Stored in Memory: Recovering Queer and Transgender Life in Software History

Pow, Whitney Kristin

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-9e7x-6h94

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Stored in Memory: Recovering Queer and Transgender Life in Software History

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Histories of digital media, software, and computing are inseparable from histories of queer and transgender life. Stored in Memory: Recovering Queer and Transgender Life in Software History situates visual media like video glitch art, the computer’s graphical user interface, video games, and computer operating systems as the product of historical queer and transgender programmers, software developers, and video game designers. The emerging field of transgender histories of digital media is uniquely positioned to address issues of citizenship, bureaucracy, and medical and legal history. My project leverages sociological data, archival research, and histories of medical diagnosis to trace how definitions of gender, and transgender, have been used as tools to construct American public policy and from there been embedded into our everyday and seemingly “normal” use of digital software and media technologies. By examining the technologies queer and transgender people like Dreamfeel, Porpentine, Jamie Faye Fenton, and Danielle Bunten Berry have produced, we can see how the legal, medical, and social policies that shaped and impacted their lives continue to exist in the media we interact with today, including the contemporary queer games avant-garde, computer operating systems, and software interfaces. My research brings a queer and transgender media studies approach to software and technology studies, arguing that what we see on screens, even the most mundane images like the computer folder icon or the software glitch, can and should be examined as a visual media object with its own ties to specific material, historical, and political moments in time. I argue that digital media objects like the computer desktop, networked software programs, and video games perpetuate ideologies about the surveillance of gender that circulated around the early development of their platforms in the 1970s and ‘80s, including the introduction of “Gender Identity Disorder” as a diagnosis in 1980 and the rise of computers as medical diagnostic tools in the 1960s and ‘70s. My work also bridges the disciplinary tendency to isolate studies of technology from studies of marginalized identities. I argue that it is through bringing together software studies and queer, feminist, and transgender media theory and analysis that we can picture the full material and historical circumstances that shaped contemporary technologies, including the queer and transgender people who were the first to design, implement, and imagine the potentials for these media.

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