—the relationship between users and the spaces they inhabit and move through. Rather than providing a predictive capacity, she argues that locative platforms are interested in making the future predictable, by shaping it. Within this context, I examine the potentials and challenges that locative media use might present for a project of what Muñoz (2009) calls Queer world-making. For him, Queer world-making “hinges on the possibility to map a world where one is allowed to cast pictures of utopia and to include such pictures in any map of the social”. Queerness originates from non-normative gender and sexual identity categories, but also extends beyond this to embrace particular non-normative ways of reading the world. What we can see here is a rich interplay of the responses to/against heteronormativity by Queer-identifying people and the imaginings of a Queer world. Queerness is a sort of IRL magical realism whereby Queer imaginings live side-by-side with the day-to-day “prison” (Muñoz, 2009) of heteronormativity. There is a growing body of research into uses of locative media apps by Queer people. However, as Miles (2021) notes, there is a shortage of research into the effects of these applications on spatial relations within and among queer communities and spaces. An essential consideration in any study of this relationship, however, is an understanding of what constitutes the parameters of a Queer space, and what potential there might be for locative media apps to contribute to the larger project of Queer world-making. Queer space is inherently ephemeral and necessarily contains some degree of the idea of utopia that Muñoz describes. While Queer space itself is not imagined, Queer spaces involve the imagining of alternative possibilities. Within this imagining there is almost invariably some degree of fantasy, extravagance, or at least eccentricity, however small it might be. From the spaces of Drag Queen Story Time to the ballroom cultures of New York, Detroit, and elsewhere, these imaginings of other possibilities are essential to the creation of Queer spaces. They help to subvert and reinterpret the spaces of heteronormativity that Queer spaces, however fleetingly, displace. There are intriguing parallels between Queer space and the space of locative media that merit study. In this paper, I examine these parallels. I interrogate the interplay between Queer and heteronormative space and between the imagining and shaping of spaces of locative media. I end by proposing a framework for studying the capacity of locative media to facilitate Queer world-making.

This paper will be presented at the following session: