Screen Love

Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era

Tom Roach

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438482095
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In work, play, education, and even healthcare, we are using social media during COVID-19 to approximate "normal life" before the pandemic. In Screen Love, Tom Roach urges us to do the opposite. Rather than highlight the ways that social media might help reproduce the pre-pandemic status quo, Roach explores how Grindr and other dating/hookup apps can help us envision a radically new normal: specifically, antinormative conceptions of selfhood and community. Although these media are steeped in neoliberal relational and communicative norms, they offer opportunities to reconceive subjectivity and ethics in ways that defy normative psychological and sexual paradigms. In the virtual cruise, Roach argues, we might experience a queer sociability in which participants are formally interchangeable avatar-objects. On Grindr and other m4m platforms, a model of selfhood championed in liberal-humanist traditions—an intelligent, altruistic, eloquent, and emotionally expressive self—is often a liability. By teasing out the queer ethical and political potential of an antisocial, virtual fungibility, Roach compels readers to think twice about media typically dismissed as sordid, superficial, and narcissistic. Written for students, professors, and nonacademics alike, Screen Love is an accessible, provocative, and at times subversively funny read.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction Screen Lessons in the Classroom
• Chapter One Screen Lessons in the ICU
• Chapter Two Fail Better at Romance!
• Chapter Three Dare to Be Indifferent (or, How to Become a Cat Person)
• Chapter Four Embodied Echoes and Virtual Affordances
• Chapter Five Becoming Fungible
• Chapter Six Shut Up! in the Digital Closet
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover