queer identity

Queers on the early Web found each other across cultural and material borders to create online identities, develop novel forms of pleasure, and create networked cultures. This idealistic era promised that homos and genderqueers would find emancipation in online communities, which would embrace our ‘true’ selves that we might otherwise hide in ‘real’ life. Twenty years after the birth of the modern Internet—in this era of Grindr, amateur porn, and selfies—such rosy prospects are now balanced by a sense of the limitations of the technologies that we have integrated into daily life. We are reticent of the online promise to transcend our offline selves—raced, sexed, classed, and gendered as they are.