I’ve been a bit of a fan of Kara Keeling’s since reading excerpts of her work on the black femme and practices of viewing. I mean, she ends this particular article with a striking acknowledgement: “All faults are mine.” How kickass is that?!
Fangirling aside, Keeling’s concept of Queer OS inevitably reads as — and probably is, to a certain extent — an echo of her previous work on cinematic perception intertwined with ideas of race. In her 2007 publication, she borrowed from Gramsci’s construction of “common sense” to characterize our individual and shared thought processes when consuming cinema. Common sense is a sort of unconscious way of understanding the world, as “aspects of what is perceptible become generally recognizable only when they work in some way through 'common senses'" (Keeling 153). It functions an indispensable conduit for our individual perception as well as the rationale of our community at large.
In The Witch's Flight, Keeling discusses the figure of the black femme that haunts the hegemonic discourse conveyed through filmic structures. For her, cinematic perception “produces and reproduces social reality itself,” and cliches and tropes that are found across films are a form of common sense that reinforce certain realities while effacing others (Keeling 11). But the most compelling aspect of her claims is her insistence on viewing this shared common sense as an empowering potential, or “the condition of possibility for the emergence of alternate knowledge... some of which might constitute a counterhegemonic force” (19). Because common sense is defined by sensory motor functions, it is conducive to alternative knowledge and perceptions — namely, black common sense and butch-femme common sense, which she proceeds to discuss later in her work. The multiplicity of subaltern common senses poses a challenge to the common sense defined by societal hegemony.
Seven years later, this insistence persists — Keeling has transposed her claims about film to address new technologies and their interactions with queerness. Similar to the black femme figure in blaxploitation films, Queer OS unsettles the common sense and constitutes an entirely new system of thinking — or as Tara describes more eloquently, an “operating system of a larger order.”
The parallelism that Keeling constructs between these two mediums — cinema and OS — is intriguing for me, as I tend to think of coders and programmers as “subaltern” producers; at least more so than the typical auteurs of Hollywood cinema. I always imagine them as quirky occupants of an isolated space, engaged in their own incomprehensible argot (which, admittedly, is the product of my own humanities-based common sense).
Reading “Queer OS” and re-reading “The Image of Common Sense” made me wonder about the role of the common sense held by content producers, rather than content consumers. Surely it matters what kind of common sense is held by the directors, writers, engineers, and programmers — the producers of perception. But I came to the conclusion that Keeling’s point lies within the very fact that “subaltern” perceptions are constructed as such. As long as these thoughts remain counterhegemonic, it means that we still haven’t achieved something like Queer OS; because sexuality, media, and information technologies should be impossible to isolate or marginalize in our processes of perception.
Keeling, Kara. “Queer OS.(IN FOCUS: Queer Approaches to Film, Television, and Digital Media)(Essay).” Cinema Journal 53, no. 2 (January 1, 2014): 152–157.
Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight the Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
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