Circumventing Virality: The Illegible Sensibilities of Vernacular Black Digital Culture

Abstract

Contemporary discourses around digital anti-Blackness, especially the use of Blackness as an object of viral material, have raised questions on how Black digital cultural productions can avert ongoing exploitation. This paper asks, can the expansiveness of Black digital culture, particularly as it exists within vernacular and less visible spaces, circumvent the dominant hand that seeks to exploit and commodify? First, I examine the unique use of Blackness as a sentimental resource online that, when made digitally viral, becomes a commodified spectacle. Next, I move to engage Black cultural production that exists in the more marginal, quotidian, and non-viral spaces and propose the notion of a vernacular Black digital culture. This is exemplified through an Instagram case study of @brownstonearchives, a digitality that engages creative innovation, intimate space making, and selective (il)legibility to counter the exploitive spectacularization of Blackness.

Introduction

In 2021, several Black TikTok creators organized a strike to cease contributing content to the application indefinitely. Black TikTokers created the hashtag #BlackTikTokStrike and, with support from their allies, circulated and committed to their cause.

Tired of not receiving credit for their creativity and original work—all while watching white influencers rewarded with millions of views performing dances they didn’t create—many Black creators on TikTok joined a widespread strike. . . refusing to create any new dances (Pruitt-Young 2021).

The strike sparked conversations around issues of digital anti-Blackness, particularly cultural appropriation and digital blackface—the practice of non-Black digital users taking up Black cultural content as a means of expressing themselves online (Sobande 2021). Joshua Green (2006) coined the term “digital blackface” to describe the ways in which stereotyped Black video game characters, like those in Grand Theft Auto, can literally be embodied and acted out by non-Black players. Contemporarily, the term digital blackface is often used to describe the prevalent use of Black reaction memes, darker-skinned emojis, and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) by non-Black social media users. Many of the Black TikTokers on strike expressed a desire to benefit from their digital content creations in the same ways as their white peers, like receiving product brand deals and monetary exchange for their millions of TikTok views. Some Black TikTok dance creators have gone as far as attempting to copyright their dances, a practice most often exercised by professional choreographers.

What these Black digital creators articulate is a general fatigue of the rampant commodification of Black cultural production online, which is often prone to virality in the form of memes, dance trends, or culturally specific colloquialisms. When internet content “goes viral,” it moves from low to high visibility, rapidly circulating as masses of digital users come to consume and share it. Authors Berger and Milkman (2012, 192) contend that “virality is partially driven by physiological arousal,” and “content that evokes high-arousal positive. . . emotions,” such as awe or amusement, is more likely to go viral. Viral material becomes vulnerable to exploitation as it circulates within social media applications whose terms and conditions disallow users from owning their originally produced digital content. In this paper, to exemplify the virality and consequential exploitative commodification of Blackness online, I engage the concept of the Black meme, particularly Russell’s (2024, 3) definition of it as “the copying and transmission of blackness-as-memetic-material.” She asserts that there is an inextricable relationship between Blackness and visual digital culture as we understand it today, similar to the way media studies scholar Keeling (2019, 123) states that “. . . relationships between Black existence and technology emerge as central considerations no matter what point in the history of the cinematic one focuses.” This paper embraces the fact of this inextricability and acknowledges that even if Black users were to opt out of visibility, such as by going on strike, Blackness would not cease to exist within digital culture. This paper investigates the ways that Blackness will continue to exist online and amid exploitation.

In the end of her text Black Meme, Russell (2024, 158) calls for new definitions of authorship that might credit Black people with their centuries-long productions of popular visual culture which has been “predicated on a model that is inherently extractive.” Russell (2024, 158) says that the “staggeringly complex next frontier” in Black digital cultural study is to restructure our “definitions of provenance” in order to “encompass the study of Black movement and sound as they travel digitally.” This paper strives to answer Russell’s call to develop new methodologies for examining the study of Black digital movement. However, I strategically depart from suggesting solutions of ownership and propose an alternate course of research inquiries. If Blackness, as an exploited digital resource, is to be (re)produced again and again as it is circulated and consumed, then what of its seemingly shape-shifting capabilities can produce possibilities rather than limitations? Can the expansiveness of Black digital expressive culture somehow circumvent the dominant hand that seeks to exploit and commodify?

