“Depending on which way one turns, different worlds might even come into view. If such turns are repeated over time, then bodies acquire the very shape of such direction.” (Ahmed 15)
“i'm a gay penguin.” (Anonymous pin somewhere in Antarctica, Queering the Map)
The year is 2019. I am seventeen, deep in a midnight Internet rabbithole. My phone glows warm in my hands. I see:
A pink Earth.
Then—a map!
…and a smattering of black location pins, clusters bleeding out to the edge of my screen.
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I tap on one pin—it tells me of someone’s first kiss near a river bank. I tap on another, nearby, to find a message written in French. I am in Montreal. I eventually fall asleep following the St. Lawrence River, going upstream, watching stories from unnamed strangers pop off the map—lost friends, reunited lovers, more first kisses, melancholic musings, and some more French.
I was in Hanoi, Vietnam. I had just discovered queeringthemap.com, and held the whole world (queer!) in my palm.
Queering the Map is a volunteer-run website dedicated to “digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space” (Queering the Map). It allows (any) users to add location pins to its map of the world and attach an anonymous text submission (“stories”, as Queering the Map calls them). The platform is fundamentally concerned with “the mapping of queer histories” (LaRochelle, “Building…”). It is perhaps this mapping quality that draws me to revisit Queering the Map again and again. I would zigzag through its pink Earth, weaving my way through others’ stories to retrace mine, getting lost in others’ memories that become indistinguishable from my own.
Beyond facilitating whimsical journeys, the materiality of the map in Queering the Map invites critical interest. Maps represent its makers’ view of the world, and have historically acted as “sources of power for the powerful” (Peluso 385). Queering the Map is alert to this fact and defines itself as a “counter-mapping” project (Queering the Map), which has a subversive goal by definition: “to appropriate the state’s techniques and manners of representation” against the “monopoly of authoritative resources by the state or capital” (Peluso 384, 386, emphasis by author). What qualities of Queering the Map’s map interface, then, facilitate this appropriation of cartographic power? The counter-mapping project of Queering the Map also declares itself a “living archive of queer life” (Queering the Map), clearly responding to the urgent need for archives of queer lives, for which traditional archives are inadequate (Cvetkovich, qtd. in Lin 204). But beyond the fact that its archival materials include stories from queer people, is the archive of Queering the Map meaningfully different from “traditional archives”? (I sense that it is.) Finally, in addition to its dual functions as map/archive, Queering the Map is also a digital artifact. Existing within a culture saturated by logics of heteronormativity, “exploitation, oppression, and other violences” (Keeling 154), could Queering the Map be capable of facilitating queer interactions?
This essay will articulate how the technological affordances of Queering the Map foster a queer archive—beyond an archive of queer stories. I will first examine the meandering encouraged by Queering the Map’s interface. I propose that Queering the Map is a queer archive because its affordances (set of possible ways to interact with archival materials) are fundamentally queer. Turning to the map of Queering the Map, I will analyze its interface in comparison with Google Maps. I suggest that Queering the Map’s map, by deprioritizing navigation, subverts both the surveillant quality and the heterosexual construction of land represented by maps. Building on these analyses, I suggest that there are distinctly queer ways of navigating and designing a digital object.
In some ways, my undertaking is much similar to Jacob Gaboury’s aim in making “A Queer History of Computing”: to prove that “queerness is itself inherent within computational logic” (Gaboury). But dissimilar to such projects, I do not approach this goal by analyzing the select queer figures in computing, limited by (!) gaps in the archive. My interest lies, instead, in analyzing the queerness of digital objects that inform, again and again, how we interact with future interfaces and objects—a mission urgent now that digital interfaces mediate our lives. Lastly: while Queering the Map is a relatively well-studied object, most analyses do not center its interface (digital map) and user experience design. Even studies that examine the peculiarities of Queering the Map as a map are overburdened with analytics and classification of land into urbans and rurals. Doing so stratifies a platform that (I will argue) refuses stratification. This analysis of Queering the Map, motivated by affordance analysis and queer theory, will center the human (user) in this negotiation between cartography and queer subjectivities.
