Sonic Technologies of a Queer Breakup

Abstract

Over the past decade, the growth of voice assistants has presented new challenges within domestic life. Prior research has shown that such technologies afect users unevenly or fail to account for some relationships and domesticities entirely. Our work investigates the under-examined topic of queerness at home. Drawing on the experience of queer breakup, we describe a design inquiry and a frst-person research approach exploring two concurrent relationships in separate households both using Alexa. We explore issues of temporality, glitch, and shared accountability. We also ask critical questions with audio experiments, including: How do voice assistants diferentiate between queer voices? How should we converse with voice assistants about queerness? And are voice assistants "queer enough"? We contribute a discussion of diference, inclusion, and queer cultures of adversarial use to highlight the limitations of both everyday and professional language for describing and analyzing the particulars of queerness and interaction design. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing; • Interaction design; • Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms;

Cruising Queer HCI on the DL: A Literature Review of LGBTQ+ People in HCI

“…The first papers about the experiences of sexual minority women 13 was published at CHI in 2022 [45,46]. That same year, the first paper centering relationship dynamics beyond monogamy, which explored the breakup of a polyamorous queer couple, was published at DIS [128].…”

“…There is very little HCI research on specific queer populations. We found one paper centered on polyamorous queer people [128], one centered on bisexual people [213], and two centered on sexual minority women [45,46]. Clearly, there is "much ground to be covered" in research on queer populations [51,53], and specificity in Queer HCI research is a way we can be held accountable as a research community to cover this ground.…”