[Commlist] CFP: ICA 2025 Panel Against Technologies of Documentation: Queer and Trans Tactics of Resistance

Alexander Monea (George Mason University) is putting together a panel 
with Whit Pow (NYU) titled "Against Technologies of Documentation: Queer 
and Trans Tactics of Resistance" and we urgently need one more panelist 
from outside the United States.

They are submitting to the LBGTQ Studies SIG at ICA 2025 that will take 
place June 12-14 in Denver, CO. They are planning on a high-density 
panel with 6 panelists giving 5–8-minute presentations and ample time 
for discussion afterwards. Submissions are due on November 1, so they 
would need a title and 400-word abstract by the morning of November 1st 
to be able to submit everything on time.

Please feel free to reach out to Alexander ((amonea /at/ gmu.edu)) and Whit 
((wpow /at/ nyu.edu)) for more information or to let us know that you'd be 
interested in joining them. Please remember, they only have on spot open 
on the panel and it has to go to a scholar from outside the United 
States, per ICA's rules.

Attached below is a lengthier panel description:

This panel examines (1) the ways in which technologies of documentation 
structure what can and cannot be known, said, and seen – what can and 
cannot /exist/ – in communication mediated by information and 
communication technologies, and (2) the ways that queer and trans 
communities are impacted by and organize tactics of resistance to 
technologies of documentation. For us, technologies of documentation 
operate similarly to how Dean Spade describes administrative systems in 
his book /Normal Life/, where he argues that administrative systems are 
not merely “responsible for sorting and managing what ‘naturally’ 
exists,” but instead “actually invent and produce meaning for the 
categories they administer, and that those categories manage both the 
population and the distribution of security and vulnerability” (2015, p. 
11). For Spade, these systems are capable of doing ‘administrative 
violence,’ as they can exacerbate queer and trans precarity by rendering 
parts of their lives and selves alternately visible and invisible.
Technologies of documentation work similarly to identify, categorize, 
memorize, quantify, digitize, and aggregate people, places, and things. 
Their practices are not ‘natural’, but instead are inflected by 
preexisting sociocultural biases. As such, they have a propensity to 
reinforce social hierarchy and marginalization. Our usage is 
intentionally broad, as we see it applying to a broad range of hardware, 
software, use cases, and user communities. For us, these technologies of 
documentation can be productively investigated from the perspective of 
queer and trans studies, whose facility in navigating plural, shifting, 
and irreducibly individual gender and sexual identities positions these 
fields well to explore the limitations and violence of technologies of 
documentation.


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