Talk by Cait McKinney: A Queer History of Blackouts

Media History Research Centre (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,” followed by a graduate seminar with the author.

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’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.

Please register your attendance for the talk here.

The public talk will be followed by a graduate seminar on Friday, September 26, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.. The seminar has limited capacity, so please register your attendance here. For more information about the talk, write to MHRC coordinator, Laura Pannekoek at: laurapannekoek@gmail.com, and for more information about the graduate seminar, reach out to A/CA representative Hannah Schallert at: hannah.schallert@gmail.com.

Cait McKinney (Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University) 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).