In Issa Rae’s newly produced HBO show, Rap Sh!t, the series follows Shawna Clark (Aida Osman) and her estranged friend Mia Knight (KaMillion) who team up to form a rap group in hopes of making it big. In addition to pursuing her dreams as an aspiring rapper, Mia is a single mom who is shown working multiple jobs to maintain her lifestyle and care for her daughter, Melissa. In the show’s pilot, for example, Mia is shown working as a makeup artist by day and an OnlyFans creator by night. She is also revealed (through contextual knowledge) to be both an Instagram influencer and a former exotic dancer. She’s depicted as the inspiration behind the group’s branding and image, despite lacking much lyrical ability. This becomes evident during one scene in the pilot where Shawna tells Mia she won’t resort to exposing her body online to gain more visibility from industry gatekeepers, and she tells Mia that her “art is not for the male gaze.” Mia asks in response, “What’s so wrong with having people look at you?” Further adding, “Is that what you think is going on? We’re in the middle of a Bad Bitch Renaissance… Loosen up, have some fun, just see where it goes.”

Hypermasculinity expressed by Black male artists in Hip-Hop is largely tied to both the need for Black men to express their frustrations and exert power within a culture they helped create. Conversely, this hypermasculinity has also been commodified as a means to sell Blackness in a way that appeals to the demands of a largely middle-class White audience. I believe this particular vignette from the show is important because though fictional, it makes the larger claim that there’s a new revolution occurring in Hip-Hop culture, one in which women artists have readily embraced their erotic capital as a liberatory part of their artist identity. In the last 5-10 years, this brand of rap music has dominated the Billboard charts and propelled artists like Nicki Minaj, Mulatto, City Girls, Saweetie, Kash Doll, Megan thee Stallion, and Cardi B to great prominence and massive financial success.

Though Hip-Hop music created by Black men has generally perpetuated misogynoir (racist and misogynistic images of Black women), Black women’s intervention into Hip Hop is not new. Black women artists like Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt N Pepa, and Yo-Yo helped establish feminist tradition within Hip-Hop that should be acknowledged as a predecessor to the more sexually charged work of Lil Kim, Missy Elliott, Trina and Foxy Brown. Though rap music is amid what Rae’s show calls a “bad bitch renaissance,” Hip-Hop culture has also never had a period with which sexualized bodies of Black women weren’t seen as a tool for the promotion in song lyrics or music videos (Miller-Young, 2014; Sharpley-Whiting, 2007). This can particularly be seen in rap’s connection to strip club culture, where dancers routinely seek monetary and cultural capital within their social networks, (while rap music also entertains the audience). From the 1993 Sir Mix-A-Lot song “Baby Got Back” to the 1998 Ice Cube-directed movie The Players Club and 2001’s Snoop Dogg’s AVN Award-winning pornographic film Doggystyle, images and logics of strip club culture have been a mainstay within the rap music industry. These logics rely on the eroticism of Black women, particularly with most popular music videos and rap lyrics focused on ‘the booty’ as the most valuable representation of Black femininity, to harvest attention and sell products.

Though highly visible in the world of Hip-Hop, Black women are historically more exploited and cannot assert agency within the economies that exploit them (Brooks, 2010). To that end, sociologist Mireille Miller-Young (2014) proposed the “Ho Theory” as an analysis for labor tactics and identity formations for Black illicit erotic performances. Ho Theory purports that there’s a link between mass media, hip-hop culture, and pornography that can be traced to a long history of Black women’s bodies being associated with criminality and degradation. Miller-Young writes that Black women have been seen as “a figure of moral corruption, social deviance, and economic drain, especially in the field of Hip-Hop influenced sexual media” (p. 146). In using women’s bodies as a form of promotion tool (via music videos, live concerts and album covers), feminist media scholar Moya Bailey argues Hip-Hop has historically conditioned its audience that Black women are only good for sexual encounters. In the realm of social media entertainment, I would argue that this erotic capital is only being made more immersive, dynamic, and ubiquitous.

However, it could also be argued that the cultural capital of today’s female rappers seems to be at a tipping point, willfully and joyfully using erotic capital for sustainable celebrity. The level of agency Black women are afforded through performance of sexual dances (e.g., twerking on TikTok or YouTube), queer activism, public messages of body positivity, and digital forms of sex work (e.g., OnlyFans) are no longer as marginal as earlier Hip-Hop scholars led the general public to believe (Brown, 2019; Halladay, 2020; Khong, 2020). In fact, in the digital era of music, one could argue that female rap artists use sexual appeal as a badge of emotional freedom rather than a marker of oppression. This trend has presented an opportunity for these women to self-commodify, curate, and monetize this process in ways that has led some scholars to believe digital sex work serves as a form of empowerment (Miller-Young, 2010).

For example, upstart rapper Rubi Rose publicly claimed she made over $100,000 in 48 hours on OnlyFans. Popular from appearing in music videos and being a social media personality with over 1 million Instagram followers, Rose charged $49.49 for a monthly subscription to her content and has claimed to have made $1M on the platform since 2020. She  has signed a record deal with music mogul L.A. Reid’s Hitco Entertainment. Therefore, it is possible to comprehend the OnlyFans content creation of female rappers like Rose as “hope labor” (Stuart, 2020), volunteer work that is the assumed precursor to more mainstream relational labor, serving as a training ground for building an ongoing and eventually (hopefully) lucrative audience (Duguay, 2019).

Though many of today’s emergent women rappers have restructured the terms of which their sexual performances are distributed, circulated, and paid for, they also still reaffirm the need for women artists to rely on stereotypical tropes associated with the “video hoe” or the “vixen” in order to gain visibility. Essentially, while many argue they serve to empower their personal pathways to digital clout and financial success, they also reproduce the status quo of hypersexualized representations of Black female bodies in mass media. Some might even describe this as a familiar repackaging of Black feminism for heterosexual male audiences.

That said, many questions remain about the sustainability of the current reign of female rap in the contemporary industry. As I write this piece, I’m still wrestling with what to make of the ways that Hip-Hop culture has continually thrived on the back of Black women’s bodies and erotic capital. Does it matter if women rappers cleanse their material of stripper culture while the male rappers continue to profit from it? On one hand, I believe these women rap artists are finally getting the reparations they’ve been owed from the music industry. On the other, I truly wonder if it makes a difference if female rappers are going platinum or owning their sexual content if their messages are becoming more dynamic in reproducing the negative stereotypes proclaimed to be ruining Hip-Hop culture in the first place. In either case Black women are, and always have been, integral and resistant voices in Hip-Hop and in popular music generally.

1. Issa Rae’s Rap Sh!t (HBO Max)
2. Rubi Rose (via Essence Magazine)
3. “In His Feelings” video by Rubi Rose

Bailey, M. (2013). New terms of resistance: A response to Zenzele Isoke. Souls, 15(4), 341-343.

Brooks, S. (2010). Hypersexualization and the dark body: Race and inequality among black and Latina women in the exotic dance industry. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 7(2), 70-80.

Brown, M. (2019). The Jezebel Speaks: Black Women’s Erotic Labor in the Digital Age (Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland). Digital Repository at University of Maryland: College Park, MD.

Duguay, S. (2019). “Running the numbers”: Modes of microcelebrity labor in queer women’s self-representation on Instagram and Vine. Social media + society, 5(4), 2056305119894002.

Halliday, A. S. (2020). Twerk sumn!: theorizing Black girl epistemology in the body. Cultural Studies, 34(6), 874-891.

Hill-Collins, P. (2004). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. New York City: Routledge.

Miller-Young, M. (2010). Putting hypersexuality to work: Black women and illicit eroticism in pornography. Sexualities, 13(2), 219-235.

Miller-Young, M. (2014). A taste for brown sugar. In A Taste for Brown Sugar. Duke University Press.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. D. (2007). Pimps up, ho’s down: Hip-Hop’s hold on young black women. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Stuart, F. (2020). Ballad of the bullet: Gangs, drill music, and the power of online infamy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

As a media studies scholar, I have been closely examining issues of trans visibility and trans representation for over a decade. I vividly recall TIME magazine’s declaration of a “transgender tipping point” in 2014, which supposedly ushered in a civil breakthrough, and a new sense of belonging and inclusion for trans folks into the larger American fabric. However, this increased visibility, as I explored at length in my first book project Terrorizing Gender (2019), has also been accompanied by a conservative backlash, which has subjected trans communities, especially those of color, to increased violence, discrimination, and harm.

Fast forward to 2022 and trans people in the United States have been experiencing unprecedented political efforts to restrict their rights and participation in public life. This year alone, over 150 bills have been introduced across the country with the aim of restricting trans people’s – especially trans youth’s – ability to play sports, use bathrooms, and/or receive gender- affirming health care. Currently, 18 states have successfully enacted such anti-trans legislation (for the latest numbers and legislative tracking see Freedom for All Americans).

So how did we get from the celebratory “trans tipping point” to here? In a larger project I am currently working on, I interrogate the role that right-wing and white-nationalist media have been playing in fueling anti-trans animus, specifically through spreading deliberate misinformation about trans people and fear-mongering on their various platforms. An illustrative example of this was the intense media scrutiny surrounding the success of Lia Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania college swimmer who became the first trans athlete to win a NCAA Division I national championship title in the 500-yard freestyle in March 2022.

Various right-wing to far-right, pro-Trumpian publications, such as Newsmax, Breitbart, and The Federalist, all of which are known for controversial reporting, the spread of conspiracy theories, and attacks on what they deem “biased liberal media,” began paying attention to Thomas’ performance in swim meets leading up to the championship. Articles in The Federalist, for example, consistently, deadnamed and misgendered Thomas and alleged that she was part of a broader campaign by an unnamed “trans lobby” which wants to “subjugate women and girls” by erasing them: “We are supposed to pretend that a hulking man is a woman, and that it is a sign of moral progress when he [sic] beats female athletes in the pool and exposes his penis and testicles to them in the locker room” (Blake, 2022). Blake here invokes and taps into longstanding stereotypes that associate LGBTQ+ communities with sexual predation and pedophilia and specifically frame trans women as fraudulent tricksters who are “really men” and just “masquerade” as women in order to “infiltrate” and “prey on” cis women’s and girls’ spaces. This ad below from the conservative Child Protection League deployed similar fear tactics back in 2014.

