Researching Intimacies and New Media:Methodological Opportunities and Challenges

Researching intimacies and new media encompasses a wide variety of intersecting practices and relationships. This special issue presents contributions from researchers who are investigating practices of intimacy mediated either wholly or in part through new media in which a variety of different methodological opportunities and challenges are highlighted and discussed. Existing research has addressed different combinations of new media, intimacy, and methodology, but there remains space for a dedicated focus on the ways in which these areas are interrelated and entangled. The articles in this special issue build up a conversation around this particular intersection from a range of directions, from reflections on specific technological devices/apps and their promotion of particular forms of intimacies that may lead to (dis)comfort and (dis)connection, to the intimate—and sometimes risky—investments in research processes and fieldwork, as well as the ethical frameworks and decision-making processes guiding the research

Going the Distance: Locative Dating Technology and Queer Male Practice-Based Identities

Hybridisation of digital and physical space is now a reality for geographies of sexualities in the digital age. ‘This chapter builds on such an understanding by exploring how digital–physical hybridisation mediated by locative dating apps can shape queer male ‘practice-based’ identities, and how these typologies in turn inform physical queer encounters. Drawing from a qualitative research project with men who have sex with men (MSM), I examine the impact of online connection on different ‘routes’ to physical meeting. I argue that certain modes of behaviour help to identify a range of practice-based identities, implicitly linked to different forms of hybridisation. Three typologies exemplify practice-based identities: the ‘Embracer’, the ‘Time-waster’ and the ‘Minimalist’. These fluid typologies overlap and are even evident within a single identity across time, depending on personal motivation, the ‘market’ of available online matches, and app genre. Such typologies demonstrate the range of user engagement that becomes bound up in, and mediated by, the digital and physical hybridisation enabled by popular mobile media platforms. The development of practice-based identities can be extrapolated beyond thinking about online and offline spaces to new questions about future sexualities, identities and digital geographies

Touch and contact during COVID-19:Insights from queer digital spaces

The aim of this conceptual paper is to discuss the transformation of socialisation processes due to the digitalisation of entertainment and community formation during COVID-19. More specifically, we focus on alternative modes of touch and contact within the context of queer digital entertainment spaces and question how the world is shaped and sensed in a (post-) COVID-19 era. Inspired by the work of Karen Barad on a quantum theory of queer intimacies, we highlight that the rise of hybridised experiences in-between physical and digital spaces captures a series of spatio-temporal, material and symbolic dimensions of touch and contact. We conclude by drawing implications for the future of organisations and work

Intimate Subjects and Virtual Spaces: Rethinking Sexuality as a Category for Intimate Ethnographies

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Sexualities and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716677285.Social networking sites and digital technologies have created opportunities for young people in India to establish virtual intimate connections. In this article we analyse the intimate exchanges between young men on two different digital platforms - Facebook and Planet Romeo. An analysis of the intimate virtual exchanges reveals technologies of queer neoliberal subject formation within contemporary India. Queer neoliberal subject formation refers to the emergence of a sexual subject of rights, one that is a consumer-citizen within the Indian free-market economy. The article highlights two kinds of ways in which bodies are being queered within present day India. First, we discuss the case of run-away young men, whose bodies are marked as failure, a kind of ‘delinquent’ subject by an ensemble of state and civil-society formations. The young men are escaping violence from male elders, and poor living conditions in peri-urban Kolkata. Their bodies come to signify a queer figure within neoliberal notions of success and enterprise. Secondly, we interrogate the ways in which homosexuality is an emergent juridico-political category in India. The Supreme Court of India ruling on 11th December 2013, which reinstated the anti-sodomy provisions of the Indian Penal Code (IPC 377), is the site for the sedimentation of ‘homosexual’ as a subject of legal rights. The homosexual is being presented as a subject of conjugal love. Conjugality is represented as a private good, as the right to consume intimacy within private space. Representation of intimacy and celebration of conjugal love is found through the growth of dating websites in India along with the proliferation of media texts such as memes, poems and illustrative images found online commemorating conjugality. Our ethnographic analysis of the virtual exchanges among runaway young men, and young gay identified men reveal how neoliberal subject formation in India remains incomplete