A queer kind of dwelling: Digital throwness and existential security among sexual minorities in Russia

Abstract

This article asks what it means to habituate a queer orientation in a world permeated by digital connectivity. In doing so, it takes media phenomenology away from the mundane towards the momentous, drawing on queer phenomenology, and existential media studies. Using life-narrative interviews with sexual minorities in Russia, the article sheds light on the “work of queer habituation” in a straight world, and the contemporary significance of digital media technologies within this process. Digital media’s ability to multiply space is defined a key feature which offers sites to “stay with” the disorienting experience of queer dispositions. Through longer periods of discrete “queer digital dwelling,” individuals who have been associating their queer desires with ontological threats are able to find space for existence and existential security. By locating others in close proximity, some are also allowed to appropriate local territory in ways that make it more livable.