Heavy Processing. By T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault. Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2004, 245 pp. (paperback) ISBN 978-1-68571-120-7. US List: $24.00, and open access.
Heavy Processing asks the question, “What happens when we take the joke of ‘lesbian processing’ seriously as a research method?” To say it answers that question would be disingenuous to the text, the act of processing, and, perhaps, to lesbians. What it does instead is much more interesting. T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault not only demonstrate this method through their topics and analyses, but also through their reflexive writing—by embedding their own process in the text. What emerges in the following chapters is a clever, honest, metatextual process-as-product, which, in true lesbian fashion, manages to be both firm and tender.
Cowan and Rault adopt a “Trans- Feminist and Queer” (TFQ) framework throughout the book, addressing the inseparability of the lives and analyses that these terms represent, while indicating the “critical combination” that they produce in tandem (xvii). This framework accounts for the “context of increasingly militarized and transnationally networked hetero-colonial white supremacy,” centering the “TFQ lives-and-ways of living . . . perpetually under siege,” especially those who are “negatively racialized, poor, disabled, Indigenous, migrant, and refugee” (xvii). They apply it both literally and metaphorically to information technologies (IT), the institutions that produce these systems and methods, the Digital Humanities (DH) programs that engage them, and the TFQ “social, artistic, and activist communities” that emerge in relation to them (xvii).
Heavy Processing begins and ends by processing a project that never was. In the introduction, “Heavy Processing: Needing IT (more than a feeling),” Cowan and Rault reflect on “Cabaret Commons,” an ambitious endeavor to build a “mega-database of every trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) cabaret” (24). They quickly realize that “using data collection, digitization, and visualization tools to chart these people, performances, and scenes in an online setting . . . poses a serious likelihood of reproducing harm and creating new harm” (27–28). They ultimately decide not to publish the material, with Cowan instead repurposing the platform to write about online cabarets during the COVID-19 pandemic “in an intensely collaborative, rather than individually authorial, way” (182). Maintaining a focus on collective care, we are encouraged to follow them in this decision-making process throughout the text.
Chapter 1, “Lesbian Processing,” defines “heavy processing” and charts it through lesbian cultural histories, focusing on two creative projects: the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest) and Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House. Reclaiming the “joke” of lesbian processing as “futile over-working, as painful, redundant, and . . . inefficient,” Cowan and Rault articulate “heavy processing” as “a technology of . . . managing big data where every single datum is understood to come from somewhere worth learning from” (36, 50). Heavy processing requires significant intellectual and emotional compute, including the capacity to hold contradictions and a willingness to adapt. Founded in 1976, MichFest was a weeklong festival that “prioritized building and sustaining culture by and for women,” dissolving in 2015 after twenty-three years of unresolved conflict over trans inclusion (40). MichFest demonstrates the tensions that surface through heavy processing: it “was and is a cultural signifier for anti-racist queer lesbian feminist utopianism;” yet it also represents “the painful emergence and calcification of anti-trans, essentialist lesbian feminist politics” (40). The authors turn to Killjoy’s Kastle, a large-scale performance installation staged in Toronto and New York, which was praised for recovering lesbian-feminist histories and critiqued for its “nostalgia for a lesbian feminism . . . tied to . . . a white-washed history and trans-exclusionary politics” (57). Its 2013 launch was followed by six years of processing—reworking scripts and installations to engage the realities of contemporary queer communities. True to the joke, processing is often “painful” and “inefficient,” yet, as Cowan and Rault show, necessary.
Chapter 2, “Central Processing Units: Trans- Feminist and Queer Manifestos” uses the CPU, the component that “performs the processing inside a computer,” to establish the manifesto as a textual processing core (67). Analyzing the Feminist Data Workshop’s “Feminist Data Manifest-No,” and its accompanying “Playlist,” Cowan and Rault posit manifestos as tools of resistance against digital and institutional domination, as well as collaborative artifacts that enable intentional affinities across difference, while inciting further processing. This collective listening, communicating, and working is charged, and the authors identify anger amongst the heavy emotions that emerge when contending with racism and other oppressions within feminist spaces.