Between March 16 and April 6, 2022, conservative cable news channel Fox News aired a staggering 170 segments discussing trans people (Paterson, 2022). This three-week period included Thomas’ winning the NCAA championship title and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signing of a “Parental Rights Education” bill, commonly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prohibits classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in the state’s primary schools. In a powerful display of agenda setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), Fox News anchors, hosts, and guests repeatedly deadnamed, spread misinformation, and fear-mongered about trans people, especially by promoting grooming claims, which – falsely – allege that LGBTQ+ adults are sexualizing and “recruiting” children into queer- and transness. For example, in a segment on her show titled “Doom & Groom,” host Laura Ingraham claimed that students were subject to “sexual influence paddling” in schools and Tucker Carlson similarly asserted on his top-rated show that “most of them have been led to where they are by adult predators.” Appearing as a guest on The Ingraham Angle to discuss Thomas, right-wing political commentator and author, Matthew Walsh, specifically blamed “the left” for waging war on “women’s privacy and safety – their very identities are being appropriated.”

From these rightwing media platforms, this inflammatory rhetoric has since also surfaced in various statehouses as legislators have been introducing and debating various anti-trans bills. Pennsylvania State Rep. Barbara Gleim (2022), co-sponsoring one of these bills in her state in March 2022, for example, exclaimed: “women lose out on having a fair playing field when forced to compete against biological men … just look at Lia Thomas, a biological male who competed on the UPenn men’s swim team for three years before switching to the women’s team and smashing women’s records.” This statement firmly asserts a gender binary between “women” and “biological males” and assumes that “male biological sex” is the decisive, superior factor for determining athletic capabilities. This view, however, ignores other factors influencing athletic performance, such as biogenetic variations, nutrition, or access to training facilitates, and basic medical transitioning processes (see Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2019; Fischer & McClearen, 2020). In a transphobic political campaign ad vying for her state’s senate seat, Missouri Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler (R), further violently deadnamed and denied the legitimacy of Thomas’ trans identity: “Meet William Thomas [sic], ranked No. 462 in men’s swimming. Meet Lia Thomas, ranked No. 1 in women’s swimming. Only one problem — it’s the same person.” She further asserted, “women’s sports are for women, not men pretending to be women” (cited in Allison, 2022).

Despite these repeated claims by rightwing media and some legislators, not a single case is known where a male athlete pretended to be a woman in order to compete in the women’s category to “steal victories” (Pieper, 2016). In their arguments, legislators and proponents of these bills also tend to ignore or conflate important competitive distinctions between elite, professional sports and youth scholastic or intramural leagues. Trans people and more specifically trans athletes comprise a very small number of the general population – exact data does not exist, one estimate suggests only 0.44% high school athletes are transgender and only about 33 trans athletes have competed at the college level in the U.S. in the past decade. No trans athlete at the high school or collegiate level has single-handedly dominated an entire sport. Thomas, for example, did not win every single race during her final year and only placed fifth and eighth in the 200 and 100 freestyle championship races. The claim that trans women’s inclusion in women’s sports allegedly threatens women’s sports as a whole, thus, does not hold and is unsubstantiated.

These sensationalizing and dehumanizing views have also traveled into mainstream media spaces. Representatives of the conservative Christian advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has been labelled an anti-LGBTQ hate-group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and has been a key policy driver behind current attacks on trans rights, are frequently quoted in mainstream publications, such as ESPN and NPR. The latter, for example, quotes ADF legal counsel Christiana Holcomb at length – “It only takes one biological male competing in women’s sports to take the state championship title [ ] It only takes three to knock women off the podium altogether” (Block, 2021) – without asking her to provide evidence and context for this claim. In my interviews with journalists who are covering anti-trans legislation and who are working at leading sports and news publications, several commented on being specifically asked to include not just “the other side” but the most extreme version thereof. Kai* (pseudonym) who works for the news division of one of the original major broadcasting companies, for example, noted:

I’ll write a story, it will center a lot of the perspectives of experts, medical doctors, researchers … and so I always find that even when I include people like that, for some reason, even though [this] approach is considered very middle of the road, my editor will be like “this, isn’t the other side. We need people who use phrases like ‘biological women,’ and that talk about people’s quote ‘inherent advantages,’ regardless of whether that person is a medical doctor.” And so I definitely find that I am pushed almost every time I write a story about trans people to include, not just the other side, but the most extreme voices of the other side; which I think is sometimes really unfortunate because I don’t think that accurately represents what the issue actually looks like. (interviewed by author, March 29, 2022)

As I seek to illustrate in my larger project, this attachment to journalistic neutrality and commitments to “both-sideism” that many mainstream news organizations are beholden to de facto function within our current socio-political climate to give a platform to, uplift, and mainstream far-right anti-trans sentiments, hatred, and bigotry. Such extreme positions and views are thereby purportedly equal to scientific and factual evidence. As Kai further observes: “Too often when it comes to issues related to trans people, the media – instead of giving the voices of people who are affected – wants to give the voices of everyone who has the strongest opinion on the matter” (interviewed by author, March 29, 2022).

Reflecting on her graduation from UPenn and the end of her collegiate swimming career, Lia Thomas recently expressed in an interview: “The biggest misconception, I think, is the reason I transitioned. People will say, ‘Oh, she just transitioned so she would have an advantage, so she could win.’ I transitioned to be happy, to be true to myself” (cited in Barnes, 2022). Much of the hateful rhetoric referenced above never considers trans people’s very humanity. It is also noteworthy that unlike with marriage equality efforts in the mid 2010s, large segments of the liberal left and progressive spectrum as well as major corporations have remained notably silent about the current onslaught of anti-trans legislation. Similarly, the lack of allyship and advocacy from within the mainstream LGBTQ movement reflects a longer history of assimilatory LGB(T) politics which fail those community members who are most marginalized and vulnerable, in this case trans youth (Fischer forthcoming). It is therefore crucial to trace and analyze how anti-trans rhetoric initially deployed by anti-LGBTQ Christian conservative actors in fringe right-wing media spaces is becoming increasingly part of the political and cultural mainstream. In so doing, we can debunk misinformation, fear-mongering, and, in turn, mobilize support for protecting the lives and rights of trans folks, especially trans youth.

Image Credits:

1. Laura Ingraham introducing “Doom and Groom” section on The Ingraham Angle, Fox News, April 6, 2022. (author’s screen grab)
2. Lia Thomas winning the 500-yard-freestyle race at the 2022 NCAA National Championship in Swimming and Diving (New York Times)
3. The Minnesota Child Protection League placed this ad in the Star Tribune in 2014 (author’s screen grab)
4. Early anti-trans legislation started with the case of two Black trans high school runners, Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, winning Connecticut state track titles in 2018 and 2019, which resulted in a Title IX complaint and a lawsuit filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). ABC’s “Good Morning America” featuring Yearwood and Miller on June 22, 2018 (author’s screen grab)
5. Protestors rally in Austin, TX, on March 1, 2022 against Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive to state health agencies to investigate gender-affirming care for trans youth as child abuse. (NBC News, Bob Daemmrich / Zuma Press)

References

Fischer, Mia & McClearen, Jennifer. “Transgender Athletes and the Queer Art of Athletic Failure.” Communication & Sport, 8, no. 2 (2020): 147-167.

Fischer, Mia. “Protecting Women’s Sports? Anti-Trans Youth Sports Bills and White Supremacy.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 20, no. 4 (forthcoming).

Karkazis, Katrina and Jordan-Young, Rebecca. Testosterone. An Unauthorized Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.

McCombs, Maxwell E. and Shaw, Donald L. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, no. 2 (1972): 176-187.

Pieper, Lindsey P. Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Over the past three years, I’ve been working on projects related to cultural geographies of digital media access and adoption, inequities in smart city development initiatives, and digital placemaking. All of these projects, compounded by the challenges and constraints of living with an ongoing global pandemic, made me acutely aware of the plurality of lived experiences of digital imaginaries. Pre-covid, I began research on a book related to dark fiber (for which I wrote a thought-piece for Flow) and expanded into an article with Jessa Lingel where we compared “failures of imagination” in urban broadband networks such as dark fiber and LinkNYC. When schools, daycares, and offices (as well as many other establishments) were closed due to the initial stages of Covid-19, I lived on the “rural side” of the digital divide, which intensified my experiences of place-based digital inequity, rural infrastructures, and “always off” connection. In 2020, I joined a research team at the Institute for Policy and Social Research (IPSR) to investigate Kansans’ experiences and perspectives on broadband connection across the state. Opportunistic and circumscribed imaginations of the past, present, and futures of digital connectivity reverberate throughout all of these projects. Those who develop, design, and implement infrastructures for digital connection imagine particular, emerging and potential uses and users for these projects, what connectivity means, where it is and where it isn’t, and who is included in digital futures.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “edges” of these digital imaginaries and how living at these edges or seams shapes one’s relationship to place and feelings of belonging; particularly in the context of biased imaginations of the future of connected places and how we need to rethink the institutional processes of imagining these places.[1] As many scholars have continually shown, exploring and analyzing frictions, inequities, and failures of communication and listening that occur within digital imaginaries reveal the underbelly or shadows of socio-technical systems, biases, and persistent discriminatory attitudes, behaviors, institutions, and structuring logics (for some examples see the work of Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Noble, Sarah Hamid, Aimi Hamraie, Erin McElroy, Lisa Nakamura, and scholars affiliated with the Center for Critical Race + Digital Studies and the DISCO Network).

Through concepts such as discriminatory design, data justice, algorithmic and design justice (Benjamin 2019a, 2019b; Costanza-Chock, 2020) researchers have highlighted and critiqued the ways in which social biases are coded, re-coded, and decoded in the technologies of everyday life. Analyses of socio-technical imaginaries of technologies, policies, and media users have become increasingly prevalent in digital media studies and science and technology studies. More scholarship has focused on the ideologies and politics of platforms as they intersect with imagined futures of computing, and the ubiquity and differential harms of computation and algorithmic logics in everyday life.

