Like the practices of drag itself, this workshop essay has been produced in and with community, geared towards many audiences and reliant on the expertise and creative intelligence of these communities and audiences. The Internet of Bawdies is the Internet of too much body. My working description of the Internet of Bawdies is: the (forced) digitization and onlining (publication, connectivity, searchability) of previously non-digital/not-onlined (Cowan and Rault, 2018) ephemera of trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) community-based expressive cultures, including but not limited to drag, burlesque, kink shows, porn and erotica across medium, spoken word, slam and other text-based performance forms, and cabaret, whether is explicitly sexual or not, as well as the Internet of sex work and other modes of consentual, adult online embodiment that exceed, transgress, resist or transform heteronormative, monogamous, reproductive bodies. While there are many sexes, genders and orientations in the Internet of Bawdies, here I focus on the ethics of TFQ digitization in this context. “Transmedial drag” is what I have identified as a method of study, knowledge production and citational practice developed on/in/of/with the Internet of Bawdies in mind. Transmedial drag are the processes involved in moving across media/mediums (for example: from live performance, to video documentation, to digital archive to online platform), which creates a sort of pastiche of the ‘original,’ denaturalizing its status as ‘originary’ and teaching us something new about the excesses and limitations of each media form. In particular, transmedial drag is a method for ethical engagements that researchers working with TFQ in the online environment, especially re-mediating materials to an online environment, might find they are already doing. There is a story in the moving across media, and transmedial drag is set of practices to tell those stories.Contents
Editor’s introduction
Introduction: Accountability orientations
The Internet of Bawdies
Transmedial drag
Technologies of fabulous
Rapid prototyping I
Rapid prototyping II
Rapid prototyping III
Rapid prototyping IV
This contribution builds on a QIS2 workshop led by T. L. Cowan around the ethics of online research, in particular as they pertain to LGBTQ users and content. Cowan’s own examples pertain to the construction of an online archive of trans- feminist and queer performances, which present an ethical challenge since these are performances, in their inclusion in the archive, are taken outside of their original context, and may thus be seen by people that the performer did not intend. This in turn could lead to the potential of new audiences connecting the individual with the performance, which could put them at risk in various ways. In the essay, based in part on the workshop, Cowan reflects on this and other issues of online ethics as they pertain to the problem and opportunity that new regimes of visibility create for LGBTQ people.
Introduction: Accountability orientations
Those of us working today in some configuration of trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) digital media studies, archival studies, digital humanities and cultural heritage studies in the Americas and beyond, face a unique set of ethical challenges for which we may not be prepared. Here is the situation as I see it: as scholars, we see the potential for career-defining work to be done using online platforms both to make available digitized archival materials that we collect, and as sites for data collection and analysis about trans- feminist and queer lives. For those of us who have aspired to the professoriate, the pressure to do career-defining work starts to build sometime around second year of undergrad (for some it’s earlier) and it seems that it never goes away. Even if you are one of the rare faculty working under the less precarious conditions of tenure and promotion, every year you are assessed, often rated against your peers on how impressively you have produced. For many, the annual cycle of the perpetual job market — and many of us are on the market for our entire careers, trying to claw our ways out of the more precarious conditions of the sessional, contract, and adjunct professoriate — produces the need for new publications and completed projects to update our CVs and to build a profile of a prolific, productive faculty worthy of a full-time, continuing position. This pressure makes it very difficult to foreground ethical concerns and practices that arise in our scholarship and to slow down accordingly, including concerns about the unwanted exposure (even of “orphaned content”), increased harm, unacknowledged risk and ongoing community accountability, contextual integrity and relational consent that arise from open-access, online publication of research and archives and/or mining online TFQ scenes as research data.
In collaboration with Jasmine Rault as well as with many other folks including Dayna McLeod and Robin Overstreet, Carina (Islandia) Guzmán, Stephen Lawsom and Izayana Gutiérrez, I have been working on the Cabaret Commons — an online archive and anecdotal encyclopaedia for TFQ artists, audiences, activists and researchers. This is a project that was granted development funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 2011, and since then we’ve been grappling with just how do we build an online archive of TFQ live performance scenes and their anticipatory and documentary media, as well as other TFQ cultural and activist scenes, in ways that are ethical, reciprocal and agential, that prioritize accountability to the scenes and people that we study even within the academic measuring systems by which we are employed. In my workshop at Queer Internet Studies 2017 (QIS2), I asked participants to think with me about how we might develop tools and tactics for working within this tension: accountability to our communities and the people and scenes we study, and accountability to the metrics of the university.
