Patterns within Grids

Susanna Paasonen (bio)

A review of Roach, Tom. Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. SUNY Press, 2021.

What would follow from detaching considerations of hookup apps from simplistic, pessimistic diagnoses of neoliberal commodification and exploitation, and from coupling critiques of the data economy with a potential queer ethics of relating instead? These are some of the questions that Tom Roach asks in Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. The approach of the book is that of both/and: it addresses the destructive, expansive, and intrusive dynamics of neoliberalism, while also arguing, in response to Audre Lorde, that the master’s tools might just be used to dismantle the master’s house (127). That is, the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism—where all subjects are seen as ultimately replaceable cogs in the machine, and where social media platforms treat their users as data points visually represented within horizontal grids foregrounding sameness—can bring forth a queer ethics premised on fungibility and shared alienation. Roach’s doesn’t shy away from complexities and ambiguities that make culture, society, and the self. This approach is refreshing, not least because much contemporary analysis of social media tends to be more unequivocal when outlining what apps and platforms do, and can do. The lines of argumentation are rich, and the examples and comparisons drawn often surprising. For me, Screen Love reads as a welcome invitation to think about networked sexual screen culture through the logic of both/and.

The founding argument of Screen Love suggests that, by presenting individuals seeking company as horizontal elements of an endless grid, m4m (“men seeking men”) media such as hookup apps Grindr and Scruff foreground nonidentical sameness and equivalence in ways disinterested in personal connection or inner depth. In so doing, m4m media allow for escapes from their own neoliberal logic. Working with and through Leo Bersani in particular, Roach argues that treating social media users as fungible—both in their visual representation as profile pictures within a grid, and structurally as data points used to aggregate broader patterns of tastes and preferences for targeted advertising—is at once a neoliberal operation of power and an opportunity to foreground an ethical, nonidentical equivalence between people that makes it possible to see life as mattering only as part of a larger composition (17, 22, 50).

In presenting users as types (“the jock,” “the daddy,” “the bear,” “the twink,” etc.) rather than as unique characters, m4m media, Roach agues, hollow out personality and perceived individual uniqueness in favor of anonymised, depersonalised patterns. Roach here thinks against or at least beyond most standard analyses of objectification, which see the reduction of people into things as a violent dehumanization that intensifies social hierarchies and relations of exploitation and that is to be resisted at all costs. This does not entail blindness about historical or present practices of racial dehumanization within which fungibility operates as a means of denying the value of an individual person or life. For Roach, fungibility as equivalence does not undo hierarchical relations or stand for equality insofar as in a fungible structure different bodies and data points are differently valued (57). Rather, fungibility becomes an exercise in self-lessening: attending to sameness—from which differences sprout—so that a given self could, by and large, just as well be someone or something else.

Screen Love is at its strongest in mediating something akin to thinking in action, as examples, anecdotes, and theoretical flights spring out of and intermesh with amalgamations where Marcel Proust meets the interface design of Grindr, and where Aristotle’s takes on philia (brotherly love) frame promiscuous cultures of cruising. Some comparisons and analogies—such as thinking about the grid-like design of Grindr in relation to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (107–109) that treats all deaths with equal weight regardless of a person’s fame, or Andy Warhol’s soup cans that repeat so that gradual differences emerge from similarity (144–148)—are likely to rub critics who would foreground the contextual specificity of cultural objects the wrong way. This, however, is not a line of critique I wish to pursue here: in terms of aesthetics and design, the analogies stand.

The book is less strong in tackling the politics, forms, and shapes of social media and the data economy within which apps such as Grindr operate. This is not primarily a media studies book, and it is something of a tired gesture to critique a volume for what it does not argue, cover, or achieve. At the same time, its focus on hookup apps and social media and its engagement with research on these topics do make it a media studies book. The comparison that Roach draws between queer kink cultures and social media interaction options in terms of their codes and forms of action—for example, suggesting that in their protocols, S&M dom and sub roles are like Twitter’s 280-character limit, and that hanky codes are governed by protocols in the way Facebook’s “like” interaction button is (101–102)—fails to grasp their fundamental differences. A like button may be used to express affective alliance in routine fashion but, functionally, it is a key marker of attention within the data economy, and is used in analyses of patterns of preference for the purposes of targeted advertising (advertisers arguably being the actual customers of social media). A Twitter character limit undoubtedly delimits action and impacts the style and form of interaction in concrete ways. Yet a feature engineered by design, resulting from the choices of a tech company, cannot be compared easily with the roles of play within sexual subcultures, even without considering the mercurial possibility of a switch in S&M. It is undoubtedly productive to think about queer sexual cultures and social media in tandem; it is, however, also crucial to understand the operating logic of social media.

Rather than uncoupling this logic or pointing to scholarship that does, Screen Love uses social media from Facebook and Twitter to Grindr, Scruff, and Tinder as something of a metaphor or symbol for neoliberalism. Roach frames social media as “‘the language’ of neoliberalism, efficient, utilitarian” (6), where clarity of expression is valued over opacity or ambiguity, and users, wrapped up in self-promotion, performance, brand-management, and endless competition, fight over visibility and popularity. This coupling of neoliberal politics and ethos with social media allows for clarity of argumentation, as it engages, if only partially, Jodi Dean’s notion of communicative capitalism. For Dean, “obligatory transparency and expressivity” (Roach 154) do not characterize the logic of communicative capitalism. Rather, the optimized flow and circulation of data for the purposes of monetization lie at its heart, so that content—let alone clarity of expression—ceases to matter. In Dean’s analysis, data streams decouple messages and updates from senders and recipients, politics and agendas, so that communicative capitalism ultimately eschews meaning and so limits social activism on social media platforms (58). This argument is not too distant from Roach’s interest in the “sensual nonsense” of m4m media that operate outside of and that resist neoliberal norms of clarity (162), yet it also runs counter to it in resisting the exceptionalism of such platforms. Furthermore, ambivalence, nonsense, and absurdity abound in online cultures within and beyond social media—communicational transparency is hardly the general norm and never has been (Phillips and Milner).

