Cait McKinney

From the beginnings of the world wide web in the 1990s, online communication has mattered in distinctive ways for LGBTQ+ users. Queer people have not simply used the internet but have worked on and re-imagined online communication practices to model alternative trajectories for the medium. The Sex Lives of Data is a book project that surfaces an original media history of queer digital disruption, a conceptual framework that describes how queer political values such as free sexual expression or justice for HIV+ people distill in specific formal, aesthetic, and technical practices online. The book draws on a range of born-digital and traditional archival collections based in the United States and Canada, along with interviews with former queer internet activists, to surface hidden histories of digital disruption that help us imagine possibilities beyond the toxicity, misinformation, and censorship characterizing online communication today.

Website: https://caitmckinney.com/