In the workshop I started my discussion suggesting that a TFQ Internet studies might be begin by thinking of the Internet of Things (IoT), or, the networked connection of everyday objects. Using this framework, I wanted us to consider the ways that the “IoT will increase the ubiquity of the Internet by integrating every object for interaction via embedded systems, which leads to a highly distributed network of devices communicating with human beings as well as other devices” (Xia, et al., 2012). The more-than-human materiality of the IoT offers us a way to think about distributed information, embedded systems and multi-situated, multi-body-object connections that are the Internet. Of course we might also take seriously a slightly inverted framework through the Internet of Bodies, or the networked connections and embedded systems of bodies through wearable devices and technologies, as well as the bodies that make the Internet possible (Internet users, corporate content managers, electronics factory workers, the cable guy). To think of the Internet as a network of objects/bodies, bodies/objects seems like a fairly easy step to take within a TFQ analytic, as we understand ourselves across and through variations on our relative object- and embod-ification. My leap to the Internet of Bawdies, is a leap that asks us to think not only of bodies in space, in factories, at desks, holding mobile devices, wearing fitbits, pacemakers, and so on, but also to acknowledge the distinctions produced when some bodies are more embodied than others; as we know quite well by now, some bodies are too much body, are bawdies. And so we reach my title: The Internet of Bawdies, the Internet of too much body. My working description of the Internet of Bawdies is: the (forced) digitization and onlining (publication, connectivity, searchability) of previously non-digital/not-onlined (Cowan and Rault, 2018) ephemera of TFQ community-based expressive cultures, including but not limited to drag, burlesque, kink shows, porn and erotica across medium, spoken word, slam and other text-based performance forms, and cabaret, whether is explicitly sexual or not, as well as the Internet of sex work and other modes of consentual, adult online embodiment that exceed, transgress, resist or transform heteronormative, monogamous, reproductive bodies. While there are many sexes, genders and orientations in the Internet of Bawdies, here I focus on the ethics of TFQ digitization in this context.
My framing of the Internet of Bawdies seeks to interrogate one of the central activities of digital humanities scholarship: the institutionally-encouraged and incentivized production of open access online repositories of previously out-of-reach archival materials. Often the project of producing an online repository is motivated by a belief that providing open access to materials that were once held behind institutional walls (pay-walls and bricks-and-mortar walls), or inaccessible to the public or to researchers because they were held in personal collections — in under-the-bed, basement and attic archives and hard drives — will be beneficial to the research community, to the previously hidden materials themselves, and to the perhaps under-studied, under-recognized or misunderstood lives and events that they assemble. However, as scholars invested in the project of decolonization — including Mukurtu and Local Context Jane Anderson and Kim Christen and the Warumungu community member co-founders who collaborated on its development — have shown us, making openly accessible all of the archival materials collected about a particular community, will very likely violate the cultural protocols of that community. Indeed, the entitlement required to imagine that all materials about a particular community should be made accessible to people who are not part of that community is a perspective with long colonial and imperialist genealogies (Smith, 1999; Ferris and Allard, 2016; Bailey, 2015). While much TFQ scholarship in the last generation has asked us to consider TFQ publics as a project of worldmaking, it strikes me and my collaborators that it would be more accurate, especially in the context of possible, impending onlining, to think of TFQ cultural production as small-world-making, and I don’t mean that in an “it’s a small world after all” kind of way. (With thanks to Jessa Lingel’s fabulous Digital countercultures and the struggle for community (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017) for introducing me to Elfreda Chapman’s “small world” theory). Jasmine Rault and I have begun to theorize TFQ small-world-making as practices of networked intimate publics, in order to theorize the creation and sustaining of TFQ tactics of strategic ephemerality, filtering, coding and selective publicity, which, we argue, we must embed, encode, design for, in any onlining project of TFQ materials (Cowan and Rault, 2018).
In her powerhouse essay, “Feminist research practices and digital archives,” Michelle Moravec underscores that archivists and scholars must “assume responsibility for forging their own practices based on the specific digital archival environments in which they work” [1]. I fundamentally agree, and believe that our research practices must account for the alterities of consent, labour (including the labour of being studied) and absence (strategic and otherwise) that Moravec schematizes (Cowan and Rault, 2014). After years of working with the many bodies and bawdies collected in the multiplying boxes, binders, newsletters and anecdotes that currently hold the initial collections to be included in — or considered for — the Cabaret Commons, inspired by the artists and audiences of cabaret scenes that we study, and attempting to bridge accountability orientations to these scenes and the universities where we work, I began to call our method “transmedial drag.”
