Embodying Turing’s Machine: Queer, Embodied Rhetorics in the History of Digital Computation

The Dark Posthuman

“…14 This body's awkward temporal assertion causes those around it to question the very nature of what Ahuja refers to as "the imperial interest in the racialized matter we call bodies. " 15 In its particularity it exists as a degraded life of no consequence. However, such bodies, by extension, are conceptually lacking in nothing if the parts of these bodies are actualized, and those which remain indefinite are temporally accounted for.…”

“…14 For that time period specifically, Feiner explains, "one had to often know their mere existence and expression as a human being meant legal and punitive threat and violence and possible death. " 15 In subsequent decades, such punishment has taken on the appearance of a "specter, " wherein het- 12 Ibid.,20. 13 Ibid.,[48][49] erosexual violence now assumes a vaguer stance against queer bodies and queer life while at the same time remaining revenant to the present, as evidence of a contemporary fracturing of time itself, in which "the countless murders of trans women of color, and the increased hate crimes and activity among reactionary male affinity groups" remain ancillary to present conditions; yet the crimes ominously persist in order to "peer upon neoliberal trajectories of normative gay and lesbian politics, " libidinally squaring the boundaries between engenderment and endangerment.…”

“…This is a particularly grievous bargain, one that Philip Butler reads "as a power move" that effectively rewards "the executors of ancestral communal violence" by requiring both their assent to peaceably "move beyond it" and the complimentary discharge of their aggressors' "ontological debt. " 15 It remains unclear what these aggrieved parties might get in return as there is no mention of any deal to challenge "the capitalist socioeconomic structure" that was built off their backs and was the source of their misery and exclusion dating back centuries. 16 Nor is there any acknowledgement that their subjugation might very well be required again in future to maintain the standards of what a certain mankind has always referred to as "civilization. "…”

The Computer as a Queer Object

“…Queer rhetorics are "identification to disrupt and reroute the flows of power, particularly discursive power" (Fancher 2018). Scholarship which reveals the "coded discriminations" (Benjamin 2019; Phan 2019) is only the first step in disrupting the power.…”

“…This is further asserted by Turing's formative paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Turing 2009), which develops a test for a machine's intelligence based on the imitation game. The imitation game is a guessing game where one must guess the gender of a concealed person based on how they answer questions (Turing 2009;Fancher 2018). Furthermore, Fancher argues that Turing's technical writing of the machine feminizes intelligence and that by comparing what a machine cannot do, like "falling in love and eating strawberries and cream, Turing places bodily experiences central to machine intelligence" (emphasis ours) (Fancher 2018, 98).…”