Niels van Doorn

Digital spaces, material traces: How matter comes to matter in online performances of gender, sexuality and embodiment

This article argues that in order to cultivate a more thorough understanding of how gender, sexuality and embodiment come to ‘matter’ in digital environments, it is necessary to reconsider the notion of the virtual as it relates to everyday reality, in addition to rethinking the digital in relation to our common conception of materiality. To develop such an understanding, the discussion is organized around three sections. The first section addresses the notion of ‘virtuality’ by arguing that empirical inquiries into new media cultures should expand their conception of the ‘virtual’ beyond its common associations with digitally mediated environments, in order to properly recognize the materiality of everyday digital practices. The second section focuses on how ‘virtual’ performances of gender, sexuality and embodiment become materialized in digital space. Finally, the third section addresses gender performance and embodied memory in relation to the archival properties of internet platforms that feature user-generated content. It is concluded that that the virtual plays a constitutive role in the materialization of gender, sexuality and embodiment in both digital and physical spaces. Rather than approaching digitally virtual images in terms of disembodied information and signification, we should continue to ask how they in-form and are in-formed by the volatile and intractable matter of gender, sexuality and embodiment.This article argues that in order to cultivate a more thorough understanding of how gender, sexuality and embodiment come to ‘matter’ in digital environments, it is necessary to reconsider the noti...

The ties that bind: the networked performance of gender, sexuality and friendship on MySpace

Although the body of research on social network sites (SNSs) continues to increase, scholarship in this relatively new field has largely neglected the gendered dimensions of networked interaction on SNSs. Through an empirical analysis of users’ comment exchanges, this study demonstrates how a group of interconnected ‘friends’ on MySpace engage in gendered and sexualized interactions through the use of various semiotic resources (i.e. text, images, video). In this particular network, articulations of affection are indiscriminatingly distributed among the friends, creating a flow of polymorphous desire in which the heteronormative gender binary is repeatedly transgressed. From a theoretical perspective, it is argued that Judith Butler’s notion of performativity is useful as an analytical lens when investigating these networked interactions. The examples illustrate how the friends make use of ironic and/or parodic citations in order to be recognized as a member of the group, performatively delineating and sh...Although the body of research on social network sites (SNSs) continues to increase, scholarship in this relatively new field has largely neglected the gendered dimensions of networked interaction on SNSs. Through an empirical analysis of users’ comment exchanges, this study demonstrates how a group of interconnected ‘friends’ on MySpace engage in gendered and sexualized interactions through the use of various semiotic resources (i.e. text, images, video). In this particular network, articulations of affection are indiscriminatingly distributed among the friends, creating a flow of polymorphous desire in which the heteronormative gender binary is repeatedly transgressed. From a theoretical perspective, it is argued that Judith Butler’s notion of performativity is useful as an analytical lens when investigating these networked interactions. The examples illustrate how the friends make use of ironic and/or parodic citations in order to be recognized as a member of the group, performatively delineating and shaping their friends network.

Keeping it Real: User-Generated Pornography, Gender Reification, and Visual Pleasure

/ Recently, some scholars have suggested that new media technologies are opening up spaces for the sexual emancipation of previously marginalized groups. These ‘DIY’ web cultures would facilitate different, more authentic, representations of gender and sexuality than conventionally available in mainstream pornography. This study examines these propositions by analyzing a sample of 100 user-generated ‘amateur’ videos on YouPorn, an adult video-sharing website. It is demonstrated how an adherence to a masculine, heteronormative ‘pornoscript’ structures the possible ways in which sexual pleasure is enacted and visualized in these videos. Simultaneously, their alleged proximity to ‘real life’ works to naturalize these representations, enabling the reification of their gender ideology through a denial of their imaginary dimension. It is concluded that, rather than providing a space for alternative sexual representations, YouPorn manifests itself as a site where pornography, participatory media, and the represe.../ Recently, some scholars have suggested that new media technologies are opening up spaces for the sexual emancipation of previously marginalized groups. These ‘DIY’ web cultures would facilitate different, more authentic, representations of gender and sexuality than conventionally available in mainstream pornography. This study examines these propositions by analyzing a sample of 100 user-generated ‘amateur’ videos on YouPorn, an adult video-sharing website. It is demonstrated how an adherence to a masculine, heteronormative ‘pornoscript’ structures the possible ways in which sexual pleasure is enacted and visualized in these videos. Simultaneously, their alleged proximity to ‘real life’ works to naturalize these representations, enabling the reification of their gender ideology through a denial of their imaginary dimension. It is concluded that, rather than providing a space for alternative sexual representations, YouPorn manifests itself as a site where pornography, participatory media, and the representation/fetishation of ‘reality’ converge to maintain a politically conservative gender ideology.

