Our journey in Techne is a queer one that has stretched our sense of what forms and modes of digital communication can do, even as we have attempted here to intervene in normative uses and deployments of such forms and modes. In On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies, we argued for greater attention to the rhetorical affordances of multimodal forms of composing—including text, images, video feed, and sound—in crafting complex, persuasive, and affectively rich multimedia (Alexander and Rhodes). We have attempted to enact in Techne our own paying-attention to the possibilities of working with and composing through new media. But in this case, our goal is less an intervention into the way a field (i.e., rhetoric and composition) understands new media and more an exploration of the relationships among processes of digital mediation and subjectivation. As such, we have used reflections on our own experiences liberally, as a lived life is the workroom of processes of subjectivation.

At many times, such work has seemed transgressive—both personally and professionally. Personally, the transgressions have clustered around risks of self-exposure, even as such risks are necessary to this project. In his gloss on the concept of transgression in the works of Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault, Tim Dean asserts in “The Erotics of Transgression” that it "is easier to contest the arbitrary limits of historically variable socio-sexual norms than to wrestle with the internal limits that constitute one's own most intimate existence” (72). We agree. In some of our earlier work, we attempted to show the ongoing importance of queering public rhetorical practices to disrupt “rational” ways of arguing that elided queer feeling and pathos in the service of maintaining heteronormative values at the expense of queered ways of knowing. Techne turns the queering on ourselves, our experiences, memories, cherished ways of knowing ourselves. In Dean’s words, we have attempted to “wrestle with the internal limits” of how we know our own queernesses.

Professionally, we risk such public wrestling in the hopes that we model a queer multimodality that is productive of critical insight and critical feeling, or ways of understanding affect and emotion not just as being subjected to lines of force but also as engaging them, working with them, bending them—queering them to livable differences. In this study of subjection, we also subject ourselves to the larger network beyond this local manifestation of it. The lesbian writer and memoirist Louise Rafkin says in Queer and Present Danger that “The work that I put out in the world goes mainly without me. I can be pleased or dismayed by the reception it gets. But my work is not me. Once my work goes out it has a life of its own. My life is still just me” (109).