Stonewall forever: queer monumentality in the age of augmented reality

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine Stonewall Forever, a mobile augmented reality (AR) application developed by Google and the U.S. National Parks Service, that superimposes computer-generated imagery into users’ lines of vision to shape public memories of the Stonewall National Monument. I argue the app functions rhetorically as a visual-material chronotope because it spatiotemporally reorients visions toward otherwise hidden contexts in which multiply marginalized people acted as primary agents in the events surrounding the Stonewall riots. However, even as the app renders visible the contributions of minoritized communities in a landmark moment in LGBTQ + history, it repackages the bodies of now deceased trans of color revolutionaries as icons within a homonationalist frame, obscuring the ongoing callousness of a nation-state that has yet to provide systemic protections for the very identities it memorializes. My criticism of the app focuses on how institutional powers may leverage emerging visual media to generate more inclusive historical storylines as a technique for both managing changing cultural expectations regarding representational diversity and to serve national interests, a nascent but nonetheless profound effect of the gradually coalescing domains of queer monumentality and official U.S. commemorative traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital
• archive
• public memory
• chronotope
• homonationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).