A queer kind of dwelling: Digital throwness and existential security among sexual minorities in Russia

Abstract

This article asks what it means to habituate a queer orientation in a world permeated by digital connectivity. In doing so, it takes media phenomenology away from the mundane towards the momentous, drawing on queer phenomenology, and existential media studies. Using life-narrative interviews with sexual minorities in Russia, the article sheds light on the “work of queer habituation” in a straight world, and the contemporary significance of digital media technologies within this process. Digital media’s ability to multiply space is defined a key feature which offers sites to “stay with” the disorienting experience of queer dispositions. Through longer periods of discrete “queer digital dwelling,” individuals who have been associating their queer desires with ontological threats are able to find space for existence and existential security. By locating others in close proximity, some are also allowed to appropriate local territory in ways that make it more livable.

Introduction

What does it mean to habituate a queer orientation ¹ in a world fundamentally permeated by digital connectivity? The fact that throughout history same-sex desires have commonly had to be communicated under the radar indisputably serves as an intricate starting point for investigations into both the specificities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or sometimes questioning), and others (LGBTQ+) culture, and media culture more generally. Much interest has consequently been paid to the ways in which the global rise of digital connectivity revolutionized the means for reaching out to one another among sexual minorities, and to overcome local constrains by the protection of the screen. Centrally focusing on issues of sexual identity, subculture, and resistance, studies over the past decades have illuminated how digital media fora have become ever more central for queer self-presentation (e.g. Alexander and Losh, 2010; Craig and McInroy, 2014; Duguay, 2016, 2017; Gray, 2009; Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012), the production and spreading of subcultural content (e.g. Berger, 2010; Gregg, 2010; McHarry, 2010), mobilization of queer activism (e.g. Cooper and Dzara, 2010; Offord, 2003), and HIV prevention (e.g. Clift, 2010; Mowlabocus et al., 2016; Pingel et al., 2012), among other things.

Even within otherwise strictly heteronormative environments, digital queer connectivity is now often only a few clicks away. However, although this assumes complex time/space relationships on behalf of the embodied media user, more phenomenological inquiries into the digitalization of the queer lifeworld are rare (examples, though, come from Tudor, 2018, 2021; Cante, 2015; Longhurst, 2017; Wight, 2014). That is, ambitions to capture the role of digital connectivity when inhabiting a queer orientation in a straight world. What does it, for example, mean to find one’s bearing as a same-sex-desiring individual, through faraway others rather than your embodied surroundings? Where do you come to feel at home? In what ways does queer digital media use co-produce and reorganize perceptions of space and situatedness at different scales? Driven by such queries, I will here take a closer look at the mediated “work of queer orientation” (Ahmed, 2006) within life-narrative interviews among same-sex-desiring Russian men. In doing so, I will discuss same-sex desire as a queer disposition, by reference to the etymology of dispositions as a “prevailing tendency,” “mood,” “inclination,” or “temperament” (Merriam-Webster, 2018). The term is used to capture how the queerness of same-sex desire might be felt and phenomenologically experienced—“as strange and often (at least initially) frightening inclinations, as leanings towards the ‘wrong’ objects, and as a sense of being out of place” (Tudor, 2021: 7). It further picks up on the astrological use of “disposition,” implying the “position of a planet as a determining influence” (Merriam-Webster, 2018), and thereby aim to expand on Sarah Ahmed’s (2006) queer phenomenology. If queerness is, as Ahmed suggests, best understood as the prevailing tendency of diverting from the straight line to reach our sexual object choice, then this tendency might indeed be described a disposition.

Combining insights from queer and media phenomenology with the conceptual framework of existential media studies, I will here promote a vision of the queer media user, not as a subcultural being consciously navigating digital terrains, but as an “exister” (Lagerkvist, 2013, 2016) thrown into the world in search for existential security and a place to call her home. In doing so, I will illuminate the centrality of slowness, lingering, and anonymity for queer habituation and the possibilities found for this through digital media technologies.

