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TRANSCRIPT OF INTRODUCTION

Thank you all for being here for this incredibly inspiring conference led by a true dream scene of an organizing committee. The minimized environmental impact of this conference is substantive – all of us being in Hawaii is an incredible toll, particularly in a year that the state itself has discouraged travel — I hope that we will continue to build infrastructure to put forward ourselves, our ideas and our environment jointly. I hope this is the first conference of many. And thank you all for being here for this series of papers and talks on Queer HCI.

Following the previous session about the invisibilized labor and uneven distribution of users and the dominant position of developers who have, as Vera did such a wonderful job satirizing, have never driven a bus… Our session asks: what happens when we design from the perspective of the users, as queer folk designing for queer experience. The next session represents a crossing of multiple generations of queer HCI scholars asking questions of our queer history and present that get answered through multiple innovative approaches from cultural probes, literature analysis, archival work and online forum analysis.

We have always been here, though recognized in many different ways throughout time, and in terminologies that have been shifting, particularly in recent years. These scholars illuminate the connection between generations, bringing the elders into the present day,  the expansiveness of the term “queer” from bell hooks’ queerness as resistance to queer as “anyone who lands in the rainbow alphabet of LGBTQIA”. Through both the authors’ positionality statements and the experiences of their research subjects, we see that identity management and privacy remains key, where disclosure is still often a privilege, or held within realms of “strategic outness” or something that happens subtly for only others who will recognize the signals — like being a Tumblr superuser or transformative fandom content creator, where queerness is regularly explored often without explicit statement of orientation by the author.

It is worth highlighting the significant work that our authors took to identify their queer subjects – not always a simple checkbox on a survey question. And, in doing so, they also took important precautions to ensure the safety of their participants, whether they be online or in person. And, through their work, we see how it is now more possible to identify as queer as both a user and researcher, to employ queer theory in HCI spaces and to outwardly design for queer experiences. These works powerfully add to to the recent chorus of queer scholars in HCI that are interested in engendering less problematic and more meaningful queer and trans experiences on and offline.

Through their work we see how tech-focused narratives sometimes miss the joyful lived experiences of queer and trans people, naming us as marginalized and not as users operating in a different paradigm. We see solidarity, community building, and resilience. I really look forward to hearing from the authors in person and developing this lived experience with you all.