“Transmedial drag” is what I have identified as a method of study, knowledge production and citational practice developed on/in/of/with the Internet of Bawdies in mind. Transmedial drag are the processes involved in moving across media/mediums (for example: from live performance, to video documentation, to digital archive to online platform), which creates a sort of pastiche of the ‘original,’ denaturalizing its status as ‘originary’ and teaching us something new about the excesses and limitations of each media form. Riffing on Judith Butler’s game-changing theorization of drag as a performance that, “[i]n imitating gender [...] reveals the imitative structure of gender itself — as well as its contingency” [2], I think about drag as a method that — rather than simply extracting a look, a style, an artefact from its original context(s) and re-play it in another media environment — first studies that context, the conditions of power and possibility that produce the look in the first place, and attempts to reproduce it, gesturally and otherwise, while shifting the context and accounting for and thematizing that shift. Like a drag performer (and I have, over the years, been a drag king and a drag queen and some drags in between) we study the constitutive elements of an “original” (think drag favourites Liza Minelli, Celine Dion, Missy Elliot, Jay-Z or Justin Timberlake) as a discursive possibility, and work to reproduce them on a different body/platform, noticing what changes in the process — what gets lost, what gets added. For a drag performer this method requires the study of embodied structures, systems and contexts — a look, a gesture, a walk, a hip, a thrust, a wrist, a glance, a style, an era, a song, and so on — to reproduce, to remediate, from one body/bawdie to another. Drag is an embedded, distributed, productive and reproductive networked information system operating across stages/platforms: inhabiting, remediating, reproducing, derivating, assembling, re-assembling and re-using an expansive array, or, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, “an entire glittering [...] array, reflected in a myriad of discourses, the obstination of powers, and the interplay of knowledge and pleasure” [3]. Or, thinking through Walter Benjamin’s (1968) anxieties about transmedial transfer in the early twentieth century, it’s what we might call the work of queer performance art in the age of digital reproduction. Thus, we practice a process-heavy collaborative protocol and archaeological method that seeks to “simulate,” not just the “aura” of live performance, but is also structured by the discursive conditions of intelligibility/sayability (Foucault, 1991) within a locally-specific, community-based social and political ethics as manifested in minoritized cabaret scenes. Indeed, while Benjamin’s concerns were primarily about what was lost in the process of transmedial transfer, we/I are/am more concerned with what is gained (for example, a big-world audience; metadata; searchability; former-name detonation) moving from live, scene-centered performance with an audience of a few hundred at most, surrounded by at least some trusted comrades, to the infinite and unpredictable audience of the Internet, especially in the context of ongoing racism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia and the apparently insatiable appetite of Internet trolls to target and attack on a whim.
Transmedial drag compels us to reckon with the cultural and ethical limitations of digital accessibility in the face of technical possibility. As Tara Robertson (2016) writes, about the onlining of dyke/queer/lesbian porn and erotica zine, On our backs (OOB),
Consenting to a porn shoot that would be in a queer print magazine is a different thing to consenting to have your porn shoot be available online ... The nature of this content makes it different from digitizing textual content or non-pornographic images. We think about porn differently than other types of content. Most of the OOB run was published before the Internet existed. Consenting to appear in a limited run print publication is very different than consenting to have one’s sexualized image be freely available on the Internet. These two things are completely different. Who in the early 90s could imagine what the Internet would look like in 2016? Robertson’s series of blog posts about Reveal Digital’s OOB project/process, and the eventual closing of the online collection, highlights and informs many of the critical methodological and ethical dimensions of transmedial drag and my framing of the Internet of Bawdies. Robertson (2016) notes, “We live and work in a society that is homophobic and not sex positive. Librarians have an ethical obligation to steward this content with care for both the object and with care for the people involved in producing it”. Indeed, taking into consideration the discursive, epistemic conditions within which a body/bawdie of work is produced is especially important when we are dealing with materials that document the lives and worlds of people and scenes who are currently, or have been, targeted by oppressive regimes of power. This, of course, includes (perhaps especially) the targeting of bodies/bawdies by state regimes, as we see with the recent SESTA/FOSTA laws in the United States, which has lead to the closing of many online platforms which sex workers were able to use to screen clients and to create collective action for safer working conditions.