The phenomenological spaces of media

Moving beyond the dominant themes of identity, politics, and culture in media studies, media phenomenologists generally strive to understand media use in terms of sensibilities, of, for example, helping the body sink into its environment, or disorienting the media user while re-organizing the body’s positionality. As such, media is seen as bound up in the social production of space and habituation (e.g. Moores, 2012, 2017, 2020; Pink and Leader Mackley, 2012, 2013, 2016). Centrally focusing on the mundane everyday use of different technologies, media phenomenologists, for example, highlight the significance of media for the ways in which we modify our surroundings to make them “feel right” (Bengtsson, 2006; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012, 2013, 2016). Turning the TV set, the radio, or different lightings on and off at different points of the day are fundamental—while hardly recognizable—ways of structuring the spatiotemporality of the home. Hence, it might be only at the point when it is suddenly missed that we actually become aware of our reliance on media (Moores, 2012). Furthermore, while there is generally a suspicion within contemporary media studies against the idea of mediated “spaces” ontologically separable from territorial space (such as the older designations of “cyberspace” or “online/offline”), media phenomenologists suggest that such distinctions might be necessary from a perception-based point of view, if wanting to understand contemporary social experiences (for a more detailed discussion of this, see Tudor, 2018, 2021).

Drawing on Paddy Scannells’ (1996) work, Shaun Moores (2012, 2017), for example, propose that the media user is best understood as multiply situated in several spaces at once, and that, for example, TV channels, email inboxes, and social media feeds must be recognized as spaces in their own right for users to occupy. At the same time, this multiple positionality of the media user is by Moores largely understood as a state of harmony, where unified subjects are assumed to flow between interconnected nods of belonging. Only if the media routine is broken will it cause disorientation or uneasiness. But if we want to understand, for example, the media use among sexual minorities, which is often characterized by conflicting spheres of interest and the overarching risk of “context collapse” (Hogan, 2012), we need a much more elaborate understanding of space across the lifeworld. Within my work (Tudor, 2018, 2021), I have hence attempted to propose such a framework through a queer digital media phenomenology, sensitive to the politics of location in the digital age, which, as argued by Jenny Sundén (2006), contain several bodies in flesh and in code.

In this article, I would like to further develop this approach by following media phenomenologist Amanda Lagerkvist away from the mundane towards the exceptional. For media phenomenology has been dominated by a focus on the “everyday,” emphasizing media use as “non-representational,” “pre-cognitive,” and “invisible” (e.g. Moores, 2017, 2020); As Lagerkvist (2020, 2022) argues though, while our existential terrains of connectivity are indeed defined by banal everyday uses of media, they also include life-defining moments, what Jaspers refers to as “limit situations,” when our entanglement with media technologies becomes momentous. This is a matter of how we may lose and seek to find our bearings in life, and how we cope with the vulnerabilities of human existence with and through media technologies. Such limit-situations commonly reveal themselves in moments when we are confronted with crisis in life, and have been prominently explored within existential media studies through the themes of death and grief (e.g. Andersson, 2019; Lagerkvist, 2017, 2018; Lagerkvist and Andersson, 2017; Westerlund, 2018; Westerlund et al., 2015). It is when we lose our ground and sense of cohesion that we are urgently reminded of the work that we ourselves have to perform to once again reach a sense—if so only temporary and fragile—of existential security. Existential media studies is thus devoted to the exceptional as key for understanding our “digital throwness” implying the uncertainty, precarity, and vulnerability of the digital-human condition (Lagerkvist, 2013, 2016). For we are, in Heideggerian terms, “thrown” into an existence, where digital connectivity in its numerous incarnations offers “both new existential predicaments, and at once new spaces for the exploration of existential themes and the profundity of life” (Lagerkvist, 2016: 97). Inspired by the work of John Durham Peters on Heidegger, these existential predicaments can be understood in terms of “human technicity,” that is, the degree to which the world is already and continuously brought into being by human hand. Thrown into a particular place and time, with its particular conditions and limitations, we are all called upon to craft our world and give form to our lives, and digital media are part of our situation and the raw material by which we unfold ourselves. In my reading, I will couple these insights with critical phenomenology, and in particular that of Sarah Ahmed (2006), proposing that a queer “disposition” in a straight world is a particular kind of limit-situation, and that “the work of queer orientation” can be read as a specific kind of human crafting intricately interlinked with digital connectivity. In particular, Ahmed’s perspectives on space are used to highlight how bodies travel unevenly across distances within the near and the far, and how media work as spatiotemporal technologies of existence.

