When everything is HCI: A Queer Turn for Human-Computer Interaction

In our society, there's no need to justify technological advancement. We always want to be faster, stronger, and better — it's a human impulse. Against this "hard" driving force of technology, HCI emerges as a movement — an alternative focus within computer science — that advocates the "soft" considerations of human factors in the development of computer systems.

In the process of establishing itself as an academic field, HCI researchers have explored a range of epistemologies and methodologies. From its ergonomic origins to the positivist practices rooted in behavioral science, HCI has attempted to define its "essence" by interacting with, or positioning itself against, existing knowledge in computer science, engineering, psychology, and other disciplines.

HCI as "The Other": The Feminist Analogy

Ann Light (2010, 2011) compares the position of HCI within computer science to that of women within society. Citing Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), she argues that while HCI is oppositional — even militant — toward mainstream industry practices that care too little about users, it faces a problem similar to the feminist movement in the 80's: by too often positioning itself against the Other (men/engineering), it risks being defined in relation to that Other. Eventually, this results in a normative narrative where "he is the absolute, she is the Other."

In recent years, phenomenological approaches have become prevalent in HCI research, aiming for a richer, "thicker" understanding of the person and society embedded in technology — much like the turn to lived experience in feminist research. Although such methods enable us to unearth more embodied, situated truths about human-computer relationships, without a critical lens they can fail to address power dynamics and oppression (as in much phenomenological UX research conducted for commercial interests). Worse, they can reaffirm and reinforce the existing status quo as accepted "truth."

"There remains the danger, though, that if we bring in diverse social aspects but ignore overtly political relations, we embed our practices further in the service of the commercial technology industry of the present, using our skills and our understanding of embodied and situated experience to help produce more effective and efficient machines and perpetuate the social status quo, not find a more effective context for life." (Light, 2010)

Light suggests that, just as feminism in the 80s benefited from a turn to queer perspectives, HCI would likewise benefit. Rather than attending to dualities — socio-techno, tradition-development — through oppositional positioning, HCI should adopt Queer Theory as a model, defining itself against no one, and not needing a One to respond to. In other words, HCI could perform itself in its own terms.

The Queer Turn of HCI

Instead of acting as a counter-force to technological advancement that knows better than "those engineers and merchants eyeing only efficiency and profit," HCI should be comfortable with experimental, radical, and critical acts that create chaos and disorientation in people's understandings of HCI, technology, society, and the world as a whole.

Responding to Light and other pioneers' call, HCI researchers since the 2010s have begun, to varying degrees and from multiple angles, to incorporate traces of Queer Theory into their work. See ¹ for a literature review of such projects.

Freed from any essentialist characteristics defined in relation to the Other, anything can be HCI. This perspective is especially valuable today, as human-machine and socio-techno boundaries continue to blur with the democratization of ubiquitous computing and artificial intelligence. If, one day, there were no longer an inorganic "computer" distinct from an organic "human," queer HCI research could be livelier than ever, as it continues questioning, disrupting, and reconsidering a world in which everything is HCI.

References

Light, A. (2010). HCI as heterodoxy: The Queering of Interaction Design. CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 23. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/experiencingcriticaltheory/Light-Heterodoxy.pdf

Light, A. (2011). HCI as heterodoxy: Technologies of identity and the queering of interaction with computers. Interacting with Computers, 23 (5), 430--438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2011.02.002

Carrasco, M., & Kerne, A. (2018). Queer Visibility: Supporting LGBT+ Selective Visibility on Social Media. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173824

Bauermeister, J., Choi, S. K., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Golinkoff, J., Taboada, A., Lavra, J., Ramazzini, L., Dillon, F., & Haritatos, J. (2022). An Identity-Affirming Web Application to Help Sexual and Gender Minority Youth Cope With Minority Stress: Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24(8), e39094. https://doi.org/10.2196/39094

Steeds, M., Clinch, S., Are, C., Brown, G., Dalton, B., Webster, L., Wilson, A., & Woolley, D. (2025). Queer Joy on Social Media: Exploring the Expression and Facilitation of Queer Joy in Online Platforms. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713592