The hottest new queer club: investigating Club Quarantine’s off-label queer use of Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Lockdowns and preventative measures during the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of nightlife venues that have long served as outlets for queer sociality. This article examines queer people’s response to such measures through a study of Club Quarantine (Club Q), a series of online queer club nights established during the early days of Canada’s lockdown in March 2020. It draws on mixed methods to explore Club Q’s negotiation of Zoom videoconferencing software for hosting and animating club nights, combining participant observation with examination of Club Q’s promotion and media coverage as well as applying the walkthrough method to Zoom. Findings show that Club Q appropriated Zoom through redefinition, adaptation, and reinvention of the platform, reorienting its purpose from business solutions to queer representation, connection, and solidarity. We conclude that Club Q merges off-label use, as technological appropriation that negotiates hurdles specific to platform technology, governance, and economic interests, with queer use­–activity that establishes queer space. We conceptualize this queer appropriation as ‘off-label queer use’: practices of platform appropriation that release a queer potentiality for challenging heteronormative and marginalizing technosocial structures. Club Q challenged platform features and policies that constrained sexual expression and posed safety risks for queer users while providing a queer space for fostering resilience and solidarity during crisis. This article’s theoretical contribution enables the identification of off-label queer use in other arrangements of users and technology, allowing for an understanding of when platforms facilitate or inhibit queer survival strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Appropriation
• videoconferencing
• platforms
• sexuality
• LGBTQ
• queer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This research has received ethics approval under the certification number 30011429 from Concordia University as part of a larger study of queer social media.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number 430-2019-00866].

Notes on contributors

Stefanie Duguay

Stefanie Duguay is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She is also a Concordia University Research Chair in Digital Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality. Her research focuses on the intersection of digital media and technologies with representations and practices pertaining to sexual identity, gender, relationships, and activism.

Anne-Marie Trépanier

Anne-Marie Trépanier is an MA student in Media Studies at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. They are also a research assistant at the Digital Intimacy, Gender & Sexuality Lab, and a member of the Feminist Media Studio at this same university. Their research interests are artistic practices, information activism, alternative media, and feminist and queer critique of media and technology. Their thesis focuses on networked media practices and information activism through a media archeology of cyberfeminist, artist-run websites. Moreover, they analyze how these websites and digital networks were informed by a desire to open ‘cyberspace’ to women and give them the tools to develop a critical and creative engagement with new technologies.

Alex Chartrand

Alex Chartrand is a PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and is a member of the Digital Intimacy, Gender & Sexuality Lab. He is also currently an Associate Doctoral Candidate at Configurations of Film at Goethe Universität, Germany. His interests are online social movements, queer countercultures, platform governance, algorithmic studies and alternative use of technology. He works on algorithm-related controversies across social media platforms and how LGBTQ+ users are increasingly mobilizing against it, analyzing how users and activists perceive algorithmic bias and how this understanding shapes their repertoire of actions. Moreover, his research asks how users make sense of their activism while remaining active members of these social media platforms.