ABSTRACT
Queering the Map is a community-generated counter-mapping platform that digitally archives queer experience in relation 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. The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical reading of Queering the Map as a digital queer archive and my role as its creator. I 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, I 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, I 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, I reflect on the resulting user experience(s) that emerge(s) from these choices, by describing the disorienting experience of navigating the map.
