White noise, white affects: filtering the sameness of queer suffering

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that media productions of an affective uniformity generate white feelings that operate like a white noise machine. By focusing on the inaugural season of the Viceland television series, Gaycation, I explore the ways that US liberal queer whiteness is performed affectively as an experience of feeling for others. I consider the ways that a performance of feeling (of sympathy, empathy, identification, and solidarity) for queer and trans people of colour creates a field of white noise that is central to the constitution of contemporary US liberal whiteness. Whiteness becomes an affective tone—of neutrality, benevolence, morality, innocence, vulnerability, and caring—constituted from bits of information, facts, feelings, experiences, and analyses provided by non-white people and mashed together into a continuous indistinct hiss that, while so familiar as to be nearly imperceptible, works to flatten and obscure any apprehension of content or detail that might unsettle attachments to whiteness.

Keywords:

• Homonationalism
• whiteness
• solidarity
• queer activism
• affect

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr T L Cowan for working closely with me to develop this essay, and for her ongoing collaboration.

Notes

1. I focus here on the first season of Gaycation because I finished writing the essay before the second season was released (in the fall of 2016). The first season alone offers ample space for an analysis of white noise as a technology for reproducing and recentring feelings of hegemonic whiteness.

2. While I am playing on the name of the New York City-based legal defence organization, The Innocence Project, I do not mean to suggest that their excellent work on post-conviction exoneration and legal reform somehow contributes to the project of white supremacy. Instead, my thinking here is informed by Gloria Wekker’s important work on the construction and performance of “white innocence” (2016).

3. Syed does not directly address the concept of white noise again—focusing instead on interviews with two university professors explaining how they became dedicated to multicultural and anti-racist pedagogy, and reflections on her own process—but the connection she suggests is compelling.