Cowan and Rault underscore the paradoxical pleasure of recognizing one’s complicity in violent structures as an invitation to a “painful, risky, transformative relational experience of learning—of creating the better story” (75). Such recognition generates strategies to reduce the reproduction of harm. They advocate for saturating processes with politics, reorienting research and organizational protocols away from the individual and toward the collective. They ultimately linger on the act of refusal—from surveillance-driven data regimes to exploitative research in over-studied, under-resourced communities—aligning the Manifest-No’s call with a central theme of the book.
Chapter 3, “Risking IT: Breaking Up with Compulsory Dispossessivity” turns its processing power to the entanglement of academic institutions with information technology as sites of knowledge production. Cowan and Rault advocate “valuing heavy processing over productivity,” a risky stance that takes Too Much Information (TMI) and Too Much Time (TMT): “when we respect the timelines set out by academic grants . . . we risk disrespecting, and not establishing, or breaking, trust with research partners and participants” (95, 97–98). They center First Nations and Indigenous communities, observing that information technologies and academic institutions replicate settler colonial logics. These systems treat minoritized communities “as potential intellectual property to be appropriated and possessed . . . while normalizing and masking the system’s own logics of domination” (107).
As an alternative, Cowan and Rault promote the Global Indigenous Data Alliance’s CARE principles: “Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics” (104). They again return to the right to refuse or limit the “free” transmission of knowledge, highlighting Jennifer Wimigwans’s FourDirectionsTeachings.com project that assumes responsibility for both safeguarding and communicating Indigenous Traditional Knowledges—given that “neither ICT industry standards, governmental communications policies, nor well-intentioned . . . initiatives dedicated to data justice, management, and stewardship can be entrusted with Indigenous Knowledge, life, well-being, and futures” (115). Beyond method, heavy processing is framed as an alternative information technology that “[works] against the violences performed by other information technologies and other data processes” (120).
In Chapter 4, “Networked Intimate Publics (NIPs),” Cowan and Rault illustrate the rigors and pleasures of building publics in resistance to dominant institutional and digital systems. They define NIPs as “networks of intimate accountability that form an inward-facing public in order to practice—to prepare ourselves and our work for the outward facing public” (132). Focusing on TFQ NIPs—those generating “artistic, activist and/or scholarly works”—they stress the cruciality of inward-facing critical processing, such as “building trust,” “having disagreements,” “protocol building,” before outward public engagement through performances, publications, and other practices (136). They distinguish between types of publics, noting that TFQ cabarets “were shows and parties created for a public, but not the public” (145). Drawing on danah boyd’s concept of “networked publics,” they theorize how digital network technologies—not unlike academic publishing—collapse the former into the latter, often to the detriment of TFQ NIPs: these “technologies are sometimes celebrated as media of connectivity . . . offering TFQ people a way out of . . . localized alienation, hostility, harassment, and violence. However, these same digital affordances and platforms . . . serve as tools for increased or ongoing forms of alienation, regulation, surveillance, exploitation, hostility, harassment, and violence” (148).
NIPs serve as information infrastructures aimed at public production, yet they rely on communities for which building trust is the product. Cowan and Rault term these “Networked Accountable Publics (NAPs)”, which they define as “durational incubators for accountability in the research we do, our relationships with other researchers, as well as with our broader research communities” (178). As these acronyms’ qualifiers demand, Cowan and Rault recursively return to the nature of intimacy and accountability—binding agents through friendship and comradeship alike—which enable solidarity, collaboration, and ultimately, survival.
Heavy Processing extends a poignant escape from institutional and informational technologies, systems, and violences, to which TFQ researchers and communities are often beholden. As Cowan and Rault remind us, “Educational institutions reproduce the domination logics and structures of power that form them” (110). They propose alternative TFQ methods, technologies, and infrastructures that foster intentional, intimate, and accountable artistic, activist, and scholarly publics. The affinities and spaces that structure these publics too are bound up in historical violences that risk reproducing systemic inequalities. Rather than a solution, Cowan and Rault offer a salve—one that stings even as it heals and strengthens: heavy processing.
I wish this book had existed when I was writing my doctoral dissertation; I am glad that it exists today. If there’s one thing the world needs to untangle the cable of crises currently strangling it, it’s processing. And, undoubtedly, lesbians.