Platform labor: on the gendered and racialized exploitation of low-income service work in the ‘on-demand’ economy

ABSTRACT How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect this relationship between value and visibility, when it is mediated through the problem of labor as at once a commodity and a lived experience? And how can these infrastructures be mobilized in projects that aim to build different kinds of platforms – the kinds that support the revaluation low-income service work? This essay addresses these questions by examining the gendered, racialized, and classed distribution of opportunities and vulnerabilities associated with digitally mediated service work, or what I call platform labor. The argument will unfold in four parts. First, I briefly situate the ‘on-demand’ economy within the context of neoliberal socio-economic reforms that have, over the past four decades, shaped our present circumstances. Second, I argue that labor platforms should be understood as new players in the temporary staffing industry, whose devices and practices exacerbate the already precarious conditions of contingent workers in today’s low-income service economy. They do so by (1) bolstering the immunity of platform intermediaries and clients, (2) by expanding managerial control over workers, and (3) by orchestrating a pervasive sense of fungibility and superfluity with respect to this workforce. Third, after a short overview of the gendered and racialized history of service work, I analyze how this history extends into the networked present of our platform economy. Finally, I address the potential of ethnography, on the one hand, and platform cooperativism, on the other, to critically empower low-income service workers operating through platforms.How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect this rel...

Assembling the Affective Field How Smartphone Technology Impacts Ethnographic Research Practice

This article recounts what happens when an increasingly commonplace technology such as the smartphone is mobilized in ethnographic fieldwork practice, investigating the particular research-related affects and intimacies that are produced by/in this sociotechnical assemblage. I start with a brief account of my research project, after which I discuss the ways in which my smartphone has informed and modulated the different components of my fieldwork, conceived as a heterogeneous practice of logistical and affective labor. In the last two sections, I reflect on the methodological consequences of incorporating a smartphone into ethnographic research and address the question of how this practice prompts a reconsideration of the relation between knowledge production, research intimacies, and mobile technology.This article recounts what happens when an increasingly commonplace technology such as the smartphone is mobilized in ethnographic fieldwork practice, investigating the particular research-related ...

Architectures of ‘the Good Life’: Queer Assemblages and the Composition of Intimate Citizenship

This paper examines how the practices and events of queer collectivity might encourage us to think differently about the relationship between sexuality, intimacy, and citizenship. Through the exposition and discussion of four ‘scenes’ based on ethnographic engagements with various LGBT collectives in Baltimore, MD, it attends to the visceral and more-than-human registers in which a fragile sense of community comes into being, subsequently developing an understanding of intimacy as a transversal sphere of mutual investment in which political and civic practices can be cultivated. This entails an analytical shift from understanding citizenship as a ‘practice of claims’ within a (supra)national legal framework to its conceptualization as a ‘practice of composition’, which brings into relief the civic nature of collective efforts towards the creation and maintenance of safe environments that foster marginalized expressions of sexuality, gender, and pleasure. These attempts to experiment with new forms of belonging and ‘the good life’ are animated by the intimate associations, practices, and events that traverse public and private space—times. Ultimately, then, it is argued that intimacy is itself a proper mode of citizenship, one of its ‘regimes of enunciation’ that is folded into many contiguous others, and that a concern for the composition of ‘civic intimacies’ productively augments and complicates established research on intimate/sexual citizenship.

The Neoliberal Subject of Value: Measuring Human Capital in Information Economies

In this essay, I introduce the figure of the “neoliberal subject of value” to explore the affective ambiguities of what Tiziana Terranova has termed “free labor,” or the voluntary, unwaged, and exploited activities that generate the digital data, content, and connections central to informational capitalism. If, as Terranova argues, free labor is characterized by exhaustion—due to the lack of means by which this labor can sustain itself—why are millions of people still sustaining a commitment to such pervasive modes of unremunerated work? To formulate an answer to this question, I first turn to the neoliberal theory of human capital, which offers a more fruitful avenue for the analysis of digitally mediated “living labor” than the Autonomist Marxist theory that inspired Terranova’s analysis, by elucidating how a logic based on competition, entrepreneurialism, and speculation has transformed how work is understood and valued. Second, I discuss the central role of commensuration within capitalist value production, arguing that human capital functions as a “commensurating machine” that allows neoliberal governmentality to permeate areas of life previously impervious to market rationality. Third, I show how such practices of market commensuration depend on a range of evaluative devices that create environments of equivalence and hierarchical difference, explicating how these devices have come to play an increasingly important role in contemporary digital culture. I then discuss a case study of Klout, a digital device that commensurates variegated social data into a score that ranks users according to their “influence,” which has become an important, if contentious, measure of human capital in information economies. Finally, I return to the neoliberal subject of value and her affective ambiguities, which index both the aspirations and exhaustion of competitive value-generating sociality.