Using drag as a method for transmedial transfer and remediation, we study the scene, the space, the social relations of power and trust within the scene, the conditions of publicity, the anticipated audience and the affective labour of that audience — a drag performance only works when the audience works with it. We also study the scale of exposure (how large was the audience? and how well did the performer know the scene?), the elements of risk and trust, and the conditions of production in order to think about the ethics of this transmedial shift. Like a drag performance, this is a long and exacting (not extracting) process.
While the “mining” methods gaining traction in much digital scholarship use different kind of drag methods — from “drag & drop” to the scraping dragging extraction of huge quantities of data as fast as possible — TFQ transmedial drag is a precision method that slows us down, think aerodynamic drag, or, to use Elisabeth Freeman’s (2010) term, temporal drag. The importance of framing these archives not only as objects/artefacts, or as residue from an earlier liveness, requires what Foucault argued was “neither a formalization nor an exegesis, but an archaeology”:
that is to say, as its name indicates only too obviously, the description of an archive. By this word, I do not mean the mass of texts gathered together at a given period, those from some past epoch which have survived erasure. I mean the set of rules which at a given period and for a given society define:
[What is drag, but a set of rules?]1 . The limits and forms of the sayable. What is it possible to speak of? What is the constituted domain of discourse? What type of discursivity is assigned to this or that domain (what is allocated as matter for narrative treatment; for descriptive science; for literary formulation)?
[How do these limits and forms of the sayable move across media? What it is possible of in one medium, may become impossible, more difficult or dangerous in another. What is the discursivity of that “original” domain?]2. The limits and forms of conservation. Which utterances are destined to disappear without any trace? Which are destined, on the other hand, to enter into human memory through ritual recitation, pedagogy, amusement, festival, publicity? Which are marked down as reusable, and to what ends? Which utterances are put into circulation, and among what groups? Which are repressed and censored?
[What are the effects of perpetual disappearance? While trans-, queer, even feminist expressive cultures, socialities and politics have required disappearance as a survival tactic, it is rare for our modes to be reused in ways that do not simply appropriate to reproduce dominant sexual and cultural norms. What does thinking about drag as a cross-platform method bring to circulation?]3. The limits and forms of memory as it appears in different discursive formations. Which utterances does everyone recognize as valid, or debatable, or definitely invalid? Which have been abandoned as negligible, and which have been excluded as foreign? What types of relationship are established between the system of present statements and the body of past ones?
[Can drag be taken as valid a method of study rather than boxing it into a set of nightclub acts? Can we think of drag beyond originary and copy and instead about transmedial, cross-platformed, networked ongoingness?]4. The limits and forms of reactivation. Among the discourses of previous epochs or of foreign cultures, which are retained, which are valued, which are imported, which are attempts made to reconstitute? And what is done with them, what transformations are worked upon them (commentary, exegesis, analysis), what system of appreciation are applied to them, what role are they given to play?
[What happens when we reactivate drag, reconstitute it as part of the rhizomaitic genealogies of transmedial, cross-platform and re-mediated cultural methods?]5. The limits and forms of appropriation. What individuals, what groups or classes have access to a particular kind of discourse? How is the relationship institutionalized between the discourse, speakers and its destined audience? How is the relationship of the discourse to its author indicated and defined? How is struggle for control of discourses conducted between classes, nations, linguistic, cultural or ethnic collectivities?
[Who controls discourses of drag? Can drag be understood in its proliferations? What happens when we understand transmedial drag as an activation of archival methods?] [4]Drag as a research practice is rarely about the reproduction simply of a look from one body to another; rather, it is the study of context, history, of audience(s) and situated communication. Thus, our person-by-person/scene-by-scene permissions and use protocol that goes well beyond conventional copyright and attempts to account for the ways that TFQ cultural production is often produced under conditions and rules that are not conducive to reproduction without intensely contextual framing. Furthermore, it becomes essential to study the conditions of collectivity, network and interaction that require a practice of relational provenance, not simply the identification of individuals pictured or names in these archives. As scholars and performers we have learned that we need to rigorously attend to the original TFQ context of our archive and to understanding limitations on what materials artists and show organizers want to put online and how open access they want it to be. For us this means re-inventing our idea, and starting a publication that is not an archive, but which is a curated set of materials developed in collaboration with creators of the materials we seek to archive, an archive that functions based on the rules under which they were created. When we think of drag, for example, it is at once a form of social memory, of discursive possibility and the likely disappearance (literally the wiping away of make-up, the removal of facial hair, eyelashes, wigs) of the contextually-specific and relational fabulousness of these performances. This is not to boil down all TFQ performance to drag; by now, I hope we all know this generalization is a tragic misreading (Namaste 2000; 1996). Rather, it is to think of drag as a well-established method of study, and a relational epistemological structure that, in the case of many performers working in drag, is as much an interrogation of gendered, racialized and classed relations of power as much as it is a subversion of gender (Brittain, et al., 2010; Rupp, et al., 2010; Halberstam 1998; Volcano and Halberstam 1999). Additionally, and importantly, it means accounting for not only what happened on stage and in the room, but also for the technologies of fabulous that make possible the abundant realities of these scenes.