Orientation in/of space

As part of a media phenomenological understanding, space is here regarded a central analytical resource for capturing both, human throwness into a situation beyond her control, and the momentousness of media use in relation to queer dispositions. Space is seen as socially produced and multiple (Massey, 2005), but as argued by Henri Lefebvre (1984 [1974]) not endlessly negotiable or relative. Power operates in space—including the material and symbolic—structuring, planning, governing, and dividing space. Still, there are micro-alterations and agency, since space is always in the making. Such dialectic gives it an inherent instability, including subjects walking off track, forming their own maps of belonging, negotiating the hegemonic uses of particular places, occupying forbidden spaces, and leaving their imprints for others who come after. In this article, space is thus conceptualized as, on the one hand, always caught up in larger social, cultural, and political structures constituting existential predicaments of our digital throwness, and at the same time navigated, lived, and contested by human existers. For the purpose of this text though, and somewhat in tension with Lefebvre’s model, space will be dealt with primarily from the horizon of the perceiving subject, aiming to capture bodily impressions, hard-to-express tendencies, and that which exceeds conscious self-representations. These are further seen as highly valuable assets for understanding spatiotemporality and media use both as normative structure and as negotiable possibility.

Already body phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1997 [1962]) noted that moments occur when things no longer appear “the right way up,” implying a dissonance between the body-subject and her world. He calls these “queer moments,” in terms of perception becoming odd and twisted. Queer moments, to Merleau-Ponty, are highly intensive and therefore force the subject to reorient herself, to overcome the queer effect (in Ahmed, 2006: 65–66). Sara Ahmed, however, takes this notion somewhere else and reads it along queer theoretical lines. She sees queer moments to be about the body’s ability to extend with, and be at ease within, the space it inhabits and calls attention to the fact, as noted by Lefebvre and Massey, that space is always in itself oriented. Regarding desire a fundamental intentionality of the body, same-sex desire is by Ahmed recognized as a largely disorienting experience in a world dominated by heteronormative textures, without immediate possibilities to extend into its environments. And rather than assuming the need to reorient ourselves, Ahmed asks what will happen if we stay with those queer moments? Even though being tremendously uncomfortable, queer moments also present opportunities to walk offline, and it is this tendency of deviating from the straight line that produces “queer orientation” as an embodied accomplishment in time-space. Due to the straight orientation of space, all queers, according to Ahmed (2006), have to somehow “become queer,” not necessarily in terms of a sexual identity, but as in

gathering such tendencies into specific social and sexual forms. Such a gathering requires a “habit-change,” a term she borrows from Teresa de Lauretis: it requires a reorientation of one’s body such that other objects, those that are not reachable on the vertical and horizontal lines of straight culture, can be reached. The work of reorientation needs to be made visible as a form of work. (p. 100)

Here, we may hear the echoes from existential media studies, pointing at the human technicity implicit in (all) orientations, and the queer disposition as a critical limit-situation (Lagerkvist, 2020, 2022) presenting itself as both crisis and the possibility to act.

Within the following analysis of digital media use among same-sex-desiring men in Russia, I aim to lift this “work” to the forefront. In contexts largely obscuring the existence of queer desires in social life and culture, digital media is more likely than ever to be the place where such tendencies start to gather. Hence, the empirical material used in this analysis is taken from life-narrative interviews with now grown-up men who all experienced the digitalization of Russia in parallel with struggling with a queer disposition. As such, I try to pin down what it may mean to reorient one’s body, and for lines to emerge through a global network, where proximity in code does not necessarily equate to proximity in flesh. For it should be noted that Ahmed in her writing leaves rearrangements of space and time, due to the digitalization of queer living, unnoticed. There are, however, plenty of opportunities to use her concepts as starting points for a queer digital media phenomenology. We will see that while the work of reorientation visible in Ahmed’s writing is largely about moving “away” from the vertical and horizontal lines of straight culture, a focus on digital media is revealing of ways to recraft straight space, and the possibilities to dwell rather than move. Thus, instead of speedup and instantaneousness commonly expected to result from (not least queer) digital culture, an existential perspective helps highlight slowness and abilities to linger and postpone action as just as important.

