Under Her Eye: Digital Drag as Obfuscation Article and Countersurveillance Harris Kornstein New York University, USA
[email protected] Abstract Among drag queens, it is common to post screenshots comically highlighting moments in which Facebook incorrectly tags their photos as one another, suggesting that drag makeup offers a unique method for confusing facial recognition algorithms. Drawing on queer, trans, and new media theories, this article considers the ways in which drag serves as a form of informational obfuscation, by adding “noise” in the form of over-the-top makeup and social media profiles that feature semi-fictional names, histories, and personal information. Further, by performing identities that are highly visible, are constantly changing, and engage complex forms of authenticity through modes of camp and realness, drag queens disrupt many common understandings about the users and uses of popular technologies, assumptions of the integrity of data, and even approaches to ensuring privacy. In this way, drag offers both a culturally specific framework for conceptualizing queer and trans responses to surveillance and a potential toolkit for avoiding, thwarting, or mitigating digital observation. Introduction When particular surveillance technologies, in their development and design, leave out some subjects and communities for optimum usage, this leaves open the possibility of reproducing existing inequalities… [But] could there be some potential in going about unknown or unremarkable, and perhaps unbothered, where CCTV, camera-enabled devices, facial recognition, and other computer vision technologies are in use? —Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015: 162–63) Around late 2014, I began to take note of a curious social media phenomenon: drag queens were posting screenshots to Facebook to highlight instances in which the platform’s predictive facial recognition algorithms incorrectly tagged their photos as one another.