Collaging together-apart: representations of queer joy in digital spaces

This paper examines how queer joy in digital spaces is platformed, performed, and imagined through discussions and collages created during a participatory workshop in the North of England. By exploring current and desired forms of queer joy in digital spaces, we evaluate opportunities and challenges for design, including selective anonymity and disclosure, and flexible group boundaries to protect safety whilst also signalling in-group belonging. Drawing on notion of cutting together-apart (Barad, 2014), we use collage as a queer methodology that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs relationships and meanings, enabling expression of complex, fluid, multiple and evolving selves. With roots in political critique and uncovering unconscious thought, collage is well suited to the examination of identity and joy. The particular value of drawing on entangled assemblages for exploring queer identity – particularly in the online context we consider here – can be thought of in terms of collage: constructing self through an active assembling of relation, emotion and expressions better thought of not as a collection of pre-existing building blocks (concepts and bodies) but rather as always iteratively co-constituted and entangled. Collaging-together-apart in this work is enlivened as an agential iterative and incessant doing that reworks meaning and relation intra-actively from within. cutting together-apart,cutting together-apart,