Thinking Generatively about Queer/Femme Digital Aesthetics: Field Notes from an AWP Roundtable

Schaag, Katie, Spelman College

2021-09-06

2020-2029

Katie Schaag: At the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference in San Antonio in March 2020 one of the last major academic conferences before the quarantine I chaired a Queer and Femme Digital Literature panel featuring the work of Sarah Ciston, Sam Cohen, Kate Durbin, Feliz Lucia Molina, Sandra Rosales, and myself. My co-panelists were unable to join in person, but in the spirit of the digital they presented virtually (now it's hard to remember a time when that wasn't the default mode). Each speaker discussed their approaches to queer and femme digital literary forms and processes, with specific examples drawn from their current projects. Following individual presentations, I moderated a roundtable discussion with Kate, Sam, and Sarah. The purpose of our panel was to move toward a working theory of queer/femme digital literary aesthetics. What's queer about code? What's femme about remix, pixels, hypertext, emojis? How do queer/femme aesthetics impact the form, content, and interactive experience of multimedia poetry and fiction? These guiding questions framed an energizing, wide-ranging conversation, documented here with individual panelists' presentations, written statements in response to my roundtable discussion questions, and screenshots from the live conversation. To contextualize our collective and individual interventions, this essay begins with an introduction to situate our work in the wider field and point to some ways forward.

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Entropy

Theater & Performance

Spelman College

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12322/sc.fac.pubs:2022_schaag_katie_8

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/