Queering the Map: On Designing Digital Queer Space

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Lucas LaRochelle is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and co-creative media. They are the founder of "Queering The Map," a community generated counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experiences in relationship to physical space.

The interactive map provides an interface with which to collaboratively archive the cartography of queer life—from park benches to the middle of the ocean—in order to preserve queer histories and unfolding realities. From collective action to stories of coming out, encounters with violence to moments of rapturous love, "Queering the Map" functions as a living archive of queer life across the world. By mapping out LGBTQ2IA+ experiences in their intersectional permutations, the project works to generate affinity across difference and beyond borders.

This talk will provide a critical reading of "Queering the Map" as a digital queer archive and LaRochelle’s role as its creator and steward. They begin by charting the trajectory and theoretical underpinnings of this practice-based project in order to situate it in relation to the critical work on queer spatialities that led to its emergence. From there, they make a case for resisting the academic impulse to make sense of the stories shared to "Queering the Map," opting to reproduce a selection of them in full to assert them as agential theoretical fragments in their own right. Following this, they explore the ways in which "Queering the Map" functions as a queer map—rather than simply a map of queer stories—by discussing the decisions made in the design of its interface. Finally, LaRochelle reflects on the resulting user experience(s) that emerge(s) from these choices, by describing the disorienting experience of navigating the map.

As they illuminate through a winding path of practice, theory and reflection—to be lost is a feature, not a bug.