Virtual Intimacies
Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality
Published on 1. December 2013
Book
Hardback
178 pages
978-1-4384-4877-0 (ISBN)
Description
Uses ethnography and cultural analysis to track scenes of intimate connection and disconnection among gay men across an array of media sites.
Virtual Intimacies tells the stories of gay men, including the author, who navigate social worlds in which the boundaries between real and virtual have been thoroughly confounded. Shaka McGlotten analyzes intimate connection and disconnection across an array of media sites, including mass mediated public sex scandals, online spaces, Do-It-Yourself porn, and smartphone apps in order to show the ordinary ways people challenge and rework sexuality and technology. The book frames "virtual intimacy" in terms of the mocking disapproval that looks at using technology to connect as something shameful or as a means of last resort. However, where many see a dead end, Virtual Intimacies argues on behalf of more extensive understandings of intimacy, thereby contributing to many feminist and queer approaches that seek to expand the scope of what counts as connection, belonging, or love. The author also highlights the creative and resilient ways that queer people build social worlds using spaces and technologies in ways they were not intended.
Virtual Intimacies tells the stories of gay men, including the author, who navigate social worlds in which the boundaries between real and virtual have been thoroughly confounded. Shaka McGlotten analyzes intimate connection and disconnection across an array of media sites, including mass mediated public sex scandals, online spaces, Do-It-Yourself porn, and smartphone apps in order to show the ordinary ways people challenge and rework sexuality and technology. The book frames "virtual intimacy" in terms of the mocking disapproval that looks at using technology to connect as something shameful or as a means of last resort. However, where many see a dead end, Virtual Intimacies argues on behalf of more extensive understandings of intimacy, thereby contributing to many feminist and queer approaches that seek to expand the scope of what counts as connection, belonging, or love. The author also highlights the creative and resilient ways that queer people build social worlds using spaces and technologies in ways they were not intended.
Reviews / Votes
"Most poignant are McGlotten's inclusions, stated in the first person, of his own experiences with contemporary queer sociality and its discontents. Academic writing on sex often leaves little room for the body and desire of the academic himself. McGlotten breaks this silence, insisting on the relevance of his own place in his research." - Qui Parle"This work is an original and finely crafted contribution, from an important new voice. Incisively reading personal/political longings and laying bare aspects of the author's own lifeworlds, here, Shaka McGlotten offers a close and compelling (auto)ethnographic account of what it is we look for when we login, cruise (by), remember, and look forward. Chronicling how we live lives of both virtuality and embodiment today-working, playing, desiring, losing, and dying-McGlotten's work is among the best of what is new in ethnographic writing." - Jafari S. Allen, author of !Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba
"While the book deals with a diversity of topics from online games to black identity politics, cruising grounds, and avant-garde porn, it also weaves them together by means of a theoretical argument and a sound writer's voice." - Katrien Jacobs, author of People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet
"Virtual Intimacies is a great book, breathtaking in its aesthetic, ethnographic, and attuned attention to the multiple mediations of an affectively attached life. Bodies and play, desire and violence, outreach and evasion, intensity and diffusion: the contemporary world of virtual embodiment is all here, and as a teacher and individual parsing the world I am so grateful to have read this." - Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism and Desire/Love
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Albany, NY
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
US School Grade: College Graduate Student and over
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Paper over boards
Illustrations
7 Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 163 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
431 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4384-4877-0 (9781438448770)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
11/2013
1st Edition
De Gruyter
from
€81.99
Available for download
Person
Shaka McGlotten is Associate Professor of Media, Society, and the Arts at Purchase College, State University of New York. He is the coeditor (with Dana-Ain Davis) of Black Genders and Sexualities.
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Virtual Life of Sex in Public
2. Intimacies in the Multi(player)verse
3. Feeling Black and Blue
4. Justin Fucks the Future
5. The Elan Vital of DIY Porn
Coda: On Not Hooking Up
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
1. The Virtual Life of Sex in Public
2. Intimacies in the Multi(player)verse
3. Feeling Black and Blue
4. Justin Fucks the Future
5. The Elan Vital of DIY Porn
Coda: On Not Hooking Up
Notes
Bibliography
Index