Virtually Queer? Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings

Abstract

This article counters and complicates decontextualized, celebratory accounts of queer subjects and cyberspace. The authors explore the significance of communicative media for queer women, with a particular focus on the negotiation of complex identifications, communities, social networks, and knowledge practices. Using a critical, sociocultural approach, the authors make illustrative use of interviews conducted in British Columbia and Alberta that are part of an ongoing research project (www.queerville.ca) that situates media practices in the quotidian. The authors' arguments concerning queer virtualities attend to (im)mobilities across multiple offline and online contexts; complex geographies of un/belonging; a paradoxical relation of intense suturing to, and disavowal of, mediation; as well as the problematics of a "politics of recognition" and of "visibility," at work in sites of subjectification and sociality. It all begins with an insult.-Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay SelfWe are in an epoch of simultaneity; we are in an epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.-Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces

Shaping New Literacies Research: Extrapolations From a Review of the Handbook of Research on New Literacies

“…He proceeds to explore a range of gender issues from comparisons of male and female Internet use and the participation of males and females in games, onlinelearning situations, e-mail interactions, blogs, chat rooms, and other sites as he discusses issues of power, identity construction, impersonation, affiliation, and agency. However, he seems to understate the dynamic and complex nature of these spaces and how individuals and groups are or are not located and displaced by them via blogs, chat rooms, listservs, or a combination of online or offline spaces (see Bryson, MacIntosh, Jordan, & Lin, 2006).…”

Moving “Out,” Moving On: Gay Men's Migrations Through the Life Course

“…Francisco as homelands to which rural and small-town gay men and lesbians moved as they sought out queer compatriots and a stake in the United States' emergent gay rights movement. Interestingly, framings of queer migration as a phenomenon based on national and regional oppositions have persisted despite an increasingly connected world (Munt et al 2002;Bryson et al 2006) and more inclusive (yet still uneven) regimes of queer rights in North America (Lind 2004;Smith 2005a).…”

“…Reflecting on their past migrations, some men suggested that volunteering and advocacy had once been dominant modes of both identifying oneself as gay and engaging with the community. While moving out was thus more of an imperative for young gay men in the 1980s, the advent of the internet and a decline in advocacy in the 1990s and later rendered relocation perhaps a less obvious-but still common-life choice (see also Munt et al 2002;Bryson et al 2006).…”

“…Greenwich Village (New York), and uprooting coming out and other "intimate" processes from place (Munt et al 2002;Bryson et al 2006;Valentine 2008). Reflecting on his earlier moves as a young adult, Sam said, "I have to keep in mind I'm talking 2010 versus 1995 ... you know, the advent of the internet changed [coming out], even for rural America, you know ... now, even though there are other people out there like you, and you can find them-there might, there might be some distance between you-but you can find them" (Sam, 44, white, European-Canadian).…”

Can we playFun Gay? Disjuncture and difference, and the precarious mobilities of millennial queer youth narratives

“…In this scene from the L Word, Angry Gay is replaced with Fun Gay in a classic neoliberal displacement of a politics of identity with a performative politics of mediatization, consumption, and an excess of visibility (Jameson 1991;McRobbie 2005;Bryson 2004Bryson , 2005Campbell 2004;Gray 2004;Bryson et al 2006;O'Riordan and Phillips 2007;Driver 2008;MacIntosh and Bryson 2008) takes up the complex project of unthinking neoliberal accounts of a progressive modernity. Current social theory identifies in the free-market logics of neoliberalism, historically disjunctive political-economic social practices and relationalities that: (1) have effected broad changes in the technologies of governing, knowledge, and related modes of subjectivity and subjectification (Rose 1998;Ong 2006), and (2) require us to address novel ethical problems pursuant to what Nikolas Rose has termed, the 'politics of life itself' (2007,3).…”