Presented by: Jamie Hakim and James Cummings
Abstract
In this paper, we reflect on initial findings from the ESRC funded, UK-based project ‘Digital Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men use smartphones to mediate their cultures of intimacy’. Specifically, we focus on the ways in which gay and bisexual men have used their smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy during the coronavirus pandemic.
In response to the pandemic, on the 23rd March 2020, the UK government imposed a national lockdown. At its most severe, this prohibited in-person meetings with anyone outside of one’s ‘household’. Gay and bisexual men have received contradictory advice on how to navigate their intimate lives during lockdown, though sexual health and community organisation have widely advocated digitally mediated intimacy in lieu of in-person interaction.
Taking Lauren Berlant’s (1998) definition of intimacy as ‘connections we depend on for living’, we ask whether and how gay and bisexual men have been using their smartphones and other devices to negotiate their cultures of intimacy during the pandemic and to what extent these negotiations help to sustain their lives?
Drawing on interviews with gay and bisexual men in London and observations of the creative remediation of counter-public spaces in which gay and bisexual men ordinarily negotiate key aspects of their intimate lives, we show how digital technologies have been used to experience both interpersonal and communal forms of intimacy. Yet, the extent to which these digital intimacies can provide connections that are depend on for living is uncertain and contested.
This paper is part of our broader research, in which we seek to understand gay and bisexual smartphone mediated intimacies ‘conjuncturally’ (Hall et. al., 1978); that is, as situated at the confluence of social, cultural, political, ideological, technological, economic and, more recently, epidemiological forces that give form to contemporary British society.
Bios
Jamie Hakim is a lecturer in media studies at the University of East Anglia. His research interests lie at the intersection of digital cultures, intimacy, embodiment and care. His book Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2019. He is principle investigator on the ESRC funded ‘Digital Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men use their smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy’, which is partnered with sexual health organisations the Terrence Higgins Trust, London Friend and Waverley Care (www.uea.ac.uk/digital-intimacies). As part of the Care Collective he has co-authored The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence which has just been published by Verso.
James Cummings is a Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia, UK. His interests are in understanding sexuality from an interdisciplinary, phenomenological perspective as a social practice that is historically and politically constructed and oriented in everyday contexts of space and time. He has worked with gay and bisexual men in the UK and China and is author of the forthcoming book The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Community, Space and Time (2021, Palgrave Macmillan).
Project Twitter: @digintimaciesUK
Digital Intimacies 6 