Annual arts lecture traces history of online blackouts to AIDS activism

KAMLOOPS — Online blackouts protests can prompt power grid failures when they temporarily shut down parts of the internet. The history of these blackouts can be traced to AIDS activism in the mid-1990s, and Dr. Cait McKinney looks them from a wider queer media theory of blackouts as impasses in which emotions and relations abruptly shift in generative ways.

Dr. Cait McKinney

McKinney is the featured speaker at this year’s annual Dean of Arts Distinguished Lecture Series on Human Rights and Social Justice Issues taking place on Tuesday, April 8, from 7 to 9 p.m. The subject of this free, public lecture is A Queer History of Blackouts.

Their lecture offers a media history of the online blackout as a digital tactic grounded in 1990s AIDS activism. Blackout protests temporarily shut down online systems by removing content, blocking access or replacing content with black imagery.

This 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 will discuss how 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. They situate this historical analysis of the online blackout in a wider queer media theory.

An associate professor of communication at Simon Fraser University, McKinney has written two books: 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), which won the Gertrude Robinson Best Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ studies.

Doors to the lecture in the Mountain Room on the third floor of the Campus Activity Centre open at 6:15 p.m.

The event is free, but registration is requested to accommodate adequate seating.

• What: A Queer History of Blackouts
• When: Tuesday, April 8, 7 to 9 p.m. (doors open at 6:15 p.m.)
• Where: Mountain Room, third floor of Campus Activity Centre
• Register: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cait-mckinney-a-queer-history-of-blackouts-tickets-1269838092919?aff=oddtdtcreator

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Contact:
Michele Young, Manager, Communications Content
University Relations, Thompson Rivers University
250-828-5361 | [email protected]