Queering the Map: Stories of love, loss and (be)longing within a digital cartographic archive

Abstract

The rise of crowdsourced and participatory digital platforms which aim to make visible the experiences of otherwise marginalised people are significant within the broader landscape of digitally mediated community spaces. One example of such media is Queering the Map, a digital storymapping platform where users anonymously pin ‘queer moments’ and memories to places. While the mediation of affect and intimacy in digital spaces among queer people is increasingly attended to in scholarly work, the cartographic and archival remains hitherto underexplored. Drawing on an analysis of almost 2000 micro-stories geolocated to Australia, in this article we explore various aspects of story contribution that situate Queering the Map as a lively cartographic archive. Rather than necessarily anonymous (as the platform dictates), the posts, we argue, entail various deliberated directions or gestures, encoded for audiences: what we term stories for someone. We highlight these publicly private stories’ connective and affective underpinnings, and the political potentialities (and problems) therein for queer belonging and community-building. In doing so we seek to contribute to scholarship on digital archives, crowdsourcing, and advance conceptualisations of digital intimacies.

LGBTQIA+ cartographies in filmic Madrid: narrative traits of spatial characterization

“…A further avenue of investigation might involve a comparison of the cinematic LGBTQI+ cartography to that offered by projects such as Queering the map (Kirby et al, 2021), with the object of revealing possible disagreements in the process of stereotyping. Aware of negative biases in spatial characterizations, several researchers have begun initiatives to locate spaces that have relevance to the LGBTQI+ community, for example, Queering the map, 13 where, by means of a collaborative platform, anonymous citizens can take part in creating a map of memorable personal moments in their LGBTQI+ lived experience.…”

Situated Talk: A method for a reflexive encounter with #donorconceived on TikTok

“…Existing scholarship on TikTok has emphasised the role of affective atmospheres on the app, especially in relation to how trend-driven the platform is (Southerton, 2021). As Southerton (2021, p. 3252) has argued ‘[w]hen content is shared, it is not merely an expression of a user's psychological state but an offering toward a collective affective state a viewer of the TikTok may feel, which is constantly shifting within the many broader communities on the platform’ (see also Kirby et al, 2021) Taking seriously the sensory dimensions of TikTok, throughout our situated and reflexive conversation, we draw on our own bodily sensations – especially moments of discomfort and unease – to identify generative lines of inquiry. Indeed, drawing on Ahmed's work, Chadwick (2021: 16) argues ‘staying with the discomfort’ can be a generative practice that ‘resists the erasure of differences’.…”

“…Accordingly, spaces to connect around donor conception have emerged on social media platforms, most notably within private Facebook groups for donor-conceived people, donors and (prospective) recipient parents (those who conceive(d) using donor gametes) (Andreassen, 2018; Darroch and Smith, 2021). A range of studies have explored how LGBTQ + people have used social media to connect with peers and represent themselves, especially since their identities and families are often not sufficiently visible within heteronormative mainstream media (Byron, 2020; Kirby et al, 2021). Over the last decades, LGBTQ + users have formed Facebook communities with a specific focus on family and parenting such as ‘rainbow families’, ‘lesbian mothers’, ‘solo mothers’ and ‘gay fathers’ where approaches to ‘alternative’ family formation can be discussed (Andreassen, 2018).…”

uMap: A Free Open-Source Alternative to Google My Maps

“…Today, Crowdspot appears to be an interesting alternative to Ushahidi to set up crowdmapping projects (see for instance Tanner et al 2020), but it is neither open-source nor free. Other JavaScript-based webmapping libraries such as Mapbox, Leaflet, OpenLayers and even Google's Maps API have been mobilized by more tech-savvy individuals to design one-off online mapping applications with crowdmapping functions such as the Queering the Map project (LaRochelle 2020; Kirby et al 2021). However, tailoring these applications often requires a certain level of technological expertise that make them inappropriate for crowdmapping projects with low budgets and limited technological resources.…”