Scholars have focused on the perceived, lived, and affective experiences of these discriminatory socio-technical imaginaries as well. Actions and movements against these imaginaries are discussed at length, as are moments when discriminatory design is realized by those who are being discriminated against or those unimagined or mis-imagined in digital futures, and those who are continually oppressed or captive within these futures. One of these moments was reiterated in scholarly and popular press after computer scientist and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, Joy Buolamwini, publicized the moment when she realized that machine vision, facial detection and facial recognition technologies couldn’t see or accurately read her face.

Equally important, and often underemphasized or under-investigated, are the moments where people realize they are living at the edge of “digital inclusion.” These moments occur when people realize that they’re just barely on the “other side” of a collective digital imaginary that doesn’t include them, or where they’re not considered “good users” (Gordon and Walters, 262). At the edges, discriminatory or selective decisions about digital connectivity are routinized in lived experience and are seen and felt through visible markers and manifestations that become nagging reminders of being undervalued or unimagined in digital futures.

In centering edges or seams rather than metaphors and relationships that indicate complete erasure or oppression, I want to recognize the material, ideological, and lived borders of exclusion. In these experiences and ontologies of exclusion, there’s some sort of effort or awareness toward digital inclusion or digital connection as a utility. The edge may indicate that certain populations and their situated or place-based problems and needs exist and might evidence previous or ongoing efforts to address issues of digital disconnection, equity, and access to resources, even if these efforts are performative. These performative inclusions are persistent problems as well, that serving certain populations and attending to their needs is superficial and not done in earnest. There’s a recognition of digital equity issues to be attended to, but there is also a palpable point at which these issues stop being meaningfully addressed and cared for or cared about by municipalities, ICT and telecom vendors, policymakers, or technology task forces. There’s an edge of attention, inclusion, and care.

These moments are often thought about as “failures of imagination” (which they are and I’ve used this term as well): failures to imagine all potential stakeholders and the plurality of ways digital media may be needed and used in urban and rural contexts; failure to imagine who has the right to intervene in the socio-technical production of place. Building on Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski’s (2022) “glitch epistemologies”, these edges are also productive moments to explore tactics for re-placeing spaces and honing tools for re-envisioning processes of digital inclusion. An example of living at the edge of digital imaginaries can be found in early controversies around the use of LinkNYC kiosks by unhoused or housing insecure populations, another in the original roll-out of Google Fiber in Kansas City. While there are many other examples to draw from, the example of rural internet access is particularly illustrative.

Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from Kansas communities about their experiences with broadband access. After reading and analyzing thousands of open-ended survey comments from people who routinely struggle to access reliable and affordable internet access at home, a common theme emerged. Many of the rural residents we surveyed and interviewed lived on the edge of someone else’s digital imagination. Many participants lived across the street or even a few yards from a fiber optic cable that bypassed their residence. One participant explained the unique frustration and stakes of living on the edge of material broadband infrastructure and the nagging potential for high-speed internet connectivity.[2]

“Fiber is available within three miles of our home, but the provider won’t bring it to us. That three miles is the difference between advancing my career (finding a remote job that I can do while living on the family farm) and falling behind.”

Participants were frustrated by the fact that they knew fiber optic cable was buried a few hundred feet from their house, they saw signs and traces of their presence and proximity every day, but adequate internet or broadband connection was not available at their residence and would possibly never be. The cost of extending the fiber lines were too expensive for the companies that owned them, and the population too sparse to obtain a return on their investment. As another participant explained:

“Fiber ends approximately one mile from our home. We know from employees working for that company that there is availability to hook into or extend that line. The cost per one household to pay for one mile is unrealistic. Yet, the opportunity for reliable, high-speed internet is so, so close. It is extremely disheartening.”

Fiber optic cables that bypassed their residences were a continual reminder that they were undervalued in past, current, and future imaginations of digital connectivity and that the imagination their (lack of) connectivity was subject to, was not their own. As another participant explained:

“I know there’s fiber within a half mile from our house, but nobody’s going to drag that half mile. Even though the functionality could be there, it just isn’t worth it for the major phone companies to do anything with it.”

Nick Mathews and Christopher Ali (2022) described these common experiences of rural residents living without broadband connections to their home as experiencing the “indignity of waiting” for more powerful actors to connect them. According to Mathews and Ali, rural residents who lack broadband access are “waiting in alternative ways” for household members to log-off, for off-peak times where web pages might load more quickly, for their turn to connect and be connected.

Participants in our study often spoke about these experiences of “waiting” as work. It wasn’t always in the waiting but in the attempt to connect that a conspicuous sense of power and powerlessness was felt. The recognition of the edge was profoundly felt through efforts exerted to extend or question the placement of that border. The constant visual reminders such as “do not dig” signs marking fiber optic cables or hills and forests that blocked line of sight networks revealed inequitable imaginaries as did the phone calls, meetings, and information requests to ISPs who noted the extraordinary expense of extending service lines a few miles down the road, or the long drives to fast-food parking lots, family members’ houses, and places of employment after hours. Through these time-intensive efforts, innovative and often expensive workarounds, living on the edge of digital infrastructures resembled the “digital edge” Watkins, et al. observe among Black and Latino youth, where socio-economic (and as evidenced here, geopolitical) conditions “give rise to distinct practices, techno-dispositions, and opportunities for participating in the digital world” (Watkins, et al, 2). Foundational to the social production and reproduction of these practices and dispositions is the recognition of the edge of imagination, and one’s relationship to the materialities, ideologies, and boundaries that edge maintains.

People are living on the edges or seams of digital imaginations (as well as at the oppressive underbellies) and researchers as well as municipalities, technology designers, and policymakers need better ways to communicate, listen to, and learn from these experiences and to be held accountable by communities for doing so. Policymakers and planners invested in digital access and infrastructure expansion and equity perpetually re-imagine and re-evaluate their initiatives. Recognizing these seams within future projects may shift digital imaginaries so that the same edges aren’t repeatedly re-inscribed in new ways.

1. Abandoned Google fiber installation in Louisville, KY
2. Screenshot from Joy Buolamwini’s TEDx talk 2016 (author’s screen grab)
3. Marker in rural Kansas indicating that fiber optic cable is buried along the roadside. The cables may serve residences on one side of the street and not the other or may bypass nearby residences entirely. (author’s personal collection)

Benjamin, R. (ed.) (2019a) Captivating Technology: Race Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Duke University Press.

Benjamin, R. (2019b) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press. 

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020) Design Justice: Community Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press. 

Gordon, E. and Walters, S. (2016) “Meaningful Inefficiencies: Resisting the Logic of Technological Efficiency in the Design of Civic Systems,” in Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, edited by E. Gordon and P. Mihailidis. MIT Press.

Halegoua, G. & Lingel, J. (2018) Lit up and Left Dark: Failures of imagination in urban broadband networks. New Media & Society, 20(12). 

Leszczynski, A. & Elwood, S. (2022) Glitch epistemologies for computational cities. Dialogues in Human Geography.

Mathews, N. & Ali, C. (2022) “Come on f—er, just load!” Powerlessness, waiting, and life without broadband. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 27(6).

Watkins, S.C., Lombana-Bermudez, A., Cho, A., Vickery, J.R., Shaw, V., & Weinzimmer, L. (2018) The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequity. New York University Press.

1.  Some of the ideas and text in this column are drawn from and elaborated on in “Re-placeing the Smart City,” a talk presented in May 2022 at the Beyond Smart Cities Conference in Malmo, Sweden.
2. All participant quotes appear in Ginther, Donna K., Genna Hurd, Xan Wedel, Thomas Becker, and Germaine Halegoua, Kansas Broadband Study, sponsored by CARES Act Supplemental EDA Award for University Centers, forthcoming. 

Before email became a routine task and sink-hole for newsletters, direct marketing and spam, it was a format for play and trouble. In Flow’s last issue, Kevin Driscoll argues that if we want to understand the commercialization of the internet since the 1990s, we have to look more closely at email. Building on this, e-mail is also a window into the web’s early potential as a queer space for sexual expression before this commercial trajectory was resolved.

Many online protests in the 1990s used email to replicate postal letter-writing campaigns. Often written off as “clicktivism,” these campaigns allowed people to join protests without leaving their keyboards. One high-profile online protest in 1996 raised the stakes of email protest with a more experimental tactic: using attachments. Organized by free speech group Interactivism, this protest asked Americans to engage in direct action, breaking an unjust law by emailing dirty files to politicians.

The Interactivism protest took aim at the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which put vague restrictions on sending, hosting, or linking to “indecent” and “patently offensive” content online. An unlikely coalition of free-speech advocates, libertarians, and tech companies joined forces with sex workers, online fetish communities, porn fans, AIDS activists and queer folks. The tech companies wanted to shield themselves from liability while monetizing the web while sex radicals expected the law would criminalize their mundane online communication and be selectively enforced against minorities.

Protestors emailed a series of technically “indecent” files as attachments to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich using an online email generator. Selecting from a menu, senders chose their attachments, wrote their name and email address in text boxes, and clicked “Submit E-mail,” all within a web-based form. By inundating the Speaker’s email account with files large by mid-1990s standards, senders cleverly broke the censorship provisions of the act, putting themselves at risk to the criminalization of sexual expression online.

In their content, size, and abundance, these attachments presented a misfit with Gingrich’s inbox and the act’s notions of criminality: these files shouldn’t fall within the drag-net of indecency, but they are sent with intention to break the law.

The first attachment, “Illustrated Instructions on Condom Use for AIDS Prevention,” is an entirely ordinary series of instructions, ubiquitous within 1980/90s safe sex discourse. Simple, semi-realistic drawings of a cobalt blue condom being lubricated, rolled on to an erect penis, and then removed are not at all titillating, but they do depict an erection, complete with a hairy sack: the images would get an R rating from the MPAA, but you might just as easily find them in a pamphlet in the guidance counsellor’s office.