Roach’s take on social media is more optimistic than Dean’s, although it would be inaccurate to identify it as optimistic overall. It is similarly concerned with the invasive powers of capitalism. In fact, neoliberalism becomes nearly synonymous with contemporary U.S. culture and its societal and economic dynamics in ways that make it difficult to consider other neoliberalisms, or neoliberalisms differently played out, in tandem with the neoliberalism discussed in the book. What would a queer ethics of fungibility look like in a neoliberal society with universal health care—say, Canada—operating according to similar ideological tenets yet with different principles, such as to safeguard the value of and rights to life? Fungibility may be key to neoliberalism, but it is also differently yet profoundly key to socialism and communism, although socialist and communist societies have historically rarely advanced, respected, or acknowledged gender diversity or sexual rights. Without meandering further along this path, there are crucial differences between fungibilities pertaining to ideology, economy, and the struggle for social equality. It is a virtue for cultural inquiry to be specific in focus and with regard to its material, yet further discussion is needed to see how neoliberalism and U.S. culture shape and condition each other, and to discover what follows from conflating neoliberalism with a specific national context.

In its call to consider cruising—online, offline, and in between—a practice of learning from strangers wherein one remains receptive to the foreign while also acknowledging the fundamental sameness of individual subjects, Screen Love bears some similarity to João Florêncio’s 2020 book, Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig, which maps out a queer ethics based on sexual communion with and receptivity and generosity to strangers. Unlike Florêncio, who foregrounds the material intensities and dynamics of sexual pleasure in the making of queer male sociability, Roach does not engage with the notion or practices of pleasure, operating with Foucault’s declaration that sex is boring instead (62). Here, Screen Love contributes to a longer debate on the role and centrality of sexuality in queer inquiry, as advanced in the 2011 anthology After Sex, edited by Halley and Parker exploring the decoupling of queer inquiry from the topic of sex. Seemingly paradoxically, this is done by exploring hook-up apps.

This chosen line of argumentation is noteworthy in that it is easy to identify the unproductive excess of sex and sexual pleasure as fundamentally resistant to neoliberal norms of productivity and the optimization of performance. If seen as autotelic, sexual pleasure is an end in itself, requiring no instrumental purposes or interests (although it may of course be tethered to these, as well). Considered in this vein, the issue is not one of positioning sexuality as a “truth” concerning the self, nor of exaggerating the importance of sexuality in terms of identity or community so as to pin down the assumed meaning of sex or indeed of the self. Sexual desire and pleasure both make and unmake the self within and across categories of identity, so that there are myriad ways to conceptualize their importance and transformative potential well beyond the potential boredoms involved in analyzing what people do, how, why, or with whom (even though I can personally think of much more tedious intellectual tasks). Thinking further with Kane Race’s discussion of experimentations across screen media and sexual likes could have opened up further avenues for considering the ethics of promiscuity as rooted in pleasure.

Despite its title, Screen Love is not centrally concerned with a notion of love beyond the general framing of philia as an ethical claim. Intimacy, another key term in the book’s title that gestures toward Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy, weaves through the different chapters even as there is notably little conceptual work done with it. Intimacy is left to point somewhat ephemerally toward or to stand in for sexual exchanges, while also suggesting something else. If, following Lauren Berlant’s critique of couple normativity and its heterosexual economies, intimacy involves “connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living” (284), then intimacy comes steeped in vulnerability, suggesting the centrality of others to the making of the self. Furthermore, this formulation suggests that such connections are not merely of the human kind, so that an app such as Grindr—assembling interface design with avatars standing in for people, platform vernaculars connected to interaction forms and styles of writing, and invasive forms of data extraction—can impact lives in important ways.

For Roach, an ethics of fungibility emphasizes vulnerability (22, 54), yet he does not quite explain how it does this. If fungibility entails fundamental horizontality such that any individual (or their screen profile) can be replaced with any other, then contact between individuals—be it an in-app reply or a fuck date—is ultimately either meaningless or only meaningful as one node in a broader pattern of exchanges devoid of personal traits. It would then seem that it would not matter if one were to get no reply or to be rejected on a dating app. If ethical intimacy means not connecting on a personal level and being indifferent “to the sexiness of psychological depth” (15), does this not do away with vulnerability in such encounters? If one contact is the same as any other, what spaces are there for vulnerability in the connections on which we depend for living?

That a book invites its reader to think and question is, by default, a sign of its merits. In its partly open-ended and lively conversational style, interspersed with conceptually dense and neatly sculpted sentences, Screen Love achieves the difficult task of showing that, however powerful the dynamics of neoliberalism, it is crucial to hold on to spaces that enable alternate understandings of those dynamics and their implications. The book outlines pockets and patterns of possibility, virtualities that may or may not actualize, but which greatly matter.

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland, and author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), and NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light, MIT Press 2019).

Works Cited

• Berlant, Lauren. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 281–288.
• Dean, Jodi. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” Cultural Politics, vol. 1, no. 1, 2005, pp. 51–74.
• Florêncio, João. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig. Routledge, 2020.
• Phillips, Whitney and Ryan M. Milner. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity, 2017.
• Race, Kane. The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV. Routledge, 2018.