This book examines the cultural and political effects of algorithms in shaping queer digital expression & online anti-queer backlash, as well as their technological role in the erosion of global democracy. In recent years, the globe has seen the rise of various technologically-mediated fascisms that have weaponized the networked conditions of social media in places like the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Key to this rise in digital authoritarianism has been the inflammation of questions surrounding gender & sexuality, as immigration, globalization, and transnational digital networks have disrupted various nationalist conceptions of media sovereignty and identity. At the same time, global movements toward LGBTQ+ acceptance have surfaced in new media economies on social media and streaming television. As new U.S. tech & media hybrids have crossed borders in the post-internet streaming era, their activities in various national media economies have spotlighted new visibility for existing LGBTQ+ populations, thereby threatening older media censorship regimes meant to manage the visual economy of sexuality that were vital for shaping the legitimacy of national political regimes. At the same time, the global and transnational character of this queer media, and its links to the spread of U.S. techno-capitalism, have created new opportunities for framing the diffusion of LGBTQ+ inclusivity as foreign and linked to neocolonial incursions into local media economies. Thus, Queer Contagions asks what scholars might learn by interrogating these global authoritarian movements as a reactionary response to the digital & algorithmic circulation of queer media, circulations that have revealed new visibilities of LGBTQ+ communities as nationalist media regimes have eroded and increasingly borderless techno-capitalism has unleashed new ‘foreign’ influences into domestic media cultures.

Responding to this question, the book is propelled by a recognition that these gender & sexual crises are themselves not new in the history of visual media, as they hearken back to the origins of the moving image. To this end, Queer Contagions starts by considering the queer dimensions of early media technologies for their capacity to unsettle existing social and political imaginations of the late 19th-century. To ground this discussion, I survey how the rise of anti-obscenity laws sought to restrict and regulate the circulation of media for its queer potential to disrupt national order by introducing social contagion. Deploying concepts of public hygiene, these earlier censors imagined the need to regulate film as continuous with the biopolitical management of the national public, seeking to install a fixed system of gender expression and heterosexual relations to manage poverty domestically and justify white European rule globally. In response to this system of censorship, Queer Contagions traces how these conditions shaped the global circulation of sexuality from U.S. media and how colonial regimes sought to censor these images internationally. In particular, I look at how systems of censorship shaped queer media through, to quote Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the “epistemology of the closet” by disciplining queer media through paradigms of visibility/invisibility in ways that drew upon the existing representational discourses of Hollywood public relations practices. In raising these historical constructions of visibility politics, Queer Contagions looks at how these discourses structured the early visual economies of networked communication via Bulletin Board Systems, the World Wide Web, and microblogging platforms. This reading of queer techno-utopianism in the context of broader media histories, moreover, is made more compelling as a site of critical inquiry when considering how these sets of visibility politics became a critical aspect of the corporate redevelopment of the internet leading to the platform era, as the growth of monopolies in user-generated content via YouTube & Facebook/Instagram and streaming services via Netflix directly synthesized this language of queer visibility within the context of growing data and informational monopolies.

In raising this history, Queer Contagions contends that platform capitalism has domesticated the disruptive potential of queer cultural production in service of a new global media economy. To support this claim, I look at how platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Netflix have courted these sets of representational politics and the ways that they regulate them on their platform. I examine how the ‘platforming’ of these queer representational discourses standardized new constructions of queer identity through algorithmic and cultural logics, while structuring new advertising regimes led by LGBTQ+ user-generated content and influencers. On Netflix, similar systems of queer visibility have been revealed at work as the streaming service first invested in LGBTQ+-themed content to grow its U.S. platform domestically. As the streaming giant has invested in similar content strategies globally, the company has been criticized for exporting economic precarity to global markets of creative labor. In this context, I interrogate how this global distribution of queer visibility by U.S. tech-media hybrids participates in a larger remapping of U.S. global influence and neocolonial development of local media markets. Looking at popular media industry discourses, I explain how the hypervisibility of U.S. LGBTQ+ media content works to produce geographies of a free United States & Europe against competing nations by emphasizing these anti-queer censorship regimes. Looking for moments of this discursive breakdown, I challenge these existing imperial narratives to look at how the lack of platform governance on social media has led to a rise in the automated amplification of anti-queer hate speech in the global Anglosphere (U.S., UK, Scotland, Australia), as well as practices of self-regulating the representation of queer characters by Netflix in places like Malaysia, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia. By looking at how digital technologies have standardized and domesticated queer representation in service of U.S. empire, these debates over LGBTQ+ media, thus, recall older colonial epistemologies to justify the economic re-development of various national media markets by the United States in the name of advancing ‘civilizational’ enlightenment.