Treatment is Prevention

The past 15 years have seen the waning of both cultural analysis and activism dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention, especially in relation to the enduring epidemic in the United States. However, current mutations in the American HIV prevention landscape, driven by the biomedical promise of a ‘Test and Treat’ strategy, are producing potentially destructive outcomes for vulnerable and dispossessed communities, a situation that demands renewed investment from cultural critics. The aim of this article is to mobilize a specific strand of biopolitical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito) to examine recent federally orchestrated prevention measures dedicated to a scale-up and integration of HIV testing, treatment and ‘linkage to care’, in order to move beyond their reductive approach to the preservation of life and advance a more capacious, politically engaged prevention model rooted in communal rather than individual forms of immunity. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, MD, I attend to ways in which l...The past 15 years have seen the waning of both cultural analysis and activism dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention, especially in relation to the enduring epidemic in the United States. However, current mutations in the American HIV prevention landscape, driven by the biomedical promise of a ‘Test and Treat’ strategy, are producing potentially destructive outcomes for vulnerable and dispossessed communities, a situation that demands renewed investment from cultural critics. The aim of this article is to mobilize a specific strand of biopolitical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito) to examine recent federally orchestrated prevention measures dedicated to a scale-up and integration of HIV testing, treatment and ‘linkage to care’, in order to move beyond their reductive approach to the preservation of life and advance a more capacious, politically engaged prevention model rooted in communal rather than individual forms of immunity. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, MD, I attend to ways in which local HIV prevention initiatives are courting the citys precarious Ballroom community – a kinship system of black queer youth structured around competitive dance and performance – in an attempt to materialize their ‘target population’ for testing purposes. Previously neglected by governmental and medical institutions, members of the Ballroom community now find themselves addressed as responsible sexual citizens who are expected to protect their bodies by getting tested and, if tested positive, start treatment. Yet, this emphasis on the medical rights and responsibilities of HIV positive youth threatens to abandon large groups of youth who have managed to stay uninfected. I conclude by locating this problem in the incongruity between the biological life protected by current ‘Test and Treat’ strategies and the forms of life that allow the Ballroom community to persevere under often dire circumstances, constituting an indigenous resource for an alternative take on HIV prevention

Between hope and abandonment: black queer collectivity and the affective labour of biomedicalised HIV prevention.

This paper investigates how current transformations in HIV prevention in the USA are intensifying a logic of viral containment rooted in biomedicine and behavioural science, in order to curb the recent rise in new HIV infections, predominantly among young African-American ‘men who have sex with men’. Based on fieldwork in Baltimore, I examine how this paradigm shift is translated into concrete prevention activities that focus on HIV testing and treatment. By attending to the affective labour performed by members of Baltimores Ballroom scene – a kinship system of black queer youth structured around competitive dance and performance – I show how the emergent ‘Test & Treat’ approach becomes a polyvalent object that attracts a host of optimistic investments in collective and individual prosperity, which nevertheless threaten to remain unrequited. Finally, I argue that the current move towards a biomedically mediated model of viral management depoliticises the struggle against HIV by suggesting that we can treat our way out of an epidemic that in fact remains intricately interwoven with racialised violence against the queer, the poor and the otherwise dispossessed.This paper investigates how current transformations in HIV prevention in the USA are intensifying a logic of viral containment rooted in biomedicine and behavioural science, in order to curb the recent rise in new HIV infections, predominantly among young African-American ‘men who have sex with men’. Based on fieldwork in Baltimore, I examine how this paradigm shift is translated into concrete prevention activities that focus on HIV testing and treatment. By attending to the affective labour performed by members of Baltimores Ballroom scene – a kinship system of black queer youth structured around competitive dance and performance – I show how the emergent ‘Test & Treat’ approach becomes a polyvalent object that attracts a host of optimistic investments in collective and individual prosperity, which nevertheless threaten to remain unrequited. Finally, I argue that the current move towards a biomedically mediated model of viral management depoliticises the struggle against HIV by suggesting that we can tr...

The fabric of our memories: Leather, kinship, and queer material history

This article examines how the practices of self-preservation and other-directed care within Baltimore’s gay leather community are entangled with the material fabric of leather. I argue that leather forms a mnemonic technology that mediates between intimate experience and collective memory, thereby enabling leathermen to develop affective attachments to both the past and the future of their shared form of life. Ultimately, my aim is to attend to the relation between memory and materiality, asking how the material qualities of leather, as treated animal skin, evoke, store, and shape memories and, vice versa, how such memories imbue leather items with emotional, cultural, and political values.This article examines how the practices of self-preservation and other-directed care within Baltimore’s gay leather community are entangled with the material fabric of leather. I argue that leather forms a mnemonic technology that mediates between intimate experience and collective memory, thereby enabling leathermen to develop affective attachments to both the past and the future of their shared form of life. Ultimately, my aim is to attend to the relation between memory and materiality, asking how the material qualities of leather, as treated animal skin, evoke, store, and shape memories and, vice versa, how such memories imbue leather items with emotional, cultural, and political values.