Rendering Black Queer Operations
Technologies for Knowing, Being, and Living in Dirty Computer
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13084963 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jordan Victorian (0009-0009-7834-849X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 141-155 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Women Gender and Families of Color (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2326-0939 • E-ISSN: 2326-0947 |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5406/23260947.10.2.03 |
| OpenAlex | W4399478352 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
In 2018, musical artist Janelle Monáe released Dirty Computer, a sci-fi film/visual album accompanying her musical album of the same name. Dirty Computer plays with elements of the visual album genre by embedding conventional music videos within a larger sci-fi narrative, the videos functioning as representations of Monáe's character's supposed “memories.” This essay analyzes representational strategies at play in Dirty Computer, drawing from Black feminist and queer theory, Black cultural studies, and media studies. I argue that together the narrative universe and structure of Dirty Computer strategically depict struggles over living as Black, queer, and/or woman; maintaining sovereignty over othered bodies and selves; and creating Black worlds within and despite an anti-Black world. Thematically, the film offers futuristic visions of queer/women's collectivity and Black queer intimacy. The film's content and structure render an example of Black Queer OS (Operating System); “Queer OS,” as Kara Keeling has described, “seeks to make queer into the logic of ‘an operating system of a larger order’ that unsettles the common senses that secure those presently hegemonic social relations that can be characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, and other violences.” Dirty Computer reveals surveillance technologies and oppressive institutions as unreliable narrators, incapable of fully or accurately depicting Black queer life. Instead, it is our own bodies and minds that enable technologies for truly knowing and relating as Black, queer, and/or woman. The film demonstrates strategies of subversive social, cultural, and political operation, presenting Black queer subjectivity as a technology of liberated being. Ultimately, Dirty Computer instructs us to operationalize Black queer life, joyfully together, on a larger order
Computer graphics (images · Queer · Rendering (computer graphics · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Gender Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |