Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality

Introduction

1 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. Introduction 2 / Vir tual Intimacies Intimacy has been a central site in the culture wars of the last thirty years. According to many among the political Right, intimacy’s well‑being, even its essential nature, has suffered under the onslaught of multiculturalism and other minority demands for inclusion. This perceived war has led to entrenched, if wholly irrational, positions, especially among the Right: to take only one example, miscegenation may no longer be a focal point of anxiety, at least not in polite com‑ pany, but gay marriage operates in its stead as a new scapegoat for the failures, real and imagined, suffered by heterosexual marriage and the family and nation writ large.3 New technologies have added fuel to these anxious fires. Utopian cyberspace discourses, whose optimism is now viewed with both disdain and nostalgia, were always tempered by technophobic panics that turned on questions of intimacy, especially of the more carnal sort. Cyberspace promised infinite pleasures and free‑ doms, especially freedoms from the constraints of gender and sex—if your wife wouldn’t do it you could find someone, even a bot, who’d do it for you online, without making you take out the trash—and at the same time evoked and reproduced fears about those kinds of sex that stepped outside the bounds of what anthropologist Gayle Rubin famously called “the charmed circle” of socially sanctioned sexuality.4 The Web, or so the fears went, would usher in an anarchic wave of sexual libertinism. And in a way, these fears were true. New digital media technologies, including but not limited to the Internet, have facilitated a new era of casual or anonymous hookups (Craigslist), CGI safe sex alternatives and role playing (Second Life), and, of course, the proliferation of masturbatory aids (DIY porn). But these new freedoms and possibilities picked up anxieties like Velcro.5 Virtual intimacies signaled new possibilities even as they foregrounded the perceived failures of intimate belonging.Virtual inti‑ macies were failures before the fact. If you had to get online to get it, it couldn’t be the real thing. But what is the real thing, what is real intimacy? Virtual Intimacies laterally answers this question by focusing on the experiences of gay men, including myself, who have navigated this expansive and expanding field of virtually mediated intimacies, who go on the hunt for love or sex and who often find themselves entangled—in the love and sex they were seeking or in other, less predictable encounters—along the way. Rather than a smooth space that flows,6 digital virtuality amplifies the inconstant stutter of desire. The technologies we hope will facilitate connection can instead block [3.133.109.211] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 11...