Can we play Fun Gay? Disjuncture and difference, and the precarious mobilities of millennial queer youth narratives

Abstract

This article takes up the complex project of unthinking neoliberal accounts of a progressive modernity. The authors position their anxieties about an ‘after’ to queer as an affect modality productive of both an opportunity and an obligation to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when queer, and therefore, gay, were organized in a relation of explicit politicization. The authors interrogate celebratory, modernist readings of millennial queer youth narratives where the potentially democratizing significance of the Internet as a cultural technology is deemed constitutive of mobility, play, and possibilities for a redistribution of rights of recognition, communality, and knowledge in a significant public sphere. Drawing on an analysis of research interviews that is framed as ‘anecdotal theory,’ the authors discuss four properties of networked publics – searchability, replicability, persistence, and invisible audiences – not uniquely as properties of technological interfaces, but rather as ‘technologies of otherness.’ Within a modality of critically queer attention, the authors consider the varied and complex precarious mobilities that constitute millennial queer youth narratives.

Keywords:

• youth
• sexuality
• queer
• gender
• internet
• media

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by a three‐year grant to the first author by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Conversations with Janice Stewart, Claire Robson, William Pinar, Paula Salvio, and John Willinsky were exceptionally productive. We also acknowledge the insightful comments made by reviewers and the QSE Special Issue Editors. However, the authors take full responsibility for the work reported here.

Notes

1. In accordance with danah boyd’s preferred use of capitalization in the spelling of her name, we use lower case (http://www.danah.org/name.html).

2. The interviews were conducted as part of a multi‐year project – Queer Women on the Net (http://www.queerville.ca) concerned with difference/s and social media in British Columbia and Alberta. Youth participants were in this project defined logistically as between 18 and 29 years since the larger project did not include ethics permission to interview participants below the age of majority (18 years of age).

3. The bio info that accompanies each transcript quote includes: a self‐chosen pseudonym, the marker that the speaker uses to signal a particular queer identification, age, race, and any other identificatory flag of particular significance to the interviewee. Ellipsis dots indicate an edit.