The second attachment, titled “Abortion Clinic Listings,” also pokes at the concept of indecency but does so without the visual depictions of sex most often associated with the early internet as a pornified space. As an .html file, this is just a list of names and phone numbers, but the information points toward abortion, an “indecent” prospect to pro-lifers. Declaring this attachment indecent or patently offensive would set a highly censorious precedent by making pointing to information a civil liability and criminal offense.

The third attachment users could select for the protest was a text file listing excerpted sex scenes from Newt Gingrich’s own novel: 1945 (1995). I have not read 1945 and don’t plan to, but this file, titled “Naughty Nips from Newt to Newt” suggests the book is a spy novel set in D.C. that features many “pouting” and “purring” “sex kittens” and is probably not very good. This attachment playfully emphasizes that a whole lot of communication about sex is actually quite banal, cringeworthy even, and that almost everyone does it. The attachment concludes, “Tame stuff, clearly, even to many of those pre-teens on the Internet the ‘Decency Act’ is supposed to protect. But possibly ‘offensive’ by some community standards and potentially illegal today on the Internet. Poor Newt.”

Each of these attachments is indecent by some community’s standard, but obviously should not be censored, either because of the social good the information offers, or because the content is utterly unsexy even though explicit. As the form message put it, “The CDA, which cannot be universally enforced, is likely to be selectively applied, possibly for political purposes. Repeal the Communications Decency Act. And enjoy the attached files.”

Gingrich and the public servants answering his email are not meant to enjoy these files. They aren’t salacious, and in the case of Gingrich’s own book, are making fun of the politician’s milquetoast sexual taste. Participants broke the law with awareness that they were really only making trouble: overloading a government email server, sending more messages than public servants could read through and sort, and pointing out the law’s intractability in practice.

Email attachments make trouble at the level of design. Often this trouble happens when an attached file is incongruous with the message itself: you think you’re opening a useful document from a co-worker but it’s actually malware, or the attachment is a bait-and-switch punchline for a joke begun in the message itself. A related technique uses mis-directed hyperlinks; think Rickrolling. The incongruity between a message and attachment opens on to humor and trouble: the internet nerd’s perfect set-up.

Protest messages appended with sexually explicit files are instances where email attachments served as low-key “dirty” communication. Once removed from the message itself, they expand how we understand attachments. Through attachments, stigmatized sex practices infiltrated everyday messaging and entangle sex with email.

Gingrich must have thought his sex kittens were a turn-on when he wrote his novel and who am I to yuck his yum? The protest made clear that sexuality is rarely a shared set of values and desires even as these digital files were fastidiously duplicated through attachment. As queer theorist Eve Sedgwick put it in her axiomatic list of banal erotic difference published a few years earlier, if nothing else, sex shows us that “people are different from each other.”[1]

The “bad attachments” protest grew out of a more fundamental disagreement over another shared set of objects and imaginaries: the nascent web. Online information about sex was vital to communities with limited access to other channels, including queer and rural youth, people living with HIV, sex workers, kinky people committed to niche sex practices, and others. For a moment in 1996, their interests happened to dovetail with the goals of libertarians and tech companies, who envisioned the internet as new colonial frontier that needed protection from regulation.[2]

Protest attachments constitute a queer, material digital practice, attuned to the political demand for information access as a means of survival and sexuality as a public and intimate mode of being in and working on digital networks.[3] For these users, the web was a scene of potential liberation worth making trouble over.

1. A picture of a keyboard.
2. Screenshot of an Interactism email generator for the CDA attachment protest.
3. Screenshot from condom-use instruction attachment depicting the last step, proper removal of a used condom.
4. The cover of Newt Gringrich’s novel 1945, co-written with William R. Forstchen (1995). (author’s screen grab)

1. Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 25–26.
2. Jessica Maddox and Jennifer Malson, “Guidelines Without Lines, Communities Without Borders: The Marketplace of Ideas and Digital Manifest Destiny in Social Media Platform Policies,” Social Media + Society 6, no. 2 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120926622; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
3. Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013); Sharif Mowlabocus, Craig Haslop, and Rohit K. Dasgupta, “From Scene to Screen: The Challenges and Opportunities of Commercial Digital Platforms for HIV Community Outreach,” Social Media + Society 2, no. 4 (2016): https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1177/2056305116672886.

Facebook depicts the platform’s white thumbs-up icon with a blue cuff as part of its “Content unavailable” message. However, the lifted and purportedly agile thumb is wrapped in a pink bandage. Wrapping a bandage around the thumb suggests that the appendage and its references to Facebook matter, including having a materiality. Facebook’s ordinary thumbs-up “like” icon and button support its claims about the embodied aspects of people’s engagements, and the platform’s influence on touching, feeling, and empowered participation. The icon acknowledges others and suggests that everything is fine even as it asserts able-bodied physiognomies.

Facebook’s bandaged thumb playfully, but also impactfully, uses the injured finger to note that the file has not been found. Given the connections among arm and hand pain and computer use, it is notable that Facebook suggests injury is associated with not viewing and not inputting further texts. The platform proposes that pain, injury, and a sense of loss occur when the connection between the physical aspects of the individual and the platform are “broken” according to an associated error message with a snapped link. In a related narrative about trying to recover a Facebook post and finding a version of the bandaged thumb, Hunchly notes that the “thumbs up with the bandage didn’t make me feel very good.”[1] Thus, Facebook’s representation and warning about pain and lack of access generate and acknowledge the sentiments that accompany digital viewing.

Facebook added “reactions” to the thumbs-up “like” button in 2016 as a means of trying to amplify the feelings associated with the platform and people’s engagements. Product designer Geoff Teehan indicates that the company wanted to “make the Like button more expressive.”[2] While managing the application, Fidji Simo suggested that Facebook launched reactions because people sought to “express how they felt.”[3] Yet, Facebook’s message that content is not available associates the thumbs-up icon and button with emotions. Facebook’s narrative about pain may also displace some of the implications of thumbs-up icons and buttons.

The “rule of thumb” and measurement of rods smaller than this metric determined tools for abusing women starting in the seventeenth century (and possibly earlier).[4] When spectators displayed their thumbs in the Roman Coliseum, they were identified as supporting the killing of gladiators who had lost matches. People employ YouTube’s and some other platforms’ thumbs-down “dislike” buttons to elide critical content and to dismiss participants. The designers of the Facebook icon and button, as well as most other interface hand-pointers, avoid cultural conceptions of femininity by not including fingernails in their depictions. It is the non-functional hand that is sometimes sheathed in a pink bandage. Facebook’s reference to white hands in shirt cuffs, blue borders, and earlier depictions of a male face associate the site with men and masculinity and script participants as white-collar and white men (and presumably connect them to Mark Zuckerberg).

In this essay, I continue my considerations from Touch Screen Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings and other research on how technology companies, device designers, and individuals correlate physically touching and emotionally feeling as methods of displacing the constructed aspects of devices and settings.[5] Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that a “particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions,” an interconnection that is conveyed by the dual meanings of the terms “touching” and “feeling.”[6] For instance, Etsy employs representations of hands on the “About” part of the site to assert that its platform “connects” sellers “with millions of buyers looking for an alternative—something special with a human touch.”[7] These emotional connections are linked to material objects and contact by a series of illustrations of hands making things and hands cupping a purchased item that is “hand” delivered to the consumer. Individuals are encouraged to mesh with hand-held and screen-based technologies and to associate represented hands with their bodies and experiences of touching things.

The linking of digital devices, processing, platforms, and finger digits are supported by people’s employment of the terms “digit” and “digital.” The thumbs-up hand and hand-pointer magnify these connections because they are digital representations, elements that activate computer processes, and presumed reflections of individuals’ finger digits. The hand-pointer is thought to represent individuals’ hands, but it establishes whiteness and able-bodiedness as the norm. The hand-pointer references touching when direct contact with the screen is not a programmed or preferred action. It represents the agile individual’s hand “inside” and “outside” the screen and the hand of the individual connected to the hand of the device.

Hand-pointers are probably the most common computer representation of users. They structure and insist upon who individuals are, how they connect, and what their relationship is to screens and other digital devices. Given the correlation of the hand with the human, they offer a method of asserting (and ordinarily overstating) the ways people can control the computer and interface. In my research, I have critiqued the hand-pointer because of the ways it is designed to assert that the white material body is present. Since they are white, hand-pointers link aspects of digital media to a white positionality and race aspects of computers, interfaces, and online sites.

Representations of finger clicking and manipulating hands often appear in instructional manuals for computers. For instance, Microsoft presents a series of white grasping and pointing hands in its development documentation for “Windows Desktop Apps.”[8] Apple Developer’s Human Interface Guidelines represent the “Closed” and “Open hand” as white with a black outline.[9] Lines across the back of the hand reference the stitching on gloves, the strokes on gloves that cartoon characters wear, and the tendons beneath flesh. Apple also employs outlines of hands where the background and the surface of the hand are white to explain “Trackpad gestures for Magic Trackpad, Magic Trackpad 2, Magic Keyboard for iPad, and Magic Keyboard Folio.”[10] These representations of hands are associated with the icons that Susan Kare developed in the 1980s for the Macintosh computer.[11]

The linking of hand-pointers and hand icons to gloves (and Mickey Mouse) intensifies the associated racial scripts.[12] As media studies scholar Nicholas Sammond observes, cartoon characters and their “white gloves, wide mouths and eyes, and tricksterish behaviors” are associated with minstrelsy. Blackface minstrels employed gloves and other classed goods as means of parodying and denigrating the aspirations of black people.[13] Since Apple, Microsoft, and other companies use these operating system and interface representations of hands to connect the hand-pointer to the material body, a script about the body of the individual is intermeshed with and encoded into devices.

