Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality

180 Pages·2013·8.33 MB·English

by  McGlotten

virtualintimacies

virtualintimacies
media, affect, and queer sociality
Shaka McGlotten
SUNY
P R E S S
Cover art by Rory Golden. Wood block print and laser printing over collage on
paper. 10 inches 3 7½ inches. © 2012 Rory Golden. Used with permission.
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic
tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission
in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGlotten, Shaka, 1975–
Virtual intimacies : media, affect, and queer sociality / Shaka McGlotten.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4877-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Gay men—Sexual behavior. 2. Internet—Social aspects. 3. Interpersonal communication.
4. Computer networks—Social aspects. I. Title.
HQ76.25.M372 2013
306.77086’642—dc23 2013000129
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Chapter One
The Virtual Life of Sex in Public 17
Chapter Two
Intimacies in the Multi(player)verse 39
Chapter Three
Feeling Black and Blue 61
Chapter Four
Justin Fucks the Future 79
Chapter Five
The Élan Vital of DIY Porn 101
Coda
On Not Hooking Up 123
Notes 137
Bibliography 157
Index 165

Acknowledgments
This book has been a lesson in sociality. I am grateful for the feedback
and support of colleagues, who have modeled the criticality and care that
supports every good friendship. Jason Pine, Agustin Zarzosa, Michelle
Stewart, Ahmed Afzal, Bill Baskin, and Lisa Jean Moore all read portions
of the book and offered their generous input. Special thanks go to Mor-
ris Kaplan and Rudolf Gaudio, who read the manuscript in its entirety
during an especially busy time.
Scott Webel, friend and editor extraordinaire, helped me to polish
the book, making suggestions that helped me improve my arguments
and others that kept me thinking and inspired. I also thank the external
reviewers who helped me to strengthen my claims and who even appre-
ciated its “mundane” voice. Beth Bouloukos and Laurie Searl at SUNY
Press offered the book a home and helped it to see print. My friend Rory
Golden provided the gorgeous cover art.
Although this book draws only a little on my research on sex pub-
lics in Austin, Texas, the thinking that shaped that project and my sub-
sequent work benefited from a brilliant and politically attuned graduate
cadre, including, in no particular order, Junaid Rana, Peggy Brunache,
Ken Rubin, Jennifer Goett, Jacqueline Polvora, Celeste Henery, Teresa
Velasquez, Lynn Selby, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Diya Mehra, Nicho-
las Copeland, Whitney Battle, and many others. I was also fortunate to
benefit from the institutional and financial support of the Austin School
of Diaspora Studies and the Center for African and African American
Studies. Edmund Gordon, João Costa Vargas, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Char-
lie Hale, Sharon Bridgforth, and Joni Jones/Omi Osun helped to shape
vii
viii / Acknowledgments
a vibrant intellectual and political culture, and they played an impor-
tant role in shaping a generation of black scholars. Charlie Hale, Kamala
Visweswaran, and John Hartigan each demonstrated, albeit very differ-
ently, ways of bringing academic and political cultures together.
My conception of an academic life, and how to make it livable, was
shaped by many exceptional mentors, including Katya Gibel Mevorach,
Begoña Aretxaga (missed by many), and Dána-Ain Davis. Neville Hoad
and Katie Stewart deserve special thanks for their ongoing support and
friendship. Katie Stewart taught me how to cultivate the pleasures of
an ordinary life, and I continue to find her writing and lateral thinking
enormously inspiring. More recently, I have, like many others before me,
benefited from the kind wisdom of Henry Abelove, mensch and gentle-
man. I also thank Lauren Berlant, whose theorizations of intimacy made
this book possible. She models an engaged scholarship that addresses the
pressing political, aesthetic, and moral issues of our times with brilliance,
force, no small measure of humor, and an abiding commitment to the
power of pedagogy.
I also wish to thank the men (and some women) who shared their
stories with me. In the face of anxieties about creeping homonormativ-
ity, they have all impressed upon me the vitality of queer cultures. Finally,
I express my gratitude to those who helped me broaden and nurture my
understanding of intimacy in very material ways, who fruitfully disrupt-
ed my fantasies of self-sovereignty, who disorganized me and held me ac-
countable, who taught me about attachment, losing, and learning to love
more gracefully. Jasper White, Jason Brown, and Thomas Beard moved
me with their creativity and passion. Daniel Alexander Jones shared his
fierce liveness and taught me about the necessity of communion. This
book is dedicated to Amit Menachem Gilutz: to the immanence of in-
timacy.
Introduction
A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events,
singularities. What we call virtual is not something that lacks
reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualiza‑
tion following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The
immanent event is actualized in a state of things and of the lived
that make it happen.
—Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life”1
This book is about what it feels like to connect, or fail to, in a tech‑
nophilic and technophobic present in which intimacy has gone virtual,
if it ever was real. We depend on communications technologies to
facilitate our lives and our interactions with others; we look to new
media for succor from our loneliness, to bring us into contact with
others we might love, hate, or remain stubbornly indifferent to. The
virtual operates as a promise of immanence, the indwelling force of
things waiting, pressing, ready to act. As an immanent power, the virtual
is often deferred, sometimes materialized, but always charged with the
capacity to help us feel like we belong. Intimacy describes: a feeling of
connection or a sense of belonging; embodied and carnal sensuality,
that is, sex; and that which is most inward or inmost to one’s personhood.
Intimacy is also a vast assemblage of ideologies, institutional sites, and
diverse sets of material and semiotic practices that exert normative
pressures on large and small bodies, lives, and worlds. In contemporary
U.S. culture, intimacy names the affective encounters with others that
often matter most, while also functioning as a juridical form, an aspi‑
rational narrative, and therapeutic culture’s raison d’être.2 All of this is
to say that intimacy refers to things we feel and do, and it is a force.
1