Materials and methods

This article draws on a larger 5-year project based on ethnographic work in Saint Petersburg, Russia between 2013 and 2015, with the overall aim to explore and analyze ways in which digital media use interconnects with senses of belonging and orientation in time and space among same-sex-desiring men. The choice of not including same-sex-desiring individuals of whatever gender in the study was a matter of prioritizing depth over broadness, as well as (even though not very spelled out in this text) a particular interest in theories of queer masculinities. I agree with Jack Halberstam (2005) that treating queer men and women together when working with queer cultures is not always productive because their histories and subcultures are to such a large extent separated. This goes for the Russian context as well, and particularly within the urban centers (Stella, 2012: 1833). The recruitment of participants was further not intentionally or articulately limited to cisgender males, but done through snowballing in calls for “same-sex desiring men who speaks English” starting from a few initial contacts introduced to me by a local friend. Though rather different in lifestyle, since some belonged to particular communities such as Bears and Chubbies, while others were not identifying along the LGBTQ-identity spectrum at all, the participants treated in this text all ended up cis-men from different parts of Russia and neighboring countries. ² All in all, the project involved 19 participants between 21 and 43 years old, followed periodically over the course of 3 years. For the purpose of their safety, all names have been changed to pseudonyms and the study design implied a continuous reflexivity trying to foresee and prevent any threats to their privacy and anonymity from anyone outside. This included me not officially being in Russia as a researcher, but on tourist visa, and not being open about my work towards anyone outside the study while out in field.

The specific analysis at hand is based more or less exclusively on non-structured, in-depth life-narrative interviews in the form of face-to-face conversations, mostly in English, ³ and loosely organized around a few themes (Johnson, 2001). This was part of a digital ethnographic approach with a non-digital-centric attitude (Pink et al., 2016). As a media phenomenological working method, this meant starting from what Sarah Pink et al. (2016) call “the digital intangible,” aiming to capture the relationship between digital, sensory, atmospheric, and material elements of our social worlds (p. 7). Searching the thickness of digital media experience, a non-digital-centric approach consciously decenters the focus on media itself to privilege other aspects of the participants’ worlds and lives that are unavailable to us if, for example, we are mainly asking about their media habits. Rather than zooming in on a specific digital milieu, this method choice was a strategy to capture the role of digital media use within larger processes of “queer world-making” (Yep, 2003).

The more general term “digital media,” as used throughout the text, is thus a loose umbrella term for communication media hardware and software, enabled by modern computerization and smart technology, and commonly combined with Internet connectivity, such as the smartphone, tablets, and home computers. The more particular term “queer digital media use” specifically implies using such technology for queer endings. This includes using “queer-catering” software and also other resources appropriated for queer endings, which also covers ways of, for example, concealing one’s queer disposition. Taken together, the interviews turned out to include the use of mainstream social networks, Internet relay chat (IRC) channels, digital bulletin boards, dating sites, web-cam forums, and geolocative hookup applications.

Situating the study

It might be important to note the rather specific circumstances of the surrounding media landscape in Russia for the participants, most being between 25 and 40 years old at the time of the interviews. At first, the pre-glasnost era did not allow for queer expressivity, and such topics were totally banned from the information sphere. While sex and intimacy in general were being hidden away in the official Soviet society, queer desires were treated as an “unmentionable sin” (Essig, 1999: 7). The ban against male same-sex intimacy and the systematic persecution and imprisonment of suspected queers figured quietly in Soviet society as an unspoken undercurrent. While several participants were born in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, it would take until 1993 before the ban was removed. Thereafter, queer visibility increased significantly during the 1990s—primarily in popular culture and in the face of globalized cultural trends—but it continued to be subject to political controversy and was never granted a natural place in the Russian public sphere. Following from the early 2000s and growing commercial and political centralization of the media, queer visibility was once again pushed further towards the periphery (Edenborg, 2017: 53–58). At the same time, the alternative and, relatively speaking, uncontrolled online media sphere had a comparably slow start in Russia, and still in 2008 only 27% of the population had Internet access, and less than half of the population in 2011.