To attempt to answer these questions, I strategically move to what I call vernacular Black digital culture—that is, the more out-of-view and illegible spaces of the Black digital world. If we need new methodologies for the study of Black digital movement, then such methods should also encompass the non-viral, the content not situated at the center of what we call digital culture. We must take a look at the margins of digital media spaces where Black cultural productions persist and are largely out of sight, perhaps even dodging spectacularization and commodification. This paper draws upon Black feminist methodologies that urge us to critique Western epistemologies and center knowledge productions developed in the margins (hooks 2000). I argue that vernacular Black digital culture evades virality, and thus the vulnerabilities of exploitation, as it defies stable categorization and is rendered illegible within dominant logics of recognition. To illuminate the characteristics of vernacular Black digital culture, I provide a case study analysis of an Instagram account initially named @everyoutfitinlivingsingle and now called @brownstonearchives. The account’s creator, Fabiola Ching, digitally archives image stills from the 1993 show Living Single and remixes them through a speculative queer reading of the show’s main characters. As it manifests outside the logics of viral internet culture through its enactments of innovative creativity, intimate place-making, and selective (il)legibility, @brownstonearchives resides within a vernacular, yet expansive, corner of Black digital culture.

Blackness as Sentimental Capital in Digital Virality

This section is an engagement with the Black studies theory that grounds this paper. Understanding the spectacularization, circulation, and commodification of Black cultural production online necessitates a clear understanding of the object of Blackness itself. The analyses made in this paper are rooted in the theoretical foundation that posits Blackness as fungible—a material reality constructed through the institution of chattel slavery and the inscription of racialized Blackness upon captive bodies of African descent (Gilroy 1993; Spillers 1987). This fungibility is materially realized upon the auction block at the direct scene of the buying and selling of the enslaved. In this paper, Blackness is understood as a socially constructed racial identifier and an object to be possessed. Blackness is recognized here as an unstable identity, its value shifting based on the modern dominant ideologies that constitute its existence. Rather than a stable identity, author Hartman (2022, 28) notes that captive Blackness becomes “an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values. . . .” Hartman (2022, 29) describes one kind of exploitation of Blackness as a “[possession] of the Black body as a sentimental resource.” As a sentimental resource, Blackness becomes an object through which one can identify and express complex emotions. ¹ Considering this, what, then, can Blackness become when used as a sentimental resource in the digital visual world?

In Joshua Green’s (2006) theoretical development of “digital blackface,” he compares the popular nineteenth and early-twentieth-century expressive form of blackface minstrelsy to the ways individuals embody Black characters in video games. The commercial success of blackface minstrelsy, from grandly staged performances to highly popular silent films like The Birth of a Nation (1915), was due to Black spectacle’s ability to evoke emotion through white mythic narratives that upheld anti-Black dominant ideologies (Lott 2013). Even as blackface minstrelsy declined in popularity, the maintenance of Black spectacle in the media continued to be reproduced through anti-Black controlling images (Collins 2000) and tropes appearing in television, film, and interactive media such as video games. As so many scholars laboring at the intersection of new media studies and Black studies have illuminated, anti-Black dominant ideologies legitimized in the material world are remediated in the digital world (Bailey 2021; Noble 2018; Steele 2021). That is, the ease at which digital media users exploit and circulate Black cultural production as an emotive resource is based upon Blackness as an unstable and fungible object with shifting valuation. Or, again, what Hartman (2022, 28) describes as an “abstract and empty vessel.”

One example of the ways Blackness as a sentimental resource and fungible object manifests contemporarily in digital spaces is in the form of the meme. The meme is a new media object that acts as a digital mask with “an ability to provoke a feeling of identification in the viewer” (Dean 2016). As a way to relate to others, memes are created with the intention to be shared en masse and Dean (2016) argues, “for the very purpose of virality.” The Black meme then not only functions as a sentimental digital object, but one that lies within the visual history of Black spectacle, and thus is especially vulnerable to exploitation and commodification. Russell (2024) traces a historical visual cultural lineage of the Black meme, beginning with the very first kinds of materially viral Black imagery that circulated within American popular culture. She places early Black spectacles like filmic blackface minstrelsy, lynching postcards, and televised Civil Rights protests in conversation with contemporary examples such as digitally circulated videos of anti-Black police brutality and the ubiquitous Black meme. Russell’s aim is to emphasize that the virality and exploitation of Black digital material, including Black memes, is a part of a long history of Blackness being used as a spectacular object within popular visual culture.

