Abstract Book of the 4th International Conference on LGBT Studies
Year: 2025
[PDF]
Queering Community: Space, Place, and Face-to-Face in the Artificial Era
Dr. Candice D. Roberts
ABSTRACT:
The relationship between humans and technology is often examined in scholarly spaces, and narrowing the focus on primarily the 21st Century can help delineate technological eras into Pre-Internet, Internet Era (or Web 1.0), Digital Era (Web 2.0), Post-Digital or Mobile Era (Web 3.0), and now the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Any major cultural event, idea, or moment can cause shifts in human communication patterns, and while much work has explored the impact of technologies and technological shifts on various aspects of humanity such as cognitive, economic, and educational impacts, interactions are less frequently examined with the social dimension at the foreground. This paper proposes that, in the alleged era of Generative Artificial Intelligence, people are creating intentional communities that are not simply shaped by ICTs but rather are intentional responses and, in some cases, rejections of the technosocial shifts that are often framed as inevitable by determinist thinkers. Further, this work uses a queer methodological framework to argue for alternative ways of approaching social science best capture the “possibilities of queer world-making and the conditions that make life livable (Ghaziani & Brim, 2019, p. 8) for marginalized communities. In addition to a theoretical framework of space/place, this paper uses ethnographic methods combined with the queer counter-narrative approach in order to examine specific cases of five different queer community groups— in Berlin, Germany; New York, USA; Philadelphia, USA; and Tokyo, Japan— that offer provocations of counter-narratives and resistance to dehumanization in the age of AI.
Keywords: community, counternarratives, dehumanization, ethnography, queer methods