Although there is a scarcity of studies into queer digital media use in Russia, research on queer living more generally shows that many also today struggle to preserve a separation between spheres where they are seen as queer and those where they may pass in accordance with mainstream expectations (Kondakov, 2017; Soboleva and Bakhmetjev, 2015; Stella, 2012, 2013, 2015). Besides the suppression of same-sex intimacy, this should also be seen in relation to the layering of several co-existing public and private spheres broadly acknowledged as a prominent trait of modern Russia. Thus, the use of “queer” as a signifier for dispositions, orientations, and sometimes individuals in this article draws on the central questioning by queer theory of universal and fixed sexual identities across time and space (e.g. Butler, 1990, 1993; De Lauretis, 1991). The main subjects of the analyses that follow are same-sex-desiring and self-identifying cis-men, signified as men with “queer dispositions,” rather than, for example, “gay men,” I see “gay” to connote a much more specific way of living sexual difference commonly associated with a metropolitan “out identity” (cf. Sinfield, 1998), while “queer” is intended to invite for a loosening of such understandings. Hence, “queer” is here used to signify non-heterosexual desires and practices, sometimes but far from always equating a gay male identity and subcultural belonging.

The work of queer orientation

In practice, within the life-narrative interviews, the participants were asked to describe their earliest memories of same-sex desire and how they remember comprehending it at the time in relation to their local context. Did they have any frameworks of interpretation for same-sex desire? Did they speak to anyone about it? Were such emotions caught up with notions of at-homeness at local, regional, and/or national levels? Throughout their narratives, particular attention was paid to times when media technologies were being brought up in relation to same-sex desire. As it turned out, that would be rather often. Within the following, I will, however, start by establishing the limit-situation of queer disorientation, as described by the participants, before moving over to its digital entanglements.

Facing the limit

Most of the men I talked to described it as though they had always known about their queer dispositions. Thus, there were no such moments of “realizing,” but more of a growing discomfort as it became gradually impossible to ignore. Many had long been secretly drawn to male friends throughout their childhood, but few found any traces at all to their memory, of queer visibility, either in books, media, or any other sites of information. They thus witness about a complete absence of queer identification or outlet, but they were acutely aware of the heteronormative expectations surrounding them, constantly re-producing the boundaries for boyhood and masculinity. Yegor, a 43-year-old hardware developer, said that he lacked any kind of vocabulary for what he was experiencing by the time of growing up:

I knew it from a very young age. I think it was at five years, or six years, so it was always. I did not understand it, but I thought about it always. You know it was strange in my childhood, because there were no such words as “gay” or . . . “homosexual.” It was nothing I heard of, and I couldn’t read anything about it, I couldn’t see it anywhere, so I didn’t know what it was. It was only the way I felt, and I didn’t speak with anyone about it. I couldn’t speak with anyone. (Yegor)

The same goes for Sasha, a 27-year-old bank employee who now lived in Saint Petersburg with his boyfriend Nicolai since a couple of years. He explained that his queer disposition was “within him from the beginning,” but that he could not make any sense out of it. Having no framework of interpretation, he was convinced that nobody else felt the way he did, and therefore concealed this aspect of himself as an unarticulated secret during his entire upbringing. Also Adrian, a 27-year-old teacher in English and German who had recently moved to Saint Petersburg when we met, described this totalizing inability to act out on queer intentions:

[O]f course you couldn’t be yourself, cause all your friends at the university; your family, they are heteros, and if I try to speak to them about this . . . this problem (nervous laughter), they just try . . . they believe that it’s a problem of big cities maybe, of Saint Petersburg or Moscow, but in [city name]? No! (laughing) It can’t be here. (Adrian)

Queer dispositions were hence for a long time experienced—not as something in the margins, but as a non-possibility, a complete closure. This is reminding of how critical phenomenologists describe the habituation of difference as overlying the body with immanence, with a distinct “I cannot” (Young, 1980: 146–147). The participants’ descriptions of being totally alone with their feelings also echo previous research in many different locations, of young queer individual’s isolation, reflecting the often totalizing effect of heteronormative culture on the individual (cf. Yep, 2003).

