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“A Queer History of Blackouts” by Dr. Cait McKinney
September 25 | 16:30 - 18:00
Clusters: Media and Materiality
Media History Research Center (MHRC), DIGS Lab and Archive/Counter Archive (A/CA) are delighted to invite you to Dr Cait McKinney’s talk “A Queer History of Blackouts.”
In this talk, McKinney offers a media history of the online blackout as a digital tactic grounded in 1990s AIDS activism. “Blackout” protests evoke power grid failures, temporarily shutting down online systems by removing content, blocking access, or replacing content with black imagery. This lasting tactic began with New York-based Visual AIDS and Creative Time’s Day Without Art online blackout (1995–2000), which drew attention to the AIDS crisis as a systemic failure to care for minoritized people. The protest asked participating sites to adopt a small banner graphic and redact their websites for the day. McKinney argues that an AIDS-informed perspective on infrastructure collapse and systemic exclusion shaped blackouts. This history helps us understand how and why blackouts trade in feelings of frustration with broken systems. The author situates this historical analysis of the online blackout in a wider queer media theory of blackouts as impasses in which affective life abruptly shifts in generative ways.
The public talk will be followed by a graduate seminar on Friday, September 26 from 10am to 12pm.
ABOUT CAIT MCKINNEY:
Cait McKinney is an associate professor in the School Communication at Simon Fraser Universityspecializing in sexuality studies, media history, and activist media. Their research focuses on the mediated conditions in which queer people, especially activists, have taken up new computing and information technologies to serve their communities and movements. This work surfaces queer modes of technological use that show us alternative ways of understanding technologies and their politics, and offers new media theories and methodologies that emerge from and can account for the knowledges of queer people. Cait McKinney is the author of I Know You Are, but What Am I? On Pee-wee Herman (Minnesota 2024) and Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke 2020).
📅 September 25, 2025
⏱️ 4:30-6 PM
📍Milieux Resource Room EV 11.705
🎟️ Please register your attendance here.