archive
There is a strong impulse across scholarship on Queering the Map to distinguish this platform from “traditional archives”. Works (co-)authored by its creator, Lucas LaRochelle, assert as such: that it is “distinct as an archive” (Kirby et al. 1046) and “departs from several archival norms, including the collection and collation of temporally situated ephemera” (Kirby et al. 1047), that it is a “living archive” (LaRochelle, “Building…”, emphasis added). Well, of course: queerness demands a different kind of archive, because queer lives cannot be chronicled by the traditional archive as an institution (Cvetkovich qtd. in Lin 204). This (traditional) archive is the territory of the absolute, the precise, of legitimization; artifacts that belong in the archive are all those fit to be used as evidence (Muñoz 9). But queer lives often cannot leave that kind of trace behind: doing so can be dangerous, exposing, or simply impossible due to systemic erasure. As a result, the queer subject’s “lived experiences, and the cultural traces that they leave are frequently inadequate to the task of documentation” (Cvetkovich qtd. in Raffa 61). The traditional archive is also an apparatus of authority and the government—the figure enacting those same violences that deter queer lives from making it into the archive in the first place: “the archival, from the beginning, sustains power” (Taylor 19).
These forms of power underlying the traditional archive also affect its materiality. Here, I turn to affordance theory. Within the traditional archive, works are sorted in alphabetic-numeric order, categorized by its metadata. The primary affordance of the archive, determined by the qualities of its objects (here: categorized, sorted, hierarchical) and the abilities of its users (here: scholars, information-seekers) (Norman 11), is the logic of retrieval. This logic emphasizes traversals from point A to point B (guided by citations), efficient and without disruption. Even when exploring the archive, users would proceed in an orderly sequence, browsing the hierarchy of the archive by subjects, categories, or alphabetic-numeric order. So, the affordance of the traditional archive is defined by linearity. The archive is a space of unambiguity, with stratification and distinction built into the system, designed to separate and classify materials.
In contrast, it is impossible to proceed in a linear order when exploring Queering the Map. There is no implied direction to traverse the site; Queering the Map is an ambiguous space, devoid of hierarchies, categories, authorship—or really any distinctions. Every location pin appears the same, as a black teardrop that turns magenta on hover. Its content, “story”, is the only element unique to each pin; beyond that, all location pins on Queering the Map share an abstract equivalence. Queering the Map resists the affordance of retrieval (and with it, linearity) entirely. All users’ journey would begin in Montreal, necessitating traversals across the map to anywhere. Without a search function or any way to recall the order of their journey, users are denied the illusion of destinations. Navigation becomes a series of lateral, often chaotic movements—scrolling, zooming out to territories beyond the user’s viewport, zigzagging across terrains, accidentally clicking against pins that may contain anything. The platform refuses the user any other means of interacting with the map; the only action afforded is to meander—to undertake a fundamentally non-linear journey, to discover meaning across a surface without paths or endpoints. Queering the Map’s interface encourages the user to wander. As Sara Ahmed writes, “To go directly is to follow a line without a detour, without mediation. Within the concept of direction is a concept of ‘straightness.’ To follow a line might be a way of becoming straight, by not deviating at any point” (Ahmed 16). Queering the Map demands detours—a queer act.
A user can become part of Queering the Map’s archive by contributing stories. Queering the Map’s interface subtly encourages this: when clicking on an empty spot, a new pin appears—a hollow teardrop with a plus sign at its center. Beyond inviting submissions, the (+) teardrop visualizes how the user’s entry would be geo-located on the map, allowing them to imagine themselves in the archive. But even without adding stories, every user still actively participates in the making of this archive. Simply by meandering through the map, the user is “a part of the transmission” (Taylor 20) of queer histories—a transmission by design. As the user takes detours from one pin to the (ambiguous, abstractly equivalent) next, the boundaries between strangers’ submissions and their memory blur together. When the user arrives at sites significant to their personal history, their experience would fold into the stories already there, and so they would carry queer history within. Queering the Map’s interface encourages these lingering after-effects: the merging of strangers’ stories with one’s own, the warm welcome of invitation to contribute, the vision of one’s queer history among the collective. Designed for the resonances of co-creating queer history and insistent on lateral wanderings (as opposed to linear traversals), Queering the Map is decidedly a queer archive.
