Interface to Hyperface: Odd Links and Cruel Design

Abstract

To queer media studies, specifically interface design/studies, challenges the mechanism of identification that Deleuze and Guattari describe as faciality. It does not identify the sexuality (homo-, hetero-, bi-, poly-, phallogocentric, what have you) of an individual, a textual discourse, or an interface design strategy. It neither outs Deleuze nor demythologizes the sexist phallogocentrism of media studies. Neither "either" nor "or," but not "and" or "but." Imagine instead the dis-conjunction, the odd blank link, an artificial-Warholian pose as the poetics of queering. Not the Being of queer, but always a deadpan bemusement: a becoming-Other. The style: not outing an identity's passion, but the queering not yet arrived at – held at bay in media studies, at least, by Oedipal ideological identity politics and anti-ideological analyses alike. This approach, "no longer trapped within the reductionist paradigms of sociological, semiological and psychoanalytic analyses," as Barbara Kennedy explains, allows for "innovative conceptions of theory of affect and sensation through the processuality of becoming, rather than pleasure and desire" (33). Alexander Doty explains that "queer" is "more than just an umbrella term in the ways that "homosexual" and "gay" have been used to mean lesbian or gay or bisexual, because queerness can also be about the intersecting or combining of more than one specific form of ... sexuality" (xvi). It apprehends the odd link that does not fit back into grand narratives. As Doty explains, "queerness should challenge and confuse our understanding and uses of sexual and gender categories" (xvii). Doty even includes the category of "straight queerness" to distinguish queering from gayness, lesbianism, or bisexuality (xviii). And, Judith Butler argues that "heterosexuality doesn't belong exclusively to heterosexuals ... and practices are not the same as ... norms" (199). These deterritorializations include Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the "relations between what is called "man" and "woman"" (232). The assumption that queer theory pushes against is that "everyone "has a sexuality" ... implicated with each person's sense of overall identity in similar ways" (8), as Eve Sedgwick argues, the "most exciting recent work around "queer" spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all" (9). Much more is at stake then simply group consciousness-raising and cohesion.