Gender and racial identities are also conveyed by Apple’s System Preferences settings for the trackpad and a series of videos that illustrate “Point & Click” and related options. In each of these representations, a light-skinned hand with short nails engages with the trackpad and produces actions on the split screen. At one point, this controlling hand accesses a cropped image of two light-skinned women. Aspects of the image, such as the women’s welcoming smiles and windswept hair and the focus on the touchpad, make the women appear to be visually and tactilely available and manipulable. I identify this stereotyped rendering of women as soft and available to the touch as constituting them as “to-be-touched-ness,” in an adaptation of Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the ways women are rendered as “to-be-looked-at-ness.”[14] This is enacted in Dan Ackerman’s article about the trackpad, which includes a screenshot of the empty touchpad and the two women. Ackerman’s suggestion that readers enable “tap to click” seems to be about these women. The image of them and the touchpad is titled, “Turn this on, even if you’re not going to use it all the time.”[15] In such contexts, the narrative about turning it/them on and the terms “tap,” which can mean to have sex, and “click,” which evokes connections, render women as waiting objects who are available and touchable.

These images and narratives conjure up the earlier use of the “finger” command to view an individual’s plan file and to get information about them. The erotic connotations of the finger command and the sexual “jokes” embedded in computer systems are underscored by the repeated explanation to “finger Lisa and see if she’s idle.”[16] People also rebuffed the finger command, and amplified the associated corporeal actions, by including ASCII representations of middle fingers in their plan files that individuals would view.

Companies’ and designers’ emphasis on white hand-pointers and thumbs-up hands should raise questions about methods for facilitating more diverse representations and engagements. However, Apple’s listing of the option to change the color of the hand under “Accessibility” displaces the racial aspects of interfaces, including the rendering of the accessibility icon as a white figure with hands and legs outspread. The linking of the hand to differently abled people should encourage considerations of designs that would present other hand configurations and alternative forms of moving, grasping, and identification.

1. Figure 1. Facebook, “Content unavailable.” (author’s screenshot)
2. Figure 2. Hunchly, “Why I created Hunchly,” Medium. (author’s screenshot)
3. Figure 3. Etsy, “About Etsy.” (author’s screenshot)
4. Figure 4. Apple System Preferences, “Trackpad.” (author’s screenshot)
5. Figure 5. Dan Ackerman, “Got a new MacBook?” CNET. (author’s screenshot)

1. Hunchly, “Why I Created Hunchly,” Medium, 11 April 2016, 29 October 2022, https://medium.com/@hunchly/why-i-created-hunchly-513a3f870a8f
2. Geoff Teehan, “Reactions: Not everything in life is Likable,” Medium, 24 February 2016, 25 November 2022, https://medium.com/facebook-design/reactions-not-everything-in-life-is-likable-5c403de72a3f
3. Fidji Simo, as cited in Evelyn Lau, “Facebook Launches New ‘Hug’ Reaction Button in Response to Coronavirus,” The National, 17 April 2020, 25 November 2022, https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/facebook-launches-new-hug-reaction-button-in-response-to-coronavirus-1.1007243
4. Tom Tyler, “The Rule of Thumb,” JAC 30, nos. 3–4 (2010): 435–56.
5. Michele White, Touch Screen Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022).
6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 17.
7. Etsy, “About Etsy,” 23 October 2022, https://www.etsy.com/about?ref=ftr
8. Windows App Development, “Mouse and Pointers,” Microsoft Learn, 7 February 2022, 25 November 2022, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/uxguide/inter-mouse
9. Apple Developer, “Pointing devices,” Human Interface Guidelines, 25 November 2022, https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/inputs/pointing-devices/
10. Apple, “Trackpad Gestures for iPad,” Apple Support, 25 November 2022,
    https://support.apple.com/en-ph/guide/ipad/ipad66ce6358/ipados
11. Susan Kare, “Apple,” 25 November 2022, http://kare.com/apple-icons
12. Kit Grose, “Who created the Mac Mickey pointer cursor?” User Experience Stack Exchange, 15 September 2016, 25 November 2022, https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/52503/who-created-the-mac-mickey-pointer-cursor
13. Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 2–3.
14. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
15. Dan Ackerman, “Got a new MacBook? You Need to Change This Setting ASAP,” CNET, 22 September 2022, 8 November 2022, https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/your-macbook-trackpad-has-an-annoying-setting-you-need-to-change/
16. Eric S. Raymond, “finger,” The Jargon File, version 4.4.8, 22 November 2022, http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/finger.html

I am using this platform to make a plea to journalists in North America: stop using online pornography as a facile means to denounce child pornography. Stop putting children at the heart of your reporting on Pornhub. For the last two years, Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek have become the focus of campaigns to tamp down child pornography and stop predators from targeting kids online. The truth is most of the websites we use daily—Facebook and YouTube, for example—have reported issues with child porn on their platforms. Yet Pornhub has been increasingly singled out as the fall-guy. Not because its issues with child porn are more severe, but because it is an easy target.

It started in 2020 when The New York Times published an opinion piece titled, “The Children of Pornhub.” In it, columnist Nicholas Kristof alleged that Pornhub was knowingly hosting and monetizing revenge porn and child pornography. Kristof claims that Pornhub makes itself seem wholesome when it is, in reality, “infested with rape videos.”[1] The article triggered public outrage; it engendered a barrage of other articles and an investigation into MindGeek by the Canadian House of Commons Ethics Committee (ETHI). Kristof is lauded by readers—“with this piece, you have done yet another important service for society,” one commenter wrote on the online version of the piece.[2] But as an adult film scholar, Kristof’s approach feels familiar, even cookie-cutter. It is a strategy to oppose pornography taken straight out of the moral panic playbook: the shout to, “save the children.”

Since the 1990s, there have been surges of interest and activism concerning child pornography and child predators. Despite the rapid transformation of the Internet, each wave of concern has taken a remarkably similar form. For example, compare the images from a Time Magazine article published in the mid-90s with recent images from The Atlantic and The New York Times. In 1995, Time published a cover story titled, “On A Screen Near You: Cyberporn.” The piece was a bombshell, and even though many of the facts it presented were later debunked, it played a significant role in how readers came to view cyberporn. The issue’s cover is almost infamous: it is a stark photograph of a young boy lit by the harsh glow of a computer screen. With his mouth agape, and his fingers hovering over a keyboard, the little boy looks terrified by what he is witnessing on screen—the horrors of cyberporn. Inside the magazine, the article features a series of similarly evocative images. One of them is an illustration of a small child staring into a room lit up by a computer screen displaying a giant lollipop—a reference to predators luring children with candy—and behind it looms the terrifying outline of a predator.

Compare this to an illustration featured in The Atlantic alongside an article published in 2022 titled, “How to Fix America’s Child Pornography Crisis.” The image shows the figure of a small boy standing at the precipice of darkness; the menacing arm of an adult looms nearby, seemingly leading him into it. Similarly, Kristof’s article features close-up portraits of Serena Fleites—a young woman who fought for years to have nude videos of her at age fourteen removed from Pornhub—taken more recently at age nineteen. In the image, she looks off into the distance, fresh-faced and serious; a reminder of how young she still is. Even at a glance, the images from Time and the more recent examples are remarkably similar. Both depict situations where young vulnerable children are in danger of being preyed upon by virtual predators.

I am not the only scholar who argues that concerns for child safety often act as a distraction from other discourses. Wendy Chun, for example, argues the images and article in Time were representative of the fears we harbor about pornography more generally—“overexposure, intrusion, surveillance, and the birth of perverse desires.”[3]  And that the panic concerning child pornography reveals a social and cultural proclivity to believe that emergent technologies inherently “induc[e] perversity.”[4] Other scholars such as Gillian Harkins argue that cultural representations of the pedophile, such as the ones above, have the unintended consequence of shoring up the “virtual pedophile.” An imagined predator that does more to “justify needs for biopolitical security,” and less to address real-world harms.[5] 

Rumors about Pornhub were circling for years before Kristof’s article, but the prestige of The New York Times forced MindGeek to act. In the article, Kristof makes three suggestions for how MindGeek could begin to address its issues with child pornography, “1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.”[6] Pornhub incorporated all of these suggestions and more, combing through the website to find illegal content, disabling downloads, and implementing a strict user-verification process that requires government issued identification. However, it is difficult to say whether or not these measures put a stop to pedophiles and increased the safety of women and children. There are two things I know for sure as a person who studies porn. First, Kristof’s article resulted in a series of difficulties for sex workers and “amateur performers.” Secondly, even when it is tamped down, desire will find a way to rearticulate itself in new forms and contexts.

Formalization is not without its caveats. In a Dazed article from December 2020, sex workers recount how payment blocks and the removal of their videos from Pornhub—even when they were properly verified—cost them hundreds and thousands of dollars of revenue.[7] In addition, while increased verification measures is a good method for preventing harmful content and putting a stop to piracy, they also limit the kinds and types of pornography that are only available through the protection of anonymity. In an article on Mashable, fellow researcher Brandon Arroyo argues, “Pornhub’s promise of anonymity fostered not just rampant piracy, but also vibrant communities of real amateurs, as well as semi-professional content creators serving highly niche and often marginalized sexual groups.”[8] In short, when child porn is the focus of analyses of a website like Pornhub, it becomes impossible to generate a nuanced understanding of online pornography that consider those who work in the industry.

I realize that by writing this, I risk appearing to diminish the harm of child sexual assault, which is far from my intent. I worry, in fact, that the journalists placing vulnerable children at the center of their stories are misdirecting care from actual targets of sexual harm. Pornhub and MindGeek have lots of problem and I support holding capitalistic mega corporations accountable. But ridding the Internet of Pornhub will not address the issue of child sexual assault. In the conclusion to his column Kristof writes, “The world has often been oblivious to child sexual abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. . .we should also stand up to corporations that systematically exploit children.”[9] But we are not “oblivious.” It is simply too daunting to admit that sexual abuse is embedded “within a social fabric rather than pitted against it.”[10] In other words, the child pornography on Pornhub and other social media platforms is symptomatic of something much more difficult to address.