Queering the Map is also quite odd. Unlike the traditional archive, it does not seem to ever stay still—though maps, commonly associated with “archival memory”, are “supposedly resistant to change” (Taylor 19). My repeated meanderings on Queering the Map, performing the same scroll–zoom–click choreography, never yield the same terrains. Different clusters draw me in. A story blooms from a new pin. “Different worlds” (Ahmed 15) come into view, worlds represented by Queering the Map’s pink map of the Earth.
map
The map is a curious object. In a world saturated with logics of heteronormativity and violences, the map is at the service of the powerful, of authorities and the government. It projects the dominant power’s representation of land, of “the world” —“a world organized around the form of the heterosexual couple” (Ahmed 20), a world that does not welcome queer bodies. Yet maps also hold great potential for resistance. Nancy Peluso, who coined the term “counter-map” that is at the heart of Queering the Map, proposes that “maps can be used to pose alternatives to the languages and images of power and become a medium of empowerment or protest” (Peluso 386). Map-making and queer(ing) geography are also long-standing traditions of queer activism (for review of literature, see Brown and Knopp). For all of these reasons, it matters that Queering the Map is a map.
A VICE interview with Lucas LaRochelle, released shortly after the site first went viral, dubbed Queering the Map “the Queer version of Google Maps” (Burke). The article doesn’t quite explain why Queering the Map is a “queer version” of Google Maps. The comparison, headlining the piece, is simply taken for granted—understandable. According to Jakob’s Law, which is the idea that “users spend most of their time on other sites” and therefore expect new interfaces to behave like the ones they already know (Nielsen, qtd. in Kuang and Fabricant 318), it is inevitable that users would associate Queering the Map with Google Maps—the most common maps application (Snyder). In fact, its two billions of users (Li) would make the same immediate connection.
Might we excuse this analogy altogether? I disagree. In the following section, I will examine Google Maps as an example of a traditional map—one that would, through its surveillant quality and heterosexual construction of land, qualify as an enforcer of oppressive logics.
Google Maps’ value lies in its surveillant quality: its real-time tracking capacities (including, but not limited to, traffic slow-downs or roadblocks) and satellite imagery (Snyder). For example, Google StreetView—Google’s “realistic” representation of the world, from the perspective of a person walking/driving through it—is composed using a fleet of vehicles that take 360-degree footage throughout the world (Google Maps). Heavy surveillance underpins Google Maps and particularly StreetView: someone is always watching and capturing our likeness for their world-building project. (This world-building project would, on the side, make $11.1 billion off of its users through advertising (Keenan)). This logic of surveillance and hyper-visibility stands opposed to the queer subject’s aversion to “leaving too much of a trace” (Muñoz 6) and instead to be relegated to private spaces.
Queering the Map, in contrast, resists surveillance. It does not access users’ location (Burke). It does not even afford the possibility of advertising, due to the uniform appearance of pins (none can stand out among all others), lack of search (no chance to promote certain locations), and complete lack of advertisable content (only anonymous, un-identifiable submissions are published). It also does not track users’ activity at all (hence the inability to retrace our paths). The map of Queering the Map is one that forgets you. In refusing all surveillant missions, Queering the Map stands diametrically opposed to Google Maps, promising, instead, that it does not demand to see everything in order to recognize that a queer world can exist.
Furthermore, the map of Google Maps represents a heterosexual construction of land—a product of violence. Land, inheritable through reproduction, is the space for cultivating heterosexual relationships and ideally the heterosexual family. As argued by Maria Lugones, the birth of the “new gender system” (Lugones 186) that asserts heterosexuality as the norm and enforces oppression on the basis of gender is deeply tied to racism and colonialism (Lugones 202)—the conquest and reappropriation of (native) land. So the common conception of land as we know it is deeply, problematically, heterosexual. The map, including that of Google Maps, reproduces the world as defined by a history of coloniality, thus representing “a world organized around the form of the heterosexual couple” (Ahmed 20)—the world that does not afford the queer body. To interact with this world, Google Maps provides users with the search bar, recommended routes, goal-directed navigation—embodying a striated, hierarchical understanding of space.