It’s always best to either begin or conclude with a good story. Here is one re-told (again) with permission, from Darrin Hagen (aka Gloria Hole). I first heard this story told by Gloria Hole, the Edmonton Queen and her drag mother, the late great Halifax high priestess of drag, Lulu LaRude, at the Loud & Queer cabaret in 2002 in Edmonton.
The story goes like this: When Gloria was just a baby queen (so in the 1980s), she and Lulu found themselves offered a gig out in Gibbons — a semi-rural town an hour or so north of Edmonton. They were booked for a show at a place called “Sensations” or “Celebrities” or “Hot Spot” or something very gay-sounding. For weeks before an excited Gloria had told all of her friends that she’d booked a FEATURE gig and just couldn’t stop talking about it. It turns out the place was a country and western bar and Gloria and Lulu barely escaped with their lives. They got back in their truck (in Alberta even drag queens drive trucks) and high-tailed it back to (the relative safety of) Edmonton. Poor young Gloria says to the wise Lulu, “Oh Lulu what are we going to tell everyone? I’m so ashamed.” Wise Lulu turns to Gloria and says “Have I taught you nothing? We’re going to tell them it was FABULOUS.”
What we’re calling technologies of fabulous are the fables — the anecdotes and gossip, the intimacies formed and broken in their relating, the performative orientation to utopia in the face of obvious disaster, the impossible networks of survivance that may never show themselves in the (staged) ‘show.’ They are, in many cases, that which is said only within the small-world possibilities created in cabaret and other TFQ spaces. They are the techniques of knowledge production that go well beyond what can be captured by a mere reproduction.
Like the deep cultural understandings, consultation, collaboration and re-engineering that led to the development of Mukurtu and Local Contexts, we imagine culturally-sensitive and specific software that prioritizes highly nuanced cultural logics, protocols and specialized knowledges in the development of computational logics, protocols and specialized tools, towards what Kara Keeling (2014) calls a “Queer OS”. Keeling‘s Queer OS is an operating system in which the “historical, sociocultural, conceptual phenomena that currently shape our realities in deep and profound ways, such as race, gender, class, citizenship, and ability (to name those among the most active in the United States today), [are understood as] mutually constitutive with sexuality and with media and information technologies, thereby making it impossible to think any of them in isolation” [5]. Transmedial drag follows in many ways the “Queer OS: A user’s manual” (Barnett, et al., 2016), and works with the assemblages of our scenes, attending to the ways that TFQ cultural scenes are also our political and sexual scenes. Thus ”privacy“ concerns with these materials is not only about ”personal information“ but also about the long and often elaborate and fabulous histories of our genders, sexes, sexualities, ethnicities, and — very importantly — our styles. For these reasons, we can’t know in advance what kinds of protocols the people and relationships who populate our archives will want to enact for their materials, so the process of transmedial drag is deeply agential, relational and detailed and slow.
This is part of a larger epistemological-transformational project to shape trans- feminist and queer practices in anti-colonial formations, and the dominant digital cultural practices that assumes that all networks are networked publics leading us to theorize what we’re calling networked privates and intimate publics. The hope that we have for the Cabaret Commons, is that by using the methods we’re practicing, speculating, rehearsing as transmedial drag and accounting for technologies of fabulous, we might bring the activated characteristics of cabaret performance, as well as other grassroots and politically-engaged live performance — along with their translocal trans feminist and queer scenes, ethics, politics, social and sexual lives — to bear on digital archiving infrastructures. The Cabaret Commons remains at the design stage as we come to some conclusions about putting our methods in action. A major component of this work has been theorizing, processing, pausing and conversing. So I’ll end here with some of the rapid prototyping materials I initiated for my QIS2 workshop, as a set of tools we can use or re-iterate, practicing transmedial drag.