1. The enduring moral panic of pornography and personal computing
2. A cover that’s meant to represent—and elicit—shock.
3. A too on the nose update to an old cautionary tale
4. The luring stranger, a familiar trope [author’s screenshot]
5. Nicholas Kristof’s article alleges PornHub enables sexual assault on children

1. Nicholas Kristof, “The Children of Pornhub: Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?” New York Times, December 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html.
2. Ibid.
3. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 97.
4. Ibid.
5. Gillian Harkins, Virtual Pedophilia: Sex Offender Profiling and U.S. Security Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020), 4.
6. Nicholas Kristof, “The Children of Pornhub.”
7. Britt Dawson, “How Pornhub’s video purge is hurting sex workers,” Dazed, December
   26, 2020, https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/51520/1/how-pornhub-video-purge-is-hurting-sex-workers.
8. Mark Hay, “Pornhub deleted millions of videos. And then what happened?” Mashable, September 3, 2021, https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-verification-changes.
9. Nicholas Kristof, “The Children of Pornhub.”
10. Gillian Harkins, “Virtual Pedophilia,” 15.

From sponsored search engine results to targeted posts on social media, advertising is inescapable on today’s internet. But in the early days of the commercial internet, it was not obvious that advertising would find a home in the online world.

When we think about the commercial internet of the 1990s, it is tempting to imagine a blinking banner ad on the early Web. But this image doesn’t reflect the everyday habits of early users. At the outset of the dot-com boom, most people were not sitting at their computers to surf the Web. They were there to read and write email.

Email is the bedrock of computer-mediated communication—“the glue that holds the Matrix together.”[1] To understand the commercialization of the internet and how it might have gone differently, we must examine how email did (and did not) adapt to the internet changing around it.

Historically, email addresses were tied to organizations. As users traded messages from one network to another, domain names like earthlink.net, virginia.edu, and f6.n105.z1.fidonet.org revealed information about their institutional affiliations and geographic locations.

The trouble with this addressing scheme was that social relationships frequently outlast organizational affiliations. If someone changed jobs, schools, or internet service providers, they lost their identity in the world of email. There was no forwarding service to notify correspondents that they had moved. Mail either bounced back with an error or it vanished into an electronic void. As email became an increasingly vital medium of communication, this lack of portability became unsustainable.

Juno was founded in 1996 with the goal of providing a standalone email service for the commercial internet. Company PR compared the existing email paradigm to “renting” a mailbox and promised an inbox independent of employers or ISPs. Further, they claimed to provide this service at no cost to the consumer. The pitch was straightforward: “You need email. But you don’t need to pay for it.”

To cover expenses and (eventually) turn a profit, Juno planned to place advertisements on the screens of their subscribers. The founders compared Juno’s business model to network television. “You don’t have to pay CBS to watch the nightly news, or NBC to watch Seinfeld,” they wrote on the company FAQ, “We believe this is the way it should be with email as well.”

Juno was not an archetypal dot-com. While other internet firms were renting lofts in the San Francisco Bay Area, Juno was created by Wall Street quants with an office in New York City. David E. Shaw, CEO of Juno’s parent company, was an vocal supporter of Juno as well as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—a connection proudly noted on the Juno website. In statements to the press, Shaw echoed a vision of the internet as an ad-supported mass medium, touting Juno as “a first step toward the goal of providing universal access.”

But the creators of Juno planned to offer a superior form of advertising to broadcast television. On the internet, they argued, advertising would be “more palatable” to consumers and “more valuable” to advertisers than on a broadcast medium because the messages could be tailored to the interests of individual subscribers. They were not yet building the sort of mass surveillance that would emerge on later email services. Rather, Juno relied on a brief survey sent to new subscribers to populate their database. According to a reviewer at the Washington Post, the survey asked for demographic information along with general preferences regarding hobbies, travel, and consumer electronics.

Juno correctly anticipated concerns about privacy among potential users. They were adamant about not scanning the content of subscriber email and maintained that all “targeting” was done using information gathered from the survey. Yet, critics bristled at being asked to fill out the questionnaire. A review published in Newsweek argued that Juno collected “far more personal information” on its survey than any other internet service [2]. Meanwhile, Juno maintained that they kept all individual responses confidential and shared only aggregate statistics with advertisers. (Of course, their terms of service were less forthright about the company’s obligation to user privacy.)

Juno was not the only company experimenting with ad-supported email in 1996. Hotmail debuted its own sponsored mail service on July 4—Independence Day in the United States. Yahoo! and Lycos followed soon after. What made Juno different from these “webmail” services was that Juno did not require access to the internet or the World Wide Web. In the tech press, Juno representatives argued that webmail could only be considered “free” if you discounted the cost of getting online in the first place.

To provide a truly “free” service, Juno operated independently of the Web. Instead of opening a browser, subscribers launched Juno’s proprietary software. The program presented users with a standard set of email functions organized into two panels: “Read” and “Write.” An interactive advertisement occupied the top-right corner of the window. The program ran primarily offline. The only time that it connected to the Juno servers was to send or receive new messages. During these brief exchanges, the software displayed a pop-up ad on the user’s screen and downloaded new banner images in the background. These images were stored on the user’s hard drive to be displayed offline.

Juno thrived in early months of the dot-com boom. In its first two years, Juno claimed 4.5 million new users. By the end of 1997, however, it was clear that the Web was becoming the primary platform for new online services. And Juno was outside of the Web.

In the summer of 1998, Juno began to pivot away from advertising as its sole source of revenue. First, they announced a paid “premium” service that included access to the Web. Then, they announced plans for an IPO. In 1999, Juno found itself jostling with several other “free” ISPs including WorldSpy and AltaVista. The bursting of the dot-com bubble forced nearly every competitor to shut down. Finally, in mid-2001, Juno merged with NetZero, marking an end to a five year experiment in ad-sponsored email.

This micro case study offers an unusual lens through which to observe the internet in a period of uncertainty and change. In 1996, it was not clear that advertising would become the default source of revenue for the consumer internet.[3] No one could say for sure what technologies would become commonplace, who could access them, or how they would be funded. The creators of Juno took a gamble on how this new medium was likely to develop. They saw email as an unglamorous motor of the information economy and believed that advertising could lower the barriers to access. This vision of the future was encoded into Juno’s technical architecture and woven through its business plan. Eventually, though, Juno was forced to adapt to the conditions of a different internet. They bet on the wrong horse.

But the purpose of revisiting a “dead” platform like Juno isn’t to flog its creators for failing to predict the market [4]. Rather, by taking the history of Juno on its own terms, we can set aside the internet that we currently have and imagine an internet that might-have-been.

1. Juno, version 3.0, interior of the CD case, 1999 (author’s collection).
2. Frey, Donnalyn, and Rick Adams. !%@:: Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networking. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly & Associates, 1989.
3. “What is Juno?”, juno.com, November 8, 1996.
4. “Can I See It?”, juno.com, December 10, 1997.
5. Juno, Version 4.0, Y2K Compliant, 1999.

1. Quarterman, J. S. (1990). The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide. Digital Press, pp 216.
2. Gajilan, A. T. (1998, April 13) “You’ve got mail—and it’s free: As long as you don’t mind a little advertising.” Newsweek.
3. Crain, M. (2021). Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet. University of Minnesota Press, pp 82.
4. McCammon, M., & Lingel, J. (2022). Situating dead-and-dying platforms: Technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline. Internet Histories, 6(1–2), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2071395

“I will fucking cut you.” Academy Award nominee Jessie Buckley stars in Alex Garland’s #MenMovie — now playing only in theaters. pic.twitter.com/AnPwyO0zir

— Men (@men_movie) June 2, 2022

If screen genres are cyclical, then horror is having another heyday. While studios like Dark Entertainment and Blumhouse continue trafficking in mainstream franchises and reboots, companies like A24 have become swept up in an aspirational movement variously dubbed “‘slow horror,’ ‘smart horror,’ ‘indie horror,’ ‘prestige horror,’ [or] ‘elevated horror’.”[1] Always adept at having its fingers on the pulse of contemporary social issues, horror still continues to do so while caught in the crosshairs of cultural distinction. Yet if, as Mark Jancovich argues of 1940s horror, these films were able to level up by treating social problems head-on under the auspices of psychological drama, I believe we’re in the midst of a similar moment today, wherein both mainstream and more art-house oriented fare are attempting to close their respective gaps by bringing the subtextual to bear on the text itself.[2]

As a horror scholar interested in gender and sexuality, the genre’s relationships to femininity and masculinity have always both fascinated and frustrated me. How and why have many viewers simply taken as given that horror revolves around tortured women (and many other historically marginalized populations) at the hands of mostly cis-gendered white men? A longitudinal view does seem to lend credence to this conclusion, but I still echo Linda Williams’ insistence that we can’t simply write horror off as subtly (or not) misogynistic exercises that habitually dispatch a male-identified villain only to reassert the status quo and let patriarchy live to fight another day.[3]

To say that entertainment industries around the world continue to be shaken by those accusations that gave rise to the #MeToo movement in 2017 would be a vast understatement. And while some have decried a rising climate in which “woke-ness” functions as a vapid form of cultural currency, I’d like to briefly sketch how the horror genre has recently taken its own historically vexed relationships to gender head-on in two films, Alex Garland’s Men (2022) and David Gordan Green’s Halloween Ends (2022), that plainly tackle how the self-replicating lifecycle of toxic masculinity might finally come to an end.

When I first encountered Men, my initial reaction was one of bewilderment. Knowing that the film was another in the quickly catalyzing catalog from prestige horror hotspot A24, there was no way in my mind that it could simply be the obvious Adam and Eve allegory its trailer read as…and I was right. Escaping to a rural estate after witnessing the apparent suicide of her husband, Harper (Jessie Buckley) is both literally and metaphorically haunted by the toxicity of men who surround her. In flashback, we learn that Harper intended to divorce her husband James (Paapa Essiedu), who did everything in the gaslighting playbook to convince her that the destruction of their marriage was her fault alone and that the blood from his threatened suicide would solely be on her hands. As circumstances begin to steadily swing sideways, Harper confronts her local landlord, police chief, bartender, and vicar as one constantly morphing character insidiously played by Rory Kinnear. The film’s final act, which can best be described by Tilda Swinton’s Eve in a pithy line from Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (“Well…that was visual”), sees Harper constantly fending off attack by this all-in-one man who wards off death through a montage of regenerative rebirths.

Perhaps fittingly, the cycle ends with the creature mutating into the likeness of James, who engages Harper in one final exchange:

James: So, I died…This is what you did.

