Building on Tara McPherson’s work on race, critical code studies, and feminist critiques of DH, which is provocatively condensed in her essay “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?,” this presentation hopes to ask and address, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” This talk will use the mediums of code and digital games to challenge the technonormativity of DH. Code in many ways are normative, structured, and deeply protocological even as programmers, developers, makers, and gamers evince its promises of power, universality, play, and agency. This presentation, written in the form of a BASIC program executable as a text adventure game, explores how the binary, algorithmic, and protocological underpinnings of both programming and design constrain and recuperate queerness.

This talk was delivered virtually on June 14, 2023, as an Institute Lecture as part of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada). The session was chaired by Sarah-Nelle Jackson (U British Columbia).