Queering the Map—built on a platform structurally similar to Google Maps (Open StreetView)—embodies a radically different spatial logic. By aligning, instead, with the smooth space (as defined by Deleuze and Guattari), it rejects the heterosexual construction of land and embraces instead a queer spatiality. In his essay “Transgender Without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-affective Theory of Gender Modification”, Lucas Crawford identifies the smooth space as a concept laden with queer potentiality, using it to rethink gender transition and the queer body. Queering the Map, through its technological affordances, mobilizes the smooth space rather than hierarchical, striated, heterosexual mapping. Smooth space, as Deleuze and Guattari describe, is
“a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without "counting" it and can "be explored only by legwork."” (Deleuze and Guattari, qtd. in Crawford 564)
Queering the Map’s interface exemplifies this concept perfectly. Lacking any stratifications or hierarchical organizations of location pins/stories, its map is “without conduits or channels” and “nonmetric” (Deleuze and Guattari, qtd. in Crawford 564). There are no starting points or privileged centers on Queering the Map, and as aforementioned, no clear linar paths from any point A to any point B, making this map “acentered” and “rhizomatic” (Deleuze and Guattari, qtd. in Crawford 564). And the map can truly only “be explored by legwork” (Deleuze and Guattari, qtd. in Crawford 564), by meandering through stories and scrolling through an interface that denies users even the ability to search for destinations at all. Instead of hierarchical, goal-directed traversals, the map insists on an exploratory approach. Its users’ directions and orientations depend on their memories and conceptualization of territories: a user would be guided by their own sense of where their stories occur, where personal landmarks are. Queering the Map makes it so that the user’s personal experiences are the direction along which the world unfolds. It is as if the locations and pinpoints on Queering the Map are not defined concretely by spatial coordinates, rather by their proximities to other memories and spaces, so fluid and transient. The space of Queering the Map thus requires users to mobilize both their personal memories and tactile facilities (clicks, scrolls, zooms) to traverse—a full immersion in this space. In this way, Queering the Map queers the act of using the map itself, rejecting the organizational schemes that maps like Google Maps impose.
There also exists an inherent absurdity in maps such as Google Maps, one that Queering the Map ultimately subverts. Alex Carr Johnson said it well—writing on his traversal at the boundaries of Lake Michigan,
“On a map, the eastern boundary of the city is clean. It curls southeast along the shore of Lake Michigan, then cuts south at Indiana as straight as a longitudinal line. On the other side of the state line are Whiting, East Chicago, and Gary, towns that only gamblers and family members visit. Everybody else just lives there. In reality, the eastern boundary of the city has no boundary at all. It continues its concrete, steel, and electrical-line unfurling along the southern shore of the great lake of Michigan. We were two white men, hurtling on four rubber wheels down the concrete Skyway, a corridor of semis and freight trains and transistors and faceless industrial complexes blinking out toward the lake.” (Johnson)
Evidently, nature and our spatial experience in the world—even our built environment, with all of our concrete and steel—defies the logic of mapping. Maps, including Google Maps, delineate clear-cut areas of land, attribute boundaries to them, and affix titles to land that, in reality, stretches gradually in all directions. And these absurd boundaries serve to enforce the “monopoly of authoritative resources by the state or capital” (Peluso 386).
While Queering the Map inherits a mapping interface and all the absurd delineations within, it ultimately allows and actively encourages the blurring of borders. As more pins are added, they accumulate and form large swatches of black, covering up the map underneath. Zoomed out, clusters of pins drape over territorial lines, quite literally erasing national borders to form new “lands” in the shape of queer stories.
The queer subject, so often positioned as unnatural, as outside of nature (Johnson), is now placed in the natural landscape of the Earth. Queering the Map’s interface makes it possible for them to not just find but to construct their space within the fabric of the world, stretching borders between land and sea to fit their memories and experiences, quite literally extending the world to their shape. There is space for every queer person on this map. Eventually, when the pink Earth becomes a mass of black pins, the absurdity of delineations in the land would completely collapse.
While not without its complications, this visual blurring gestures to an alternative mode of existing on “land”—one that questions sovereignty, borders, nations, and the powers that occupy and enforce them. Notes left in all of the world’s oceans, in North Korea (where Internet access is restricted), in Antarctica (generally regarded as uninhabitable) all indicate that queer people are cognizant of the restrictions the current world enforces upon queer existence—enhanced by borders and the authority of maps. Among these stories, I find well wishes, fantasies of liberation, and quite creative jokes about gay penguins. Clearly, on the surface of Queering the Map’s pink Earth, anything is possible.
