Becoming Fungible: Queer Intimacies in Social Media

Everything you may have heard about online dating is true: It is steeped in a consumerist logic. It substitutes algorithms for pheromones. It instrumentalizes intimacy and mechanizes the wily ways of desire. It conjures illusions of privacy, control, and anonymity (while simultaneously violating that perceived privacy with the insidious practices of data mining and personalized advertising). It exacerbates the same barbarous impulses—hyper-individualism, cutthroat competition, solipsism, self-aggrandizement—so integral to and rewarded in the marketplace.¹ Indeed, it is difficult to argue that social media at large do little else but construct and fortify what Michel Foucault designates homo economicus: that calculating spawn of neoliberalism who perceives himself and others foremost as human capital.² If the lived experience of homo economicus turns on consumption, enterprise, brand creation, self-optimization, efficiency, aggressive speculation, and, ironically, amid the never ending workday, the maximization of individualized pleasure, it finds its virtual Elysium in the profile pages of online dating sites.³ At first glance, queer social media, including hookup apps such as Grindr and Scruff, would appear to be no different.⁴ They too seem the refuge and breeding ground for neoliberal subjectivity, communication, and relational forms. However, in contrast to the chorus of techno-pessimistic voices that holds the Internet responsible for the death of a public queer sex culture,⁵ I assert that to whatever extent social media have transformed the means of queer communication and connection, the ends are generally the same, that is, connection, hooking up. Despite significant differences between bathhouse cruising and profile browsing, between dark rooms and chat rooms, the antirelational ethical principles constituted in the former can nonetheless be found and fostered in the latter.⁶ In this article I will foreground an ethical commonality I see spanning public cruising and private browsing, namely, the queer practice of shared estrangement.⁷

msm (men-seeking-men) media illuminate some ugly truths about the gay community that mainstream lgbt political lobbies aim to suppress. For one, the social institutions of marriage and military, along with the deadened concept of sexual identity that grounds them, cannot harness unruly desires or squelch socially unacceptable beliefs and practices. Moreover, the deep currents of racism, classism, sexism, effemiphobia, and patriarchal masculinism that pervade msm media should give any out and proud queer cause for concern. I understand msm media, however, as more than reactionary proof of the failure of a respectable politics of assimilation. Rather, I find in them a form of perceptual training for a coming politics beyond representation, one founded in the abandonment of traditional, dialectical conceptions of intersubjectivity and community.⁸

The training begins with a paradox: At the same time that screens underscore the distance between interlocutors in the social media exchange, they simultaneously produce intense feelings of connection. In other words, the screen that bridges the distance between individuals also calls attention to their solitude, perhaps even finitude. As such, the screen stands as an ever-present reminder of the impossibility of intersubjective fusion, and yet feelings of deep interdependence brim over. In my earlier work on aids Buddy friendships, I argue that death’s constitutive and inescapable presence in these caregiving relationships forces an acknowledgment of the radically common yet thoroughly singular finitude the participants (un)share. Such an acknowledgment encourages a respect for the unknown in the self and the absolute foreignness of the other and nurtures an impersonal ethics of nonrecognition: a mode of relating that resists the violent, intersubjective subsumption of self into other, other into self.⁹ A relation forged through a mediating force that both binds and separates—in the Buddy scenario, death; in the social media situation, the screen—can provoke affective ties that pressure traditional understandings of belonging and community. Despite their capacity for eliciting merciless opportunism and outrageous selfishness, social media might also cut another way: in the virtual atmosphere of shared estrangement, the destructive ego might be humbled if not humiliated, unknown selves and unusual intimacies born, and respect for the inviolable alterity of the other learned.

Furthermore, in the age of hyper-communication there is something to...