Nicolai, now a 27-year-old automotive engineer in Saint Petersburg, described an innate sense of dis-belonging in relation to his surroundings. He remembered the pleasures and fears connected with watching his male classmates already in early primary school, and how it made him feel queerly out of place. The only explanation he could come up with to himself as a child was that he in fact came from outer space:

When I was a kid I thought I was . . . coming from another planet, because I liked boys. But, while growing up I understood everything. It was more due to the Internet that I understood what it was. [. . .]

But at that moment I couldn’t really understand why I liked my friends, so I thought that maybe I was from another planet, that it was wrong. (Nicolai)

For Nicolai, his hometown was all he knew, and not being extended by that place, he felt himself to not even belong to this world. In a similar vein, the trope of death was reoccurring in several accounts:

to be interested in . . . homosexual . . . sex, it was the same as suicide. (Sasha)

At a certain age, I thought that if I couldn’t get this out of my mind, I would kill myself. I never wanted to die, but I thought about it, when I was twenty and twenty-one. I thought that I needed to get out of this world, because there are no people like me, who understand me. (Yegor)

Trying to define some point of origin for that otherly existence, which could be shared with no one, several participants developed for themselves very real biographical narratives of being “aliens” and “changelings.” Ahmed (2006) describes how the failure to orient oneself toward “the ideal sexual object” within heteronormative culture, that is, the opposite sex, comes about as a “threat to the social ordering of life itself [emphasis added],” which is why the queer child is “read as the source of social injury” (p. 91). In light of this, we might also understand the inability among the participants to see themselves as part of their biological families and how they come to regard their feelings in terms of death. As a limit-situation, the queer disposition confronted the participants with the ultimate closure and also the opportunity to act.

Digital throwness and ways of finding one’s bearings

Throughout these disoriented periods of the participants’ lives, some tell stories about pre-digital encounters, when they came across queerly opaque traces, such as a suggestive contact ad in the local newspaper or a phone number written in the men’s room. Such experiences and objects would be treasured and kept as totems to return to, physically or in memory, over and over again. However, many had their most significant “openings” when introduced to Internet connections. For Sasha, it was the first time he ever got to know about queer others, and he would spend much time on a dating-site called Mamba searching and following members in his home region. If queer dispositions had initially been experienced as being accidental visitors in reality, the locating of queer others in the world is further described by the participants as coming to be at ease with their being, in a very basic sense. This was, for example, the case with Nicolai, who had previously thought of himself as an alien:

I guess it was more to turn to the Internet to realize that I am not the only one. [. . .] I had this phobia that I was from another planet, and that went away. I started to understand that I am a son of my parents and, and that there are people nearby similar to me. (Nicolai)

Aslan, an Azerbaijani immigrant in his mid-30s working as an art teacher in Saint Petersburg, witnessed about similar experiences. Aslan grew up in Baku with a very traditional upbringing, but worked as a teenager within metropolitan hotels and restaurants where he met several same-sex-desiring men from near and far. Still, he had difficulties with his own queer disposition, both in relation to heteronormative culture and in relation to these queer others. He describes himself as a traditionally masculine guy, who realized at an early age that he was drawn to a spectrum of masculinities that he thought of as incompatible with queer desire and that he saw nothing of at his work. Nowadays, Aslan belongs to the Bear community, characterized by hypermasculine aesthetics and valorization of attributes such as body and facial hair and body fat, but at that time he thought that he was the only one in the world with his kind of queer disposition. Once he got an Internet connection, he was, however, able to register a fake Hotmail account to search MSN groups, and there he found Bear and Chubby communities. At this point, Aslan—just like Nicolai—went from thinking about himself as being from another planet, to having to re-conceptualize the planet itself. Aslan got wide-eyed when he spoke about this:

