Cowan, McLeod, & Rault chronicle the challenge of creating digital spaces that house and encourage trans-feminist and queer affective and cultural archives.
"…We are also wary of the ways in which a project like ours is always already complicit in the racist, settler-colonial, expansionist violence and logics of our corporate academic industry that is designed to flatten, regulate and instrumentalize the other ways to be/of being that motivate our work. We need to foreground how this project relies on the immaterial and affective labour of artists, audiences and organizers and how our project both seeks to archive these labours and affects AND reproduces these economies. By ‘immaterial labour’ we follow Maurizio Lazzarato’s formulation of ‘labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (1996), and affective labours that are driven by intimacy, commitment, care, love, desire, community and community-building, but which go unrecognized, under-appreciated and un- or under-remunerated—this is affective work that is typically ignored but absolutely expected within the queer economies of world-making[63], in an analogous way to “women’s work” and now so uncannily familiar in ‘user-generated’ Web 2.0 culture. How do we account for asymmetrical affective labours of artists and audience members who are minoritized within these spaces and do the work of being the “diversity” in the room/on the stage that allows everyone who is majoritized to feel good.[64] What does it mean to be an audience member (of colour, trans- feminine, Indigenous, Métis, etc.) doing the work of supporting predominantly white, predominantly non-trans identified women, in a larger/broader cultural context of white supremacy and trans- misogyny?”
