Digital Memories
Queer memory is an urn of ashes that breaks at the moment of birth. This collective memory is never formless, but embodied by queer memorialization practices that incorporate art, media, and performance. Parties no one will raid: Homonormative LGBTQ social organizing in the gig economy draws on an analysis of Montreal-based parties for “queer womxn” held by Her, a social networking app and international events company, to reveal the gigification of LGBTQ social organizing. How Making Videogames Turned Me Into a Depressed Gay Communist is a choose-your-own-adventure AR solo performance about growing up as an undiagnosed autistic, proto-transgender nerd with immigrant parents, with all the loneliness such an experience entails. Fragments of a Shattered Urn: Queering the Map, Collective Memory, and the Globalization of the Stonewall Myth contrasts two global sites of memory — Pride and Queering the Map, a community-generated mapping project created by Montreal-based designer Lucas LaRochelle — to explore the possibilities engendered by, and the limitations inherent to, community-generated digital media in crumbling Stonewall’s mythology and illuminating, under its blinding shadow, the path ahead.