I was like crazy, “Oh my god! This kind of thing can happen!” like “How can there be a chubby community? Is this real, or what?” And I thought like there are so many people here, it’s not like a small group of people, it’s quite big and huge and especially like in the US or in Europe, and they have like parties there and cruising and, oh my god! This is like a completely different planet! (Aslan)

At the risk of taking their statements too literally, it might be suggested that by finding queer others, Nicolai and Aslan were able to accept that they could in fact be part of this world, that Nicolai could actually be the son of his parents. As phenomena that were previously considered alien became part of the participants’ lifeworlds, turning the world into a different place than it was before, and by that a place for mere being. In a phenomenological sense, we might say that the lifeworld is oriented through that which appears in view, and here completely new objects overthrew previous perceptions. Locating queer others thus eased a sense of placelessness and gave room for existence. The term existence is here used in a philosophical sense, but there are good reasons to be reminded that there is also an acute literal meaning as same-sex-desiring youth are dramatically over-represented in the statistics of attempted suicides (e.g. Kulkin et al., 2000; Marshal et al., 2011), with death being, as it is, the ultimate state of placelessness. However, such a basic thing as to make queers visible to one another, enabled by digital connectivity, could in situations otherwise lacking in queer visibility promote a sense of “existential security” (Lagerkvist, 2013, 2016)

This adds to previous queer media research, which has established that queer youth, through their use of digital media, are able to explore their identities and “digitally engage in coming out” (Craig and McInroy, 2014: 95, also Alexander and Losh, 2010; DeHaan et al., 2013; McKenna and Bargh, 1998; Pingel et al., 2012). It also resonates with Mary L Gray’s (2009) work on rural queer youth in the United States, where she presents the particular vulnerability of queer youth growing up in places understood as hostile to difference in general and queerness in particular. In her writing, Gray points out the complexities of trying to forge a queer identity balancing such social contexts on the one hand and queer media engagement on the other. However, while the referenced work has discussed queer media use in terms of affordances and recourses when it comes to identity development, I have here articulated the phenomenological implications of being presented to queer others online in how this can help find one’s bearing and reach a sense of existential security. That is, through a phenomenological lens, we are able to capture and arrive at aspects of queer existence outside the pervasive framework of sexual identity and the gradual development of ever more “out” and unified subcultural subjects. This is further, and as we will see in the following, an approach that may be even more urgent when trying to understand queer experiences outside of the Western metropolitan centers, which may not always be equally reliant on queer expressivity.

Queer digital dwelling

After locating queer others, many participants spent long periods of time without initiating contact or actively taking part in the forums they had found. And while much previous research has witnessed about the abilities of digital media to enable quick connectivity especially between same-sex-desiring men (e.g. Ahlm, 2017; Batiste, 2013; Labor, 2020; Licoppe et al., 2016; Møller, 2017; Mowlabocus, 2010; Race, 2015), many of those I interviewed were initially rather passively lurking around, or at most anonymously chatting. For Aslan, for example, it would take months before he was using the MSN group he had found with such exclaimed thrill to actively contact anyone. Instead, he spent much time on this and other websites quietly watching and stretching himself out to full length. He did not use a face picture or his real name, but just hung out anonymously at the sites, gradually acquiring a certain level of “comfort”:

[Y]ou know [the Internet] was kind of the door; like the portal to another world. Like the Internet was really a support and help during that time. [. . .] Because before, [. . .] there were newspapers and such, but I would never have written letters to anyone in newspapers. [. . .] So, the Internet at that time provided you with confidence and you could, you know, hide yourself, and no one knew [. . .] I wasn’t really ready at that time to post my picture. Because I knew that—you know—someone could see that. (Aslan)

As noted by phenomenologists, bodies become oriented through “dwelling,” which is not only a question of the occupation of space, but also refers to time and the process to “make room” (Ahmed, 2006: 20). To dwell on something, as highlighted by Ahmed, is also to “linger, or even to delay or postpone,” which is why dwelling clearly takes time. Thus, the time initially spent on queer digital media by the participants should be regarded as queer digital dwelling. And a fundamental aspect of this process, which served to postpone and delay, was the far-reaching possibilities for anonymity, “providing you with confidence” as suggested by Aslan, or making you “feel free” as noted by Ilja. Ilja, who grew up in Saint Petersburg, explained,

Ilja:

[There were] chats, with plenty of people, where you could find somebody, and chats were special in the way that you could be anonymous there. And you could feel free . . . to (laughing)—

M:

So, no face picture?

