Cait McKinney: A Queer History of Blackouts

Cait McKinney: A Queer History of Blackouts

March 11, 2025 at 3:02 pm  Education, Kamloops, News

Join the TRU Faculty of Arts for the Dean of Arts Distinguished Lecture series on human rights and social justice, with an engaging lecture by Dr. Cait McKinney.

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Everyone is welcome and this is a free event.

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This talk offers a media history of the online blackout as a digital tactic grounded in 1990’s AIDS activism.

Blackout protests evoke power grid failures, temporarily shutting down online systems by removing content, blocking access or replacing content with black imagery.

This lasting 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.

Dr. McKinney argues that 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 of blackouts as impasses in which emotions and relations abruptly shift in generative ways.

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