Black memes labor in the digital world in different ways. On the one hand, they act as tokens of exchange between users to communicate sentiment, and, on the other, they are appropriated by corporations and brands as a format through which to advertise. Mainstream virality is a prerequisite for commodification, and not all memes meet this condition, nor do they strive to. Williams (2020, 7) outlines the ways Black users creatively produce memes and hashtags that speak back to “White supremacist [logics]” such as #LivingWhileBlack. The hashtag humorously highlights the absurdity of some white women, also referred to as “Karens” or “Beckys,” systematically calling the police on Black people for no apparent reason. These memes “circulate a countercultural logic” that opposes the omnipresent surveillance of Black people that often leads to violence (Williams 2020, 7). In contrast, viral Black memes that become commodified rely and thrive upon the pervasive surveillance of Black people. Meme advertisements and meme marketing—memes created for the sole purpose of selling a product—are an essential part of the digital economy (Malodia et al. 2022). Meme marketing takes advantage of the meme’s virality and sentimentality, drawing social media users, especially young ones, in with the intent of selling them a product. Sobande (2021, 140) articulates the dehumanizing process of flattening Blackness into a digital token:

. . .the spectacularization of Black lives online includes the decontextualization and recontextualization of video footage of Black people. Depictions of them, including in anguish and when grieving, continue to be treated as fodder for social media reaction content. . . Such digital activity can involve a Black person’s mannerisms, facial expressions, image, and overall humanity being treated as though it is nothing more than a mere digital commodity and means to communicate online.

For example, in 2012, Kimberly Wilkins, also known by her pseudonym Sweet Brown, was interviewed by a local Oklahoma City news station after evacuating her apartment building due to a fire. Brown expressed her frustration at having potentially contracted bronchitis from the incident and exclaimed “ain’t nobody got time for that” in reference to having to deal with this ailment. Users heavily memeified an image still from this interview by taking it out if the original context of Brown’s circumstances—experiencing a house fire and having bronchitis—and placing it in a different, more readily relatable context. Posters used the “ain’t nobody got time for that” meme to express general emotions like dissatisfaction, impatience, or annoyance. Shortly after Brown’s viral moment, the pastry brand PopTart advertised a version of the meme on their in-store boxes. The meme was used to promote the instant nature of the food, reading: “Toasting?! Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That!” with the hashtags #whywait and #fullybaked featuring a stick figure drawing instead of Brown’s image. Yet, Brown’s words and the meme format, which reference her image, are used. Through this extractive process of virality, remixing, and commodification, a video of a Black woman in distress becomes an advertisement. As the meme circulated in the public domain without any copyright licensing, Brown’s image and likeness were able to be freely used by anyone, disallowing her to monetarily benefit from her own virality.

Though Aunt Jemima no longer appears on syrup bottles, spectacularized images of Blackness are constantly preyed upon in the advertising world—this is the legacy of the visual history of commodifying Black spectacle used as a sentimental resource. In 2015, a Twitter user posted an image of the PopTart meme box with the tweet, “lily white pop tarts says ‘ain’t nobody got time for that’ #commodification” (@MMLunlimited, February 24, 2015). Like the Black TikTok boycotters, social media users often express their keen awareness of the ways Blackness is used as a commodity online. Despite the reality of commodification and the awareness so many users have of it, Black people continue to use social media as a space to create, express, and interact with others. I am less interested in trying to theorize around how we might banish the commodification of Blackness from social media and rather am invested in the ways Black social media users continue to create amidst exploitation. As I’ve discussed, viral internet culture is a vulnerable space for Blackness to exist, as its fungibility renders it an object for exploitation. In the next section, I make an intentional shift to outline what sits on the edges of popular internet culture. It is a space that counters the mechanisms of virality with its inability to attain mass viewership, existing instead as a vernacular Black digital culture that centers creativity, community and intra-group legibility.

Toward Vernacular Black Digital Culture

The obvious response to evading spectacularization is to simply log off, to cease being perceived online, as was the strategy of the Black creators of the TikTok boycott. The more complicated response is one that necessitates carefully navigating a predatory digital space while producing content. If Black viral content remains always vulnerable to commodification due to its mass visibility, then the Black vernacular exists outside of these social media logics—too illegible to be identified. The vernacular consists of the lesser-viewed social media content, the lesser-liked posts, and the lesser-follower accounts. These characteristics place it on the peripheries of the internet, particularly within a social media economy that privileges hierarchy, influence, and mass viewership. However, its precarious position does not render the Black vernacular non-valuable; rather, it is a space that embraces different sensibilities. In this section, I strive to illustrate a vernacular Black digital culture, one that not only exists, but persists, outside of a social media economy that centers around the exploitation and commodification of Blackness. Generally, vernacular culture is defined as everyday, community-based forms of cultural expression performed outside the confines of what is considered high culture. Henry Louis Gates (1988) asserts that African American vernacular traditions, particularly through creative language expression, challenge dominant power structures through what he calls signifyin(g) practices—rhetorical strategies of subversive communication. Language is not the only form of vernacular expression; it also manifests as song, dance, and visual arts. Contemporarily, digital forms constitute an expressive medium of their own, and vernacular Black culture has emerged within digital worlds as well. I define vernacular Black digital culture through three central characteristics: innovative creativity, intimate place-making, and selective (il)legibility. These factors place vernacular Black digital culture apart from viral digital culture as it divests from aspiring to mass viewership and broad legibility.