Through its design and affordances, the map of Queering the Map rejects surveillance, refuses the heterosexual constructions of land to embrace the smooth space laden with queer potentiality, and transcends absurd, fixed borders. It remakes the world, allowing queer subjects to encounter the world differently—one where their existence is wholly embraced.
community
In my analysis so far, I have touched on how the properties of Queering the Map as both a queer archive and queer map contribute to producing positive affect, including the sense of belonging, adventure, and expansive possibility for queer subjects. Queering the Map also produces palpable emotions. I have felt joy when reading heartwarming stories, anger and hurt at injustices targeted at queer people, sadness when sharing in someone’s grief, amusement at cheeky jokes, and so much more in my many returns to Queering the Map. These emotions point towards connections, no matter how fleeting, that I have with the amorphous population of “queer subjects” and their subjectivities. Together, they amount to a sense of community.
The personal resonance I feel, then, perfectly mirrors LaRochelle’s goal for the site as a community re-engagement project (Burke). But this is quite curious. Queering the Map does not have any of the social features supposed to make online platforms “social”—no identifying profiles, no likes to indicate affirmation or affiliation, no replies or shares to allow echoing of views. So how does this site, so resistant to the usual digital cues of connectivity, facilitate such successful community-building?
I sense that it is because the design and affordances of the site allows us to easily imagine a community of queer subjects. It does so in a similar way that the nation came to be—people perceive themselves as part of a collective not due to interpersonal connections, but through a shared spatiality and temporality engineered by media (Anderson 9-46).
On Queering the Map, all queer subjects are invited to exist in the same space—its smooth space that encourages meandering and inevitable encounters with each other. All stories within the rich archive of Queering the Map are located on the same flat plane: that of the user’s device. There are no timestamps on stories; the site itself does not reveal when it is made or how recently it was updated. When on Queering the Map, only one time exists: the user’s time set to their locale, blinking at the edge of their device. Messages carrying queer memories and experiences hence always arrive “from the deepest present” (Johnson), equally written at the moment of encounter as they are delivered from a distant past. All messages gather in a flat temporality that first and foremost belong to the user. Thus in what feels like an impossible contradiction, Queering the Map users are able to imagine a tangible community of other queer subjects in the same placeless spatiality and asynchronous temporality, an ever-expanding moment that transcends differences.
In our current world that privileges designing for efficiency and productivity, Queering the Map offers an alternative mode of designing technology for human connection. It resists conventional design logic in relinquishing the control of its designers. Instead, it is designed to be taken over—to be covered up and reshaped, embracing unruly accumulation of content to transform into new user-directed forms. And rather than streamlining interaction, its archive-map encourages users to perform the choreography of meandering, necessitating slow exploration of the platform. Its interface is designed to primarily afford the act of “going astray, getting lost, or even becoming queer” (Ahmed 21) that brings into view new, more inclusive worlds. Queering the Map is indeed queerly designed.
Attending to the queerness present in this platform, we recognize that technology (particularly computation) indeed has the latent capacity to reimagine and facilitate new relationships with queer feelings, experiences, and memories. None of Queering the Map’s queerness is accidental: someone intentionally designed this platform to afford such rich interactions. Design conventions, shaped by dominant values, have “buffed away the clues of what might have been otherwise” (Kuang and Fabricant 299)—perhaps including queered design. But those values can very well change. As digital interfaces mediate everyday life, repeated turns to queer digital objects such as Queering the Map may allow new forms of queer futurity to take shape and be realized. The role of the designer for digital interfaces, then, is of critical importance. Designing for queer pasts, presents, and futures would mean questioning everyday objects and critically investigating the queer potentiality in technological affordances. It would also mean taking risks and straying away from design norms, for what is built for queer subjects probably cannot be found in the archives.
While we are indeed not yet able to imagine our world without stratification into hemispheres (Ahmed 13), Queering the Map shows what an alternative way of inhabiting it could look like. In this world where maps uphold violent, heterosexual representations of land and archival institutions are inadequate to preserve or even acknowledge queer stories, Queering the Map insists on collective queer memory. It says: we are right here.
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