About the Author
This website represents the culmination of my time at the University of Texas at Austin receiving my Masters in Media Studies.
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I first began to take an interest in machine-human interactions and relationships in Dr. Sharon Strover's "Communication, Technology, and Culture" class, where I was first introduced to the digital influencer Lil Miquela. Miquela was the start of my thinking about the ways that we integrate machines and technology into our daily lives. In following this line of enquiry, I found myself contemplating the way that in taking a recuperative stance toward technology, and in looking at our images of machines and tech through a queer lens, can reveal new modes of being in the world. I found myself transfixed by the ways that these creations are frequently the backdrop that allow humans a way to imagine a different world and a different self. More often than not, these imaginings take on a distinctly counter-hegemonic sensibility.
Halfway through “Communication, Technology, and Culture” (Spring 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic forced us into remote online courses. I’m writing this section on the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a worldwide pandemic. Since then, I’ve completed the majority of my Masters remotely.
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Simulated boundaries
in the matrix
Constructing a queer body and the fluid movement between temporalities
The Wachowski sisters’ The Matrix, released in 1999, follows Thomas Anderson, a programmer at MetaCortex, a banal software company. Known in the hacker community as Neo, he is wary of the world around him. Convinced that something isn’t right, he spends his nights in front of his computer screen searching for answers to one particular question; what is the Matrix? His suspicions that something isn’t right with the world are confirmed when he meets with Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). They explain that the world Neo has been living in, isn’t really a world at all, but an intricate computer simulation called the Matrix. The Matrix was
created by artificially intelligent machines over a hundred years ago as a way to control humans, thus winning the war between humans and machines. Morpheus believes that Neo is “The Chosen One,” a man who will fulfill the prophecy and defeat the machines to free the humans from their control. With the help of Morpheus and others of the resistance, Neo escapes the Matrix and his journey to free humanity from the machines begins.
Where the relations between technology and humans in Her (2013) are benign, and even amorous, the relations between humans and machines in The Matrix are largely antagonistic. Humans lost the battle against the machines and are now enslaved by them, living out their lives in the Matrix simulation. In spite of this, the audience is still shown numerous instances where Neo and the other members of the resistance physically couple with machines in order to traverse the Matrix. Not only does this allow them to inhabit a queer temporality both within and outside of the Matrix, but it complicates their relationships with the machines. The resistance uses the
machines’ cables and technology to plug into the Matrix. From within the Matrix, their interactions vary from cooperative with programs like The Oracle and The Keymaker, to antagonistic like with Agent Smith. Regardless of the varied relationships between Neo and the programs/machine, I posit Neo as a queer character because his ability to move between the queer temporalities while on the Nebuchadnezzar (Morpheus’ ship) and in the Matrix is only possible through his physical coupling with machines.
Keeping this in mind, I expand upon how I perceive The Matrix as a queer text, specifically in relation to how this queerness is generated by—and through—machinic coupling. In doing so, I pull from theorizations of queer temporality, as well as concepts related to the construction of the queer body and touch. My arguments are largely built upon textual analyses of the scenes and locations throughout The Matrix.
In The Matrix, human members of the resistance co-opt the technology and machines (used to surveil and control) of the Matrix to fight against the power of the machines. In a similar vein, David France's 2020 documentary Welcome to Chechnya uses deepfakes, frequently associated with methods of control and the spread misinformation, to protect queer Chechen survivors.
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Click here to explore that offshoot.
 Hyperreality and The Matrix |  Building a Queer Body |
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 Queer Temporality in The Matrix |