Queer profiles and post-surveillance

This article addresses the hypothetical capacity of algorithmic systems to generate queer user profiles, as a recent modality of the so-called "queer surveillance" and whose antecedents are traceable in Foucauldian reflections on the panopticon and the dispositif of sexuality. We extensively review how the mechanism of user profiling operates since its first prototypes in the late 1970s. We establish what its particularities are with respect to other types of identification. We propose that these systems configure an exponential leap in the technologies of perception of the sexuality of subjects that forces us to rethink central aspects of queer theory such as the Foucauldian sexuality device or the Butlerian heterosexual matrix, in a context of post-surveillance.

Keywords:
Artificial intelligence; queer theory; algorithmic surveillance; user profiling