Is there anything you have ever performed, published, spoken, or done “in public” that you would rather not have on the Internet?
What is it?! (You can keep it a secret if you want.)
How do you keep it off the Internet?
What would you do if it got onto the Internet?
What kinds of TFQ events do you attend/scenes do you participate in?
What are the codes/community protocols of these events or scenes?
Do these codes/protocols extend to the way these events or scenes conduct themselves online?
To whom are you (or your research) accountable?
What are the competing logics, priorities or accountabilities at play in your scholarly practice?
To your knowledge, have one of your tweets or SM posts ever been used for a scholarly or journalistic article? What does this shifted exposure feel like?
Are there TFQ community protocols that we can implement for data, ethnography, ethics for queer Internet studies?
Group 1: How do you keep it off the Internet? Rapid Prototyping Group on TFQ non-online archives — protocols for digitization and online circulation of our viscera & ephemera.
Group 2: What would you do if something you did in a queer “public” got onto the open access Internet and you didn’t want it there? TFQ protocols for permission/consent/agency/filter and our viscera & ephemera.
Group 3: What are some possible harms that can come from the mining, scraping, (re)circulation of TFQ born-digital materials? What are some benefits? Are there TFQ community protocols that we can implement for Data, Ethnography, Ethics re: QIS. What TFQ Harm Reduction Models do we already have for, or might we bring to, the Internet of Bawdies?
About the author
T. L. Cowan is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Digital Media Cultures) in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at the University of Toronto. Cowan holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of minoritized digital media and performance practices. Dr. Cowan’s scholarly practice moves between page, stage, and screen; recent notable commissions for her creative-critical work include the PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Queens Museum in New York City, and Nuit Blanche in Toronto.
E-mail: tl [dot] cowan [at] utoronto [dot] ca
Acknowledgements
This workshop essay is a process-based piece that is the result of many on-going conversations with collaborators and interlocutors including Jasmine Rault — with whom many of these ideas have been developed — as well as Michelle Marzullo, Dayna McLeod, Alexandra Tigchelaar, Alexis O’Hara, Stephen Lawson, Aaron Pollard, Miriam Ginestier, Moynan King, Jack Gieseking, Jordan Arsenault, Carina Islandia Guzmán, Seth Hancock, Jessica Lapp, Izayana Gutiérrez and the ever-proliferating and magnificent FemTechNet and Center for Solutions to Online Violence (CSOV) collectives especially Laura Wexler, Moya Bailey, Jacqueline Wernimont, Veronica Paredes, Liz Losh, Lisa Nakamura, Sharon Irish, George Hoagland, Alexandrina Agloro, Alexandra Juhasz, Anne Balsamo, Paula Gardner and Anne Cong-Huyen. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Gloria Hole and Lulu LaRude for offering a story I needed and have held close since, and to Darrin Hagen for the permission to retell. Thank you to Jack Gieseking and Jessa Lingel for inviting me to give the workshop at QIS2; this was an amazing opportunity to work through these ideas. A post-workshop version of this paper was delivered at the Internet Cultures Symposium at Yale University in December 2017. Thanks very much to organizers Marijeta Bozovic and Marta Figlerowicz. I would also like to acknowledge important seed funding from the Digital Humanities Lab and the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies (FLAGS) both at Yale University. This work was developed while I was a Visiting Professor at Yale, in the department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies (2015–2016). Earlier versions of this these ideas were presented at McGill University and the University of Toronto and a very early version of this paper was co-written and co-presented with Jasmine Rault at Trinity College, hosted by the fabulous Jack Gieseking. Thanks, Jack.
Notes
1. Moravec, 2017, p. 189.
2. Butler, 1990, p. 138.
3. Foucault, 1978, p. 72.
4. Foucault, 1991, pp. 59–60.
5. Keeling, 2014, p. 152.
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Editorial history
Received 1 June 2018; accepted 5 June 2018.
Copyright © 2018, T. L. Cowan. All Rights Reserved.
The Internet of Bawdies: Transmedial drag and the onlining of trans-feminist and queer performance archives, a workshop essay
by T. L. Cowan.
First Monday, Volume 23, Number 7 - 2 July 2018
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/9256/7459
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i7.9256
