Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era

Synopsis

In work, play, education, and even healthcare, we are using social media during COVID-19 to approximate "normal life" before the pandemic. In Screen Love, Tom Roach urges us to do the opposite. Rather than highlight the ways that social media might help reproduce the pre-pandemic status quo, Roach explores how Grindr and other dating/hookup apps can help us envision a radically new normal: specifically, antinormative conceptions of selfhood and community. Although these media are steeped in neoliberal relational and communicative norms, they offer opportunities to reconceive subjectivity and ethics in ways that defy normative psychological and sexual paradigms. In the virtual cruise, Roach argues, we might experience a queer sociability in which participants are formally interchangeable avatar-objects. On Grindr and other m4m platforms, a model of selfhood championed in liberal-humanist traditions—an intelligent, altruistic, eloquent, and emotionally expressive self—is often a liability. By teasing out the queer ethical and political potential of an antisocial, virtual fungibility, Roach compels readers to think twice about media typically dismissed as sordid, superficial, and narcissistic. Written for students, professors, and nonacademics alike, Screen Love is an accessible, provocative, and at times subversively funny read.

Copyright:

2021

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

222 Pages

ISBN-13:

9781438482095

Related ISBNs:

9781438482088, 9781438482071

Publisher:

State University of New York Press

Date of Addition:

08/07/23

Copyrighted By:

State University of New York

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender, Social Studies

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.