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The Queer Times of Internet Infrastructure and Digital Systems

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The Geographies of Digital Sexuality

Abstract

This chapter examines the queer temporalities of the internet. Our starting point is that space cannot be adequately theorised without reference to time. Geographers have theorised the spatial structure of internet infrastructures, but they have paid less attention to the temporal structure of these systems. Contemporary queer theory provides analyses of temporality as a critique of the heteronormative-reproductive times of state-capitalism, which also characterise imaginaries of digital systems. Instead of the internet as a necessarily futuristic invention, we demonstrate the necessity of thinking through the concrete histories and embodied presents of the internet. We first conceptualise internet infrastructures as historical anachronism—evidence of the continuing inequalities of colonialism. Then we examine how queer presence online can lend itself to a troubling of modern temporalities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We understand this failure in the sense that Jack Halberstam (2011) intends it, not in the language of digital media firms to “fail forward” in which failure is a kind of startup hazing strategy, but in the sense of a failure to adhere to the modes of subjectivity that characterise heteronormativity.

  2. 2.

    It is interesting to observe that the term ‘Web 1.0’ is itself a retronym.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Daniel Cockayne

  2. Durham University, Durham, UK

    Lizzie Richardson

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  1. Daniel Cockayne
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  2. Lizzie Richardson
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Correspondence to Daniel Cockayne .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

    Catherine J. Nash

  2. Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia

    Andrew Gorman-Murray

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Cockayne, D., Richardson, L. (2019). The Queer Times of Internet Infrastructure and Digital Systems. In: Nash, C.J., Gorman-Murray, A. (eds) The Geographies of Digital Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6876-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6876-9_2

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-6876-9

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