Queering Media Archaeology

Abstract

This contribution outlines a theory of the performative nature of queer media agency. Drawing on key concepts in the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, it looks at how media themselves can be queer and act subversively in relation to a historically contingent discursive order as well as on the impact of the continuum between material bodies and media as they are reconfigured in the digital. It highlights repetition and reproducibility as shared core concerns of queer theory and media archaeology and seeks to show that the former has a lot of bearing on the latter. Queer theory also allows for a more radical understanding of the body as medium, an understanding with implications for where we draw the line between body and medium, between organic and inorganic matter. The construction of bodies and their coming into being through a discursive configuration is deeply intertwined with media in several ways. Media are performative in the sense that they enable technical repetition – creating habits, orientations, expectations and rules – that produces discourse. The quantitative intensification allowed by digital media draws this performative aspect to the front. Finally, the article offers new perspectives on the issue of sensory perception in the medianaturalcultural continuum.