ABSTRACT
In the wake of the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, Club Quarantine (Club Q) emerged as an antidote to social distancing and isolation, carving out a space and time where fractured queer communities could reunite and party together on Zoom. By investigating Club Q’s activities on both Zoom and Instagram, as well as the ways in which these activities crossover and intersect, this chapter seeks to elucidate how users of such digital technologies can activate new forms of political subjectivation while remaining under the stronghold of platform power. Unfolding through a multidisciplinary lens, it bridges together contemporary literature from platform and software studies, queer theory, and Jacques Ranciere’s writings on the politics of aesthetics to develop a comprehensive framework for grasping the often dis-sensual and multivalent character of queer digital protest. Combating this stabilizing dynamic of the police, according to Ranciere, takes place primarily through the practice of disidentification.
