Crafting “bisexual bedroom imaginaries”: queering virtual reality design practice

This article explores the opportunities, challenges, and ethics of creating archives of memory through trans-feminist and queer approaches to virtual reality design practice. Guided by trans-feminist and queer phenomenologies and sensory analyses, this article will retroactively analyze the creation of a VR-based archive entitled “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries” which assembles digitized objects, spaces, drawings, and texts from personal collections of queer-coded ephemera acquired from two decades of adolescence into early adulthood. Through a critical analysis of my own practice as informed by sensory analyses of other seminal trans-feminist and queer VR works – including Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close, Dylan Paré’s Queer & Trans Narratives in Virtual Reality, and Seanna Musgrave’s Animal Massage – this article theorizes a queer virtual reality world-making practice radically opposed to the promissory aims of full body immersion as pursued by design teams positing VR as an “empathy machine.” This article leverages queer and feminist phenomenology, performance theory, and archival scholarship toward a vision of a queer virtual reality design practice informed by partiality, hybridity, possibility, creativity, and play – one which does not seek to project trans-feminist-queer experience onto its audiences, but create space for subjective queer readings and counter-readings, interpretations, sensations, and resonances within virtual worlds.