Bringing Sexy Bareback

It strikes me that the reading this week, from McGlotten’s queerspace to Dean’s emphasis on the distinctly modern stranger in cruising, are oriented specifically toward gay male culture, and as Tewksbury notes, one that is predominantly white. I can’t help but wonder what kind of space is opened up for female sexuality and in particular, gay women, particularly as the couple of Craigslist ads I placed were for women seeking women. The theories certainly apply to or suggest ways in which female sexuality might adhere to or differ from the web-mediated encounters that are described, though the focus on male homosexual practices like cruising or barebacking, or in the case of Bersani, the sociality of gay male community, is, for me, dangerously close to assuming that these types of encounters are common to all gay people, female and male. Tewksbury is the most explicit in delimiting his gendered scope, though as a sociologist (I am presuming), this seems to be intrinsic to his methodology; theorists like Kaye, McGlotten, Bersani and Dean, to differing degrees, posit modes of self-representation, desire, and community formation that are implicitly male.

My own experience posting on Craiglist was somewhat uncomfortable, in that I had no intention of actually representing myself or my desires accurately, and for me this was an ethical concern. This may be in part because the first response I received, and admittedly this may have been a standard reply to Craigslist postings, provoked a massive guilt trip:

i just saw your craigslist ad you posted earlier today looking for some nsa fun. i really want to take you up on it...like right now :) problem is, i responded to a similiar ad last month and was supposed to meet up with a guy but later found out after that it was just some 12 year old kid who was playing a prank on craigslist. That was my first time trying to hookup with someone from craigslist and since then i have been really skepitcal about going through with this again. but after just seeing your ad, i want to try this with you (if your ad was legit) i am for real, so i hope you are as well. i just moved here a couple months ago from vermont....wow....what a difference.

I was reminded of McGlotten’s observation of the “contradictions of sexual publicity; bodies in circulation do not necessarily want to be known.” (76) He admits at one point, “I have to wonder why some participants try to protect their identity,” yet I couldn’t help but think that anonymity in a queer culture is of paramount importance, particularly given the stigmas still attached to revealing one’s own identity, e.g. closeted identities, or the near (or sometimes actually) faceless encounters in cruising. If the fantasy of the internet is disembodiment, there is still a logic of separating the face from the rest of the body, i.e. the genitals, that still operates in this manner.

I certainly did not want to be “known,” not on the level that I normally present myself in any case. (Perhaps the certainty of that statement needs to be interrogated more thoroughly; or is it enough to say I just wasn't in the mood?) Though I posted pictures, they were movie stills that seemed ambiguous enough to be taken as candid photographs of “me.” This too spoke to the authority of the photographic image that Kaye describes, how, taking after Barthes, “a person’s photograph, much more than actually able to represent reality, makes the viewer believe in its reality.” (168) The awkwardness I felt may have stemmed from the knowledge that the photographs I used, however “fake” or “inauthentic” (i.e. misrepresentative), still evoke a certain reality, or reality-effect. It is not the indexicality of Bazin, but a signifier for authenticity nonetheless, an implied statement of disclosure, which I was, in actuality, falsifying. Kaye remarks that virtual cross-dressing only works “to the extent that they are fooling, or making themselves invisible to that hegemony,” and yet my experience with it was a heightened sense of myself, that I was not who I said I was. That, to me, felt ethically dubious. (166) Part of this problem, additionally, stemmed from the frustration over Craigslist’s lack of options for what I might have been looking for: strict divisions between gender, not being able to find more bisexual ambiguity, or having to rely on conventions of casual sex when it came to “casual encounter.” Why is there not a space for something between “strictly platonic” and something more pointedly sexual? Something like a queerspace in McGlotten's formulation: “a space of threshold, as a betweenness that opens up?" (65) A way of figuring out those dynamics in the process of their unfolding, rather than ordering off a menu of options?