QUEER COMMUNITY ARCHIVE ON PERVERSE DIGITAL SPACES
I am Suisui Wang, a doctoral student in gender studies. Through HASTAC scholar project, I hope to assemble a Chinese queer community archive in perverse online spaces. I amass materials from sites where queer existence are ephemeral, amorphous, and pathologized – a medical consultation platform where “sexual perverts” seek clinical care and cure; the longest run online advice column filled with sexual agonies and banal yearnings; several defunct advocacy websites closed down by the government. I excavate these digital traces of queer existence generated from decentralized online participation, most of which fall outside “modern” and “Western” identitarian registers such as gayness or queerness. As part of my doctoral research on transpacific queer therapeutics, I center these narratives from perverse space as sources of knowledge production, as well as tackling politics of erasure, unknowing, and digital memory.