Julia Rose Camus - Core Response 2

Kara Keeling’s Queer OS is in my opinion one of the most generative texts I have ever encountered. While it falls quite explicitly within the context of my own research, I think its generative quality expands widely beyond the subfield of computation and instead offers a new modality for the way in which we consider speculative theory as a whole. The first time I read it I felt the weight of one of my favorite B. Ruby Rich quotes to the fullest: “The queer present negotiates with the past, knowing full well that the future is at stake.” Especially in recent developments of queer theory across digital platforms, I think the stakes of queer futurity are more pressing than ever, and have found a clear outlet for a collective imaginary that resides on digital platforms and through algorithmic processing.  

The primary investigation of Keeling’s manifesto is clear: “Queer OS 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.” In such, queer theory is a framework of speculative futurity, but also of political and social disruption. The notion of the “hegemonic,” while clearly established on digital platforms, is one that feels perhaps easier to disrupt given the active agency afforded to a wide range of users, which has never quite been possible when thinking about physical political life. She reinforces this idea further: “QueerOS seeks to identify digital interactions, both intentional and serendipitous, that lead to new pleasures and possibilities both online and off. QueerOS imagines the pleasure and pain of queer digital mediations as practices that are inherently organizing and disorganizing at the same time.”

 

In such, this framework is revolutionary in a digital context, but its reach expands far beyond into the realm of the real.