My research, broadly conceived, considers digital technologies’ long-term impacts on social movement organizing and political activism. In my work, I study the points of contact between identity, activism, and technological affordances and constraints. As such, my research is interdisciplinary, connecting the user-centric approaches of feminist science and technology studies with digital humanities and LGBTQ Studies’ critical attention to movement history. My research is driven by a commitment to using these histories as a foundation for imagining how new digital technologies might correct earlier failures and be used to create a better future for all users, particularly those who might otherwise be further marginalized. Moreover, this work requires engaging deeply with the ethical challenges of studying and archiving born-digital materials, especially content by vulnerable populations.
My first book, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) explores how the “internet revolution” shaped transgender movement politics from the 1980s up to the current political moment. The Two Revolutions reconstructs the various digital networks of political activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who incited the second “revolution” of the title: the emergence of “transgender” as a collective political identity in the mid-1990s. Taking a historical approach, each chapter of The Two Revolutions considers how trans users engaged with the platforms and their attendant affordances which have at various points composed “the Net:” bulletin board systems (or BBSes), commercial “walled gardens” like AOL and Compuserve, Usenet, websites, and algorithms and semantic tagging. Drawing methodological inspiration from platform studies, each chapter considers the ways platform design influenced not just community discourse but also its major political goals.
Current Research
My next book project, tentatively titled Otherwise Networks,explores a set of case studies within the history of digital communication that directs attention to those communities and technologies not widely embraced by venture capital before and after the dot-com bubble, which so often dominate popular histories of digital communication. These histories, I argue, represent the roads not taken—what could have happened, but didn’t. Currently, the case studies are organized into one of three sections—Scale (LGBTQ BBSes); Governance and Content Moderation (FidoNet); and Infrastructure and Access (Community ISPs). Each section title and the associated cases reflects the specific area where these historical networks differed from their popular contemporaries not just in terms of design and affordances, but the rhetoric key actors used when they discussed the network with their users and the wider public. In other words, not just how they developed and implemented the technology, but the narratives they used to explain what digital communication was for. Taken together, I argue the stories in Otherwise Networks represent a counter-history of digital networking in the United States—one told from the perspective of community, not commerce.