Incel, the now-widely circulated portmanteau for involuntary celibacy, denotes a growing community of mostly cisgender men who are unable to find sexual partners or forge romantic relationships. Organizing in online networks, these men blame their exile from sexual relations on everything from feminism and sexual liberation to genetics and natural laws of attraction. In this essay, we offer an asexual critique of compulsory sexuality in online incel communities to illustrate how the sexual imperatives that animate fascism and the politics of the alt-right rest on myths of an insatiable male sex drive. We argue that incel discourse repurposes liberal conceptions of sexual liberation as well as alternative theories of intimacy crafted by queer and asexual communities to advance an abject and fascist form of masculinity. Rather than understand incels as sexually repressed and unable to assimilate hegemonic masculinity, we theorize incel discourse as a white militant extension of compulsory sexuality that transforms alternative intimacies into violent masculinist fantasies of invulnerability and the sexual will-to-power. Content warning: this essay examines potentially traumatizing discourses concerning sexual assault, racial violence, and discriminatory beliefs. Please read with caution.
The queer dating and hookup app Grindr evidences a technological and economic intensification in queer spaces online. The dominant modality of capitalist power is no longer consumerist norms but the collection and analysis of data. Grindr's participation in datafication distributes increased risks upon its queer users and necessitates a renewed politics of queer privacy beyond homonormativity. I name this arrangement of power homoconnectivity and detail four techniques that capitalism deploys to capture and monetize queer social production. Ultimately, this article unpacks how Grindr designs experiences that move users to log into the app while hiding its engagement with multi-sided markets. Oscillating between producing continuous experiences and deploying annoying constraints, platforms like Grindr privatize and monetize user spaces, communities, social production, and lives under the guise of increased connectivity. With the goal of building more just queer worlds, homoconnectivity makes legible new pressure points to push back against the growing ubiquity of capitalist datafication and queer world-taking. *This is not a homophonic flub. On the one hand, the article to come traces how Grindr cracks queer intimacies into "discrete" parts through datafication, and on the other, Grindr places risk upon queer lives and necessitates a new orientation to "discretion," to privacy. Oh! and the phrases "discreet" and "looking" are common refrains on Grindr.
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