Ilja:

No face picture and no other picture either or any other information about you. Just a nickname and after that you . . .. I did not lie there, but you could feel free there because all limits were off.

This way of relating to the online milieu resonates with previous studies on anonymous and pseudonymous interaction in digital media environments and the possibilities it offers people to explore and enact aspects of themselves that they are not ready or willing to show publicly (e.g. Albury and Byron, 2016; Cassidy, 2013; Van der Nagel, 2017; Van der Nagel and Firth, 2015). However, it points at a related, but still different issue, namely that of lingering, as many of the participants were using queer digital media resources leaving very few traces. It was not that anonymity was first of all used to “express themselves,” for example, but as a cloak under which they could invisibly spend time in queer online environments, a kind of queer turning without further action. After locating others, some spent years online, anonymously dwelling, without any contacts transcending into offline meetings. So why then, like some did, even bother with searching for people nearby? Why did not all participants limit their searches to distant others, as some did, and by that minimize risks of unintended clashes with their local surrounding? I would suggest that the impulse to locate others in close proximity might be regarded a strategic re-negotiation of the local. Because media can be understood to multiply place (Moores, 2012, 2017), this enabled queer dwelling “within” the local, making the participants more “at home” in their territorial surrounding. Simply targeting others, and repeatedly spending time in the space constituted between the digital nodes of their bodies, was a safe way to appropriate their hometowns as queer-dispositioned individuals. Even though the dwelling was strictly kept in mediated space, specifically locating nearby others helped reshape the experience of embodied existence in a particular time and place making offline territory more “accessible.”

A queer online activity hence surfaces that cannot be regarded as “expressivity,” but as lingering enabling habituation and the work of queer orientation. By that, “the representational model”—that is, the idea of a straightforward relationship between visibility and politics of belonging for marginalized groups—is somewhat destabilized. As such, it also complicates the turnings implied by Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology where reorientation often equate moving “away” from the vertical and horizontal lines of straight culture. Instead, a focus on digital media is revealing of ways to recraft straight space, to re-negotiate its limitation.

Conclusion

Within Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1997 [1962]) discusses the intense discomfort experienced when one is disoriented and the need to overcome these moments through reorientation. But, as Ahmed (2006) suggests in her queer reading, if we instead stay with such moments, we might be able to achieve a different orientation towards them, and “[w]e might even find joy and excitement in the horror” (p. 4). Thus, in this article, I have highlighted digital media’s ability to multiply space and offer sites to “stay with” the disorienting experience of queer dispositions. And while queer orientation takes time and requires work, I have argued that these digitally constituted spaces serve as valuable resources for this specific kind of habituation, not least in strictly heteronormative contexts. Through anonymity, digital media enabled lingering by which individuals who had been associating their same-sex desires with ontological threats—as alien phenomena or even deadly sins—were able to reach a sense of existential security. Hence, I have suggested queer digital dwelling as a key concept that draws our attention away from digital culture’s obsession with action, expressivity and identity, as well as politics of representation. Rather it sheds light on the possibilities also inherent to digital media technologies to multiply, postpone, hide, and habituate. As such it also invites us to think about ways of living queerness that cannot be fairly understood through dominant narratives of a gradual development of open “out” sexual identities, much needed on a global scale.

Taking media phenomenology away from the mundane towards the momentous, through the limit-situation of queer disorientation, has here served to add fresh and pertinent examples to existential media studies. Zooming in on those moments when we are all called upon to either become ourselves or to wither is no doubt revealing of our contemporary digital throwness and the extent to which our worlds are brought into being by existential media. I believe that there is much more work to be done in these terrains—work that acknowledges our profound vulnerability as human beings starting from embodied perception. Moreover, I believe that experiences of marginality and stigma may be particularly illuminating of the ways in which we all grapple with our vulnerability with and through media in ways that becomes life-defining and momentous.