The Queer Data Showcase: queer data as an adjective and as a verb

This event, taking place in Pride Month, was a first-of-its-kind showcase spotlighting artists, academics, and activists working with queer data, co-organised by the Gender + Sexuality Data Lab, Pride in STEM and AI Ethics & Society. The showcase was a performance as well as a space to meet and forge connections, to feel joy, sadness and anger. Kaveri Qureshi reflects on how the showcase addressed queer data as an adjective and as a verb.

Yesterday night I found myself in the Cabaret Bar in the Pleasance laughing, weeping and raging at the phenomenon (no other word for this springs to mind) that was the Queer Data Showcase. This event as brilliantly curated by Kevin Guyan of the Gender + Sexuality Data Lab, SJ Bennett and Vassilis Galanos from AI Ethics & Society, and folk from Pride in STEM.

I have to admit, I approached the event – as a self-confessed technophobe – with some trepidation. But reassuringly, the composition of the event was wonderfully inclusive. In terms of the materiality of the data, the types of data being addressed, the presentations ranged from historical archives, to ethnographic fieldnotes, to biographical data about individuals, to the life-course, demographic, bio- and psycho-metric data of social research, to data categories related to sexual orientation and gender identity, to then the big data amassed by social media companies. The conversation ranged freely across disciplines, between the concrete and the imagined, across academia and activism and change projects. A central theme was the high real-world stakes of this data in terms of queer lives and vulnerabilities.

I’ll try to briefly give a flavour of the event, by reflecting on two ways that the presentations and performances addressed queer data: first as an adjective, and then as a verb.

The term queer can be related to data as an adjective, thinking about data about queerness. For instance, JT Welsch talked about the mythical 1% figure that is widely cited as a population prevalence for asexuality, its distorted historical provenance in terms of Kinsey’s sexological work on the USA and then the UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, and showed how this 1% figure is recited in the media. Interestingly, over time, this 1% figure has been cited less and less as a statement of fact about populations, and more and more, this statistic has been critiqued. Perhaps then, as Welsch suggested, this promises a world in which asexuality doesn’t have to work so hard to qualify itself. 

The term queer can also be related to data as a verb, putting the emphasis on the process of actively queer-ing what can, or should be done with data. In this vein, Zosia Kuczynska’s performance was about working at the Lavender Menace queer archive and the terms of engagement that are needed to approach such an archive, not in the conquistador mode of discovery and conquest, but to humbly recognise that a queer archive is composed of absences, of what’s not there; where you have to resist the assumption of understanding, because you won’t understand at all; where you are mindful of your present, and how that shapes your encounter with the archive; and try to overcome your inner queer vampire that wants to see yourself reflected in that archive. 

Meg Fereday talked about a neuroqueer method to approach the datapoint itself, of neuroqueer: a social media hashtag capturing what it means to be both queer and neurodivergent as well as, a field of study seeking to queer normative thought and behaviour. Meg described how their efforts to make Gephi maps of the terms and topics connected to #neuroqueer on tiktok were initially thwarted by the swirling messy complexity of this data and how they slowly realised that this dataset needed to be read in a neuroqueer way. First you must stim the data, rolling in and out of its meaning. Then you let yourself get distracted. This means not looking at the big, obvious nodes of the Gephi map but letting yourself get lost in the finer details of the margins; margins where #neurodiverse connected to hashtags about health conditions, or neurotypical humour. 

Katherine Wyers didn’t  talk at all. Rather, they played the saxophone in accompaniment to a powerpoint montage with descriptions and fieldnote excerpts from their ethnographic research on gender category changes in informational infrastructures. The piercing notes of joy and despair in the jazz improv response captured how the data from their fieldwork was crushingly hard to gather, but tells a story of what it’s like for trans people when data gets recategorized.

Queer research methods are political; they are about using data to make changes on some level, to build queer futures. Jess Parris Westbrook talked spellbindingly about the panoply of data about queer people across social, bio- and psy- research, that could be put together to queer purposes to create ‘what-if’ scenarios, queer time travel and queer time machines. Jess described their method of data-driven speculation by which social signs in queer data are analysed and used, in a blend of magic and science, to reprogram memories, bringing relief, closure and reset; and activating foresight and a posthuman queer future in which you will get to live, abundantly and freely. 

Alfredo Carpineti talked about Pride in STEM and how this body highlights the presence of LGBTQIA+ people in these disciplines, doing events in which queer people in STEM can talk about their work in an approachable way and using data about the presence of, and barriers faced by queer people working in STEM to try to make these disciplines more inclusive. 

Rodrigo Tadeu Guimarães Jales talked about queer human rights advocacy and how the invisibility of queer people in human rights data is deadly. Queering human rights is about challenging who gets dignity, legal protection and space to breathe. For this, data about queer people is needed, because if no data exists, then no resources will flow to queer people’s needs. At the same time, the data that gets collected about queer people must be queered, meaning, the prescriptive binarism and clear-cut boundaries of categories such as male/female, gay/straight must be flipped and reinvented.

Kim Foale talked about how big tech has colonised queer and trans communities and how it has become impossible to have a queer or trans social life without using social media platforms owned by hostile billionaires. To challenge and counter this, Kim has been creating an open-source online platform to collate an up-to-date directory of events across the UK. Rather than one big national organisation, the idea is to support small, local work. Direct action and protest work can give burnout; by making community, we can instead regenerate communities.

This message about getting off our phones, and meeting in person more feels like a fitting one with which to end, in light of the idea that queer research is about collectivity and affect. I wish I could capture in writing, the energy and affect in the room, brought out with flamboyance, humour and smartness by drag queen host Mystika Glamoor. The performances made my fists clench in fury, my eyes well up, as well as laugh like a drain. The notes of the saxophone. The event really was a first-of-its kind.