Harper: James…what is it that you want from me?

James: Your love.

Harper: [heavy sigh] Yeah.

The heavy sigh tells it all. Tale as old as time, and one with which Harper is even more exhausted than ever before. As prominent horror critic and scholar Kim Newman writes in a review for Sight & Sound, Garland’s film presents Essiedu and Kinnear’s characters as a “living rebuke to the #notallmen hashtag” that became a reactionary response to #MeToo.

As morning dawns, Harper’s friend Riley (Gayle Rankin) arrives at the behest of Harper’s earlier FaceTime pleas for help. Seeing Riley in the flesh for the first time, we’re presented with one final twist: she’s pregnant. And, given what has previously transpired, we can only assume it’s with a boy. This (pun intended) pregnant pause reverberates with Harper’s heavy sigh to leave us with a final question: will masculinity continue to replicate its own toxic lifecycle or is this the moment for a different kind of rebirth?

Released less than five months later, Halloween Ends is the third and final chapter in David Gordon Green’s reimagined trilogy of one of horror’s most storied franchises. On the surface, Men and Halloween Ends share little in common: a prestige production shot in the U.K. with a nearly all English cast versus the latest installment in an American slasher franchise that even some diehard fans wish would have died years ago. Admittedly, I watched Halloween Ends primarily because I’m a completist. But like my experience with Men, the film did more than I expected.

In an October 12, 2022 Today interview, Jamie Lee Curtis minced no words about the defining legacy of her career being Halloween’s iconically resilient final girl, Laurie Strode.

Although Laurie appears in less than half of the franchise’s films, the forty-four-year battle between her and masked killer Michael Myers has become shorthand for Halloween itself. So, what surprised me most about Halloween Ends was that the central battle wasn’t between Laurie and Michael, but rather between Laurie and a legacy.

Living with her granddaughter in a house at the heart of Haddonfield, Laurie becomes increasingly suspicious when Allyson develops feelings for Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who several years earlier had “accidentally” killed a young boy while babysitting him on Halloween. First presented as a bullied outcast of tragic circumstance, Corey’s character takes a turn when, after discovering Michael Myers is still alive, he lures Allyson’s former love interest into Haddonfield’s sewers to observe how Michael kills. Far more than a mere copycat, Corey intends to inherit Michael’s legacy to become Haddonfield’s newest boogeyman. Although Corey is dispatched by Laurie after a string of violent murders, the latter only sees Michael during the final act of the film when she pins him down, stabs him repeatedly, and slits his wrists and throat. “He’s dead,” Laurie exhaustedly says to Allyson who immediately replies, “Not dead enough.” Strapping him to the hood of a police car, Michael is paraded through Haddonfield as its residents follow en masse to watch his body run through an industrial grinder at the local junk yard. It’s here that Halloween Ends fascinated me most. What started in 1978 as a young girl battling a psychotic killer became, by 2022, so much more: an entire town engaged in a group exorcism of the demons of toxic masculinity that had haunted Haddonfield ever since.

In her landmark study Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol Clover argues that horror offers moments of “formal brilliance, political intelligence, [and] psychological depth…that [are] simply not available in any other stripe of filmmaking.”[4] Indeed, whether prestige products or mainstream reimaginations, contemporary horror has begun to ponder new possibilities vis-à-vis its gender politics. What many feminist critics have seen bubbling below the surface for decades has finally come full circle, as fantasy spaces of horror might finally be where toxic masculinity meets its end.

1. Jessie Buckley as Harper Marlowe in A24’s Men (2022)
2. British actor Rory Kinnear adeptly plays nearly all of the male characters in Men
3. Jamie Lee Curtis has played Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise since the first film’s release in 1978

1. David Church, Post-Horror: Art, Genre, and Cultural Elevation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021) 2..
2. See Mark Jancovich, “Horror in the 1940s,” in A Companion to the Horror Film (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 237–54..
3. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 2–13..
4. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 20..

When considering where the locus of control over our personal data and individual privacy lies, our first thoughts should be about Big Tech and corporate Terms of Service agreements that force users to consent to a host of rights infringements as the price of access. Their platforms have normalized privacy violations and a culture of what Shoshanna Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism” [1] to such an extent that a privatized form of informal policy largely dictates our digital civil liberties. This was a development many decades in the making. In fact, it can be traced back to the beginnings of computerized databases in the 1960s and a cultural fear of centralized, state control weaponized by digital technology.

The U.S. government’s concern for the privacy of its citizens peaked in the 1960s. Portable recording technologies and computing began to sound regulatory alarms as their capabilities elicited new threats to privacy rights. Such worries were amplified by the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice Earl Warren stated in a 1963 opinion regarding recording devices and entrapment, “[T]he fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual…”[2] There was also a wave of writing by scholars and journalists at this time that focused on technology, privacy, and personal autonomy which helped inform public debate. In many ways this work anticipated current anxieties about the price of life under Big Tech. Vance Packard’s The Naked Society (1964), Alan F. Westin’s Privacy and Freedom (1967), and Arthur Miller’s The Assault on Privacy (1971) were among the most influential in this genre.

This was the context in which President Johnson proposed a federally-controlled data center called the “National Data Bank” in 1965 as part of the Great Society project. The data center was imagined as a tool for efficiency and organization that would consolidate federal databases at the dawn of computerized record-keeping. A special Congressional subcommittee on the Invasion of Privacy was established in the House of Representatives as a result. Four separate hearings were held in the House and Senate between 1966-1967 to discuss the threats to privacy posed by the computer and government control of data. They were dominated by overwhelming expressions of concern about the sanctity of individual privacy and civil liberties, with the state – aided by the yet unknown capabilities of digital technology – seen as the main potential threat.

The Invasion of Privacy Subcommittee Chair running the House hearings, Representative Cornelius Gallagher (D-NJ), introduced the investigation of the National Data Center in July, 1966 by saying, “The possible future storage and regrouping of such personal information…strikes at the core of our Judeo-Christian concept of ‘forgive and forget,’ because the computer neither forgives nor forgets.”[3] Frank Horton (R, NY) warned that “the magnitude of the problem we now confront is akin to the changes wrought in our national life with the dawning of the nuclear age… it is not enough to say ‘It can’t happen here’; our grandfathers said that about television.”[4] One of the original Internet architects, Paul Baran, alluded to threats posed by the future cloud in his testimony, noting that “A multiplicity of large, remote-access computer systems, if interconnected, can pose the danger of loss of the individual’s right to privacy – as we know it today.”[5] In his expert witness statement, author Vance Packard noted the “hazard of permitting so much power to rest in the hands of the people in a position to push computer buttons….[because] we all to some extent fall under the control of the machine’s managers.”[6]

Gallagher had a remarkably prescient grasp of our current predicament, even back in 1967.[7] His speech to the American Bar Association that year entitled “Technology and Freedom” was quite striking in its predictive accuracy. He warned, “Although the technology of computerization has raised new horizons of progress, it also brings with it grave dangers…the computer, with its insatiable appetite for information, its image of infallibility, its inability to forget anything that has been put into it, may become the heart of a surveillance system that will turn society into a transparent world in which our home, our finances, our associations, our mental and physical condition are laid bare to the most casual observer. If information is power, then real power and its inherent threat to the Republic will not rest in some elected officials or Army generals, but in a few overzealous members of a bureaucratic elite.”[8]

The final report from the House Committee was clear about the links between data privacy and democracy: “A suffocating sense of surveillance, represented by instantaneously retrievable, derogatory or noncontextual data, is not an atmosphere in which freedom can long survive…This report, therefore, charges the Federal Government as well as the computer community with a dual responsibility….they must….guarantee Americans that the tonic of high speed information handling does not contain a toxic which will kill privacy.”[9] The report further noted that “a grave threat to the constitutional guarantees exists in the National Data Bank concept,” leading to their ultimate recommendation to abandon it until privacy protections were fully explored and guaranteed “to the greatest extent possible to the citizens whose personal records would form its information base.”[10]

At the same time, the reporting in the popular press was highly alarmist. One representative article in Look magazine entitled “The Computer Data Bank: Will it Kill Your Freedom?” posed various questions that could easily be answered by “any snooper with a computer,” such as: “Did your sister have an illegitimate baby when she was 15? Did you fail math in junior high? Are you divorced or living in a common-law relationship? Do you pay your bills promptly? Are you willing to talk to salesmen? Have you been treated for a venereal disease? Are you visiting a psychiatrist? Were you ever arrested?”[11] The public response to these developments led to the end of all discussion about a National Data Bank by 1970.

Sadly, it would be a pyrrhic victory. The focus on protecting public data from the perceived dangers of centralized state collection and storage blinded legislators to the problems created by the alternative: putting data in the hands of private companies. Corporations ultimately filled the vacuum created by the National Data Bank’s failure, and became the chief custodians of American citizens’ private data. In Congress’s attempt to defend US citizens from experiencing a version of “1984” and “Big Brother” which were mentioned relentlessly during the hearings, they ended up creating exactly what they were trying to avoid, albeit serving a different master. I am not suggesting that government control over public data is preferable, but our current experience of private control without regulatory oversight has proven disastrous for individual and collective privacy. To his credit, Senator Long (D-MO) who presided over the Senate hearings in 1966 and 1967 did warn that if the proposals for a National Data Bank “concerned themselves only with Government interests, and if individual, private interests were ignored, we might be creating a form of Frankenstein monster”[12] but his words went unheeded. Unfortunately, history would prove him right. 

1. Representative Cornelius “Neil” Gallagher, 1972. New York Times.
2. Computer and Invasion of Privacy Hearings Document, 1966. Credit: “Congressional Special Subcommittee Holds Hearings on the Computer and Invasion of Privacy (PDF).” (author’s personal collection)
3. Cover of The Atlantic November, 1967.

1. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2020. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. First Trade Paperback Edition. New York: PublicAffairs.
2. Chief Justice Warren, Concurring Opinion, Lopez v. United States, 373 U.S. 427, 441 (1963). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/373/427/#tab-opinion-1944364
3. “The Computer and Invasion of Privacy,” Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy, House Committee on Government Operations, 89th Cong., July 26, 1966. P. 3.
4. Ibid, Pp. 5-6.
5. Ibid, p. 125.
6. Vance Packard Testimony, House of Representative Hearings on “The Computer and Invasion of Privacy,” July 26, 1966, Pp. 11-12.
7. This could be from his many years of being persecuted and having his own privacy violated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. See Ron Felber, The Privacy War, Montvale, NY: Croce Publishing, 2003.
8. Quoted in Felber, P. 176. Also see the statement of Professor Arthur R. Miller, “Computer Privacy,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 90^th Cong., March 14, 1967. Pp. 72-73.
9. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Government Operations, “Privacy and the National Data Bank Concept,” July, 1968. P. X.
10. Ibid, p. 6.
11. Jack Star, “The Computer Data Bank: Will it Kill Your Freedom?” Look, June, 1968. P. 27.
12. “Computer Privacy,” Senate Hearings, P. 1. 

Sexually diverse individuals and communities are extremely marginalized and oppressed by the heteropatriarchal sociopolitical institutions and publics in Bangladesh, and South Asia more broadly (Karim 2014; Khubchandani 2016; Hossain 2019). The interface of colonial legacies and dominant religious ideologies have enmeshed non-normative sexual identities and practices in Bangladesh with cultures of the West, totally ignoring the histories of queerness in South Asia. The socio-cultural, gendered, and sexual lives of the Bangladeshi people are dictated primarily by two oppressive institutions – first, the constitution and legislation that has not been updated since the colonial era even after undergoing independence twice, and second, the dominant interpretations of the state religion of Islam that is strongly committed to compulsory heteronormativity, patriarchy, and cissexism. In May 2017, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a special division of law enforcing agency in Bangladesh, arrested 28 men under suspicion of being homosexual. The arrest, made in Keraniganj, soon became a national phenomenon as these young men, aged between 20 to 25 years, were presented in front of the public through national television (Khokon 2017). Public discourse around the arrests mostly represented the dominant religious beliefs and heteropatriarchal ideologies that interprets homosexuality as sin and abnormality, and as I have argued elsewhere, the initial Bangladeshi queer rights activism that began in 2014 following patterns of Western LGBTQ+ movements, such as rainbow themed Pride rallies and public coming out parades, also played vital roles in buttressing this problematic assumption (Rashid 2022).

However, for sexually diverse and marginalized communities to challenge and carve out a space to realize non-normative sexual desires and to negotiate the politics of sexual identities within an extremely heterosexual place is not new in Bangladesh. As Shuchi Karim’s work shows, sexually diverse publics have been occupying both virtual and actual space, using them to communicate their sexual needs that is considered to be a crime by the colonial era legislature currently at work in Bangladesh (Karim 2014). Karim’s findings are not only important because it explores the entanglements between the private and the public and the ambiguous nature of sexual desires and identities within Bangladeshi gay and lesbian cultures, but also because without making explicit, her work gestures towards the fact that even before the intervention of organized feminist institutions and LGBTQ+ rights groups, enclave media cultures and communicative practices, both within and outside LGBTQ+ communities, supported queer possibilities and potentialities in Bangladesh. The extreme oppressive treatment of LGBTQ+ publics that is now exacerbated after the 2014 public LGBTQ+ rights activism, require a reassessment of how queer activism may tactically continue without drawing visibility. Within two years of the first public LGBTQ+ pride rally in Bangladesh, several organizers of the movement were either killed by armed religious extremists or forced to flee the country in fear of death. Under such extreme circumstances, a more enclave approach is necessary. More recently, queer activism in Bangladesh is taking an interesting maker turn, supported by the work of feminist makerspaces and queer maker cultures that tactically mobilize popular media and cultural production to extend the work of LGBTQ+ activism discreetly and effectively.

In Lesbian Potentialty and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer explores how feminist cultural productions such as cinema and science fiction literature in the 1970s facilitated new formations of counter-publics and alternative interpretations around the meaning of lesbian existence. According to Samer, this work was taken up by fans and enthusiasts of particular media (Samer 2022). To reorient Bangladeshi LGBTQ+ activism from a hyper visible, and therefore potentially lethal, movement that prioritizes publicness and visibility, to a resistance that takes a more tactical and cultural approach to social transformation, the work of mobilizing such fandoms become crucial. In Bangladesh, the medium of comics and zines have long been a popular medium of entertainment and fandom. Contrary to perceptions around the recent rise of Western comics culture in Bangladesh, comics such as Vetal (1964), Nonte Phonte (1969), and Chacha Chaudhury (1971) have always been extremely popular in Bangladesh since their creation. The establishment of comic book imprints such as Indrajal, Diamond, and Raj, date back to the 1960s and have since been followed by immense fandoms. This popular medium is one of the avenues though which LGBTQ+ activism in Bangladesh is finding a way going forward in the midst of extreme persecution.

Dhee (2015) is a series of material comic strips, created by Boys of Bangladesh, an LGBTQ+ rights group based in Dhaka. The comic strip is presented as flashcards that tells the story and everyday experiences of a Bangladeshi lesbian girl named “Dhee” in the hopes of raising awareness around Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual identities and experiences in Bangladesh. Exploring Dhee from the perspective of feminist and queer makerspace activism is important, particularly because it lends itself to possibilities of approaching ‘Deshi’ Queer Activism from de-colonial and de-imperialized subjectivities. It also has the potential to respond to dominant narratives around Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual identities and practices being an import of the West, and situate them within Bangladeshi cultural historicities. 

Dhee tells the story of a young lesbian girl from the suburbs of Dhaka city in Bangladesh. The narrative is told in first person by the protagonist Dhee and spans almost her entire life. Dhee, which was created in 14 months by four Bangladeshi queer content makers, is part of a larger project titled Project Dhee, a 5-year strategic plan to advance site-specific and fact-based knowledges around diverse sexualities often focusing on the multiple counter and alternate histories of Bengali non-normative sexual identities and practices that are almost never represented in popular media or public communication. Despite its popularity, Dhee resists being widely available to the public with its makers remaining largely anonymous due to the dangers they face. In an interview with German broadcasters Deutche Welle, one of the makers of Dhee who remained unnamed claimed that the flashcards were selectively made available to queer folks and allies in the hopes that they would share them further only to people they trusted. Additionally, the flashcards were made in a hidden queer makerspace where access to anyone except the makers was restricted for safety issues. It is important to note that the comics’ production and distribution, along with its makerspace practices implies a community of care where secrecy and safety is prioritized over visibility, publicity, and pro-active networking. This is necessarily a departure from the 2014 hyper-visible and public LGBTQ+ activism in Bangladesh.

The narrative and framing of Dhee is also worth analyzing. These are the opening lines of Dhee –

Ever since my childhood, I have always found myself oddly out of place. My mother was always scolding me, telling me to pay attention to domestic work, play with dolls or to keep my hair tied up all the time. But within my heart, I only wanted to roam around while letting my hair flow freely in the open air.

The very first page of the comic strip immediately draws our attention to Dhee’s childhood. Dhee narrates her story explaining how, for as long as she can remember, she has always felt out of place. Each of the graphic frames also depicts Dhee struggling to fulfill the gender roles society has imposed upon her. As the story progresses, Dhee becomes increasingly aware of her sexuality, and the misalignment of expectations around sexual desire, identity, and practice between herself and the dominant heteropatriarchal society becomes clear. Burdened by her desire and identity, Dhee tries to find answers and her probing leads her to uncover LGBTQ+ inclusive alternate historical references and contemporary community resources and support groups. As opposed to organizing pride rallies and drag events in Bangladesh, that is often understood as invitations to a primarily Western and otherwise unknown queer world from the outside, Dhee makes her readers familiar about gender and sexual diversity from within by providing access to the everyday oppressions, feelings and affects she experiences as a non-conforming Bangladeshi woman.

Project Dhee printed 4,000 copies of the comic strip and initially distributed them within close circles primarily through fundraising ceremonies and awareness building workshops. While mobilizing the popular medium of comics and using a culturally situated counter-history approach to challenge dominant gender and sexual norms in South Asia opens new avenues for the LGBTQ+ movement to forge ahead, it also raises concerns around how and when governmental and legal institutions may be forced towards more equitable policy changes. Perhaps the potential of Deshi queer activism and the possibility of an inclusive future that is less oppressive to the LGBTQ+ community of Bangladesh needs to negotiate between the sites of queerness, visibility, anonymity, publicness, decoloniality, and temporality. There is a lot to unpack, at least now, there are certain conditions in which the conversations may begin, and most importantly, continue without the fear of being hacked by a machete.

1. Cover page of the Dhee/ The Story of Dhee comics, 2015. From Dhaka Tribune. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2015/sep/06/first-ever-bangladeshi-lesbian-comic-character-launched. Content has been deleted since 2016. (author’s collection)
2. The Dhee comic strip flashcards. (courtesy of Boys of Bangladesh)
3. Opening page of Dhee originally published in Bangla. (author’s collection)
4. Dhee questioning Bengali normative social constructions. English translation. (author’s collection)

Hossain, Adnan. 2019. “Section 377, Same-sex Sexualities and the Struggle for Sexual Rights in Bangladesh.” Australian Journal of Asian Law 20(1): 1-11.

Karim, Suchi. 2014. “Erotic Desires and Practices in Cyberspace: Virtual Reality of the Non-Heterosexual Middle Class in Bangladesh.” Gender, Technology and Development 18(1): 53-76.

Khokon, Sahidul Hasan. 2017. “28 youngsters detained on charges of homosexuality in Bangladesh.” India Today. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/28-youngsters-detained-homosexuality-bangladesh-978106-2017-05-19.

Khubchandani, Kareem. 2016. “LGBT Activism in South Asia.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Nancy A. Naples, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss675.

Rashid, Mohammed Mizanur. 2022. “Queer Blogs and Digital Archives: A Tactical Shift Towards Queer Utopia in Bangladesh.” Media Fields Journal 17(1): 1-11.

Samer, Rox. 2022. Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s. Duke University Press.