Scholar Fouché (2006, 641) articulates what he calls “Black vernacular technological creativity,” which “is characterized by innovative engagements with technology based upon black aesthetics. . . .” Through the processes of “redeployment, re-conception, and re-creation,” Fouché argues that African Americans resist the notion of technology as a Western symbol of power and reclaim it as a tool of innovation for Black expressive culture (Fouché 2006, 642). For example, Black musicians in the 1990s “hacked” the newest electronic equipment, such as turntables and synthesizers, to produce desired sounds for the emerging Black vernacular musical genre, hip-hop. Similarly, creative innovation within vernacular Black digital culture as it exists on social media may look like Black users disengaging with the intended use of an application. For example, storytelling through threads—strings of Tweets on the app formerly known as Twitter—became a common communicative practice within the Black Twitter community, undermining the app’s infrastructure as a microblogging platform (André 2020).

The term vernacular itself denotes a space—it is in the margins, off to the side, de-centered. From where, then, does vernacular Black digital culture emerge? Johnson and Nuñez (2015, 51), also known by her digital avatar Kizmet Nuñez, offers us a “methodology of the [digital] kitchen table” as she examines the intimate spaces of the Black feminist blogosphere. Inspired by the Black feminist publishing collective Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and acknowledging the locus of Black women’s domestic labor, Johnson and Nuñez (2015, 51) identifies the kitchen table as a “key site of Black feminist political geography,” both literally and metaphorically. She recounts the Black feminist blogosphere emerging as an intimate gathering space where women exchanged letters, left heartfelt comments, engaged in consciousness-raising, and inspired each other’s writing practices. Johnson describes the digital kitchen table as a vernacular space centered around community building rather than achieving virality or mass viewership. Vernacular Black digital culture exists within a space that prioritizes communal exchange—of dialog, perspectives, and signifyin(g) practices—and fosters a politic of relation amongst other users.

Finally, vernacular Black digital culture engages in a selective (il)legibility, manifesting as something that is visible to some, but invisible to most. New media studies scholar Abidin (2021, 10) identifies what she calls “refracted publics,” defined as “vernacular cultures of circumvention strategies on social media. . . mobilized to avoid detection, promote deflection, and facilitate the dissemination of [content] away from or toward target audiences.” Refracted publics are a direct response to dominant social media ideologies such as “perpetual content saturation [and] hyper-competitive attention economies,” which are foundational to viral internet culture (Abidin 2021, 10). Abidin provides broad examples of refracted publics—from fandoms to meme accounts, and even nano-influencers—that utilize techniques such as optical illusions or vague encoded messaging to attract or detract certain attention. Refracted publics exist “below the radar” in three different ways: they completely “avoid being registered”; they “register in misplaced pockets”; or, they appear “on the radar but parsed as something else altogether” (Abidin 2021, 10). Whether intentionally or not, vernacular Black digital culture remains non-viral due to its selective (il)legibility—creating content that disengages with popular trends, hashtags, and meme formats. This is also a disengagement with the cycle of exploitation that Black digital content is subjected to, as its selective (il)legibility makes it difficult to find amongst the vastness of social media content. For example, AAVE is popularly used amongst Black users online, and some words’ spellings don’t always align with their standard phonetic expectations, which emphasizes the vernacular’s foundation in spoken rather than written language. The term “talmbout”—an AAVE expression of the words “talking about”—is sometimes alternatively spelled “tammbout,” which a keyword search of both spellings on X reveals. Without standard spelling conventions, the unfixed nature of written AAVE produces a selective (il)legibility, dividing oral speakers of the vernacular from those who are not. While AAVE has been heavily digitally appropriated, its orthographic variation allows it to continuously defy containment as it oscillates on and off the radar.

Overall, vernacular Black digital culture exists in opposition to viral internet culture as it remains largely out of view due to its illegible sensibilities. In the next section, I exemplify these three core characteristics of vernacular Black digital culture—innovative creativity, intimate place-making, and selective (il)legibility—through a case study analysis of a small Instagram fashion archive that unexpectedly became a Black queer communal space. I ask, can we find something within the lesser-followed, lesser-engaged social media communities that point us in new directions regarding Black digital culture as a whole? While the digitally viral is heard loud and clear, what does the digitally vernacular have to say?

The Digital Stoop of @brownstonearchives

During a doom scroll one early evening in 2020, I came across a new Instagram account with the name @everyoutfitinlivingsingle. The biography was short and stated the quite obvious aim of the account—to screenshot and post every outfit in the 1990s television sitcom Living Single. The archivist behind the account is Fabiola Ching, a twenty-seven-year-old, self-identified Black lesbian, who I had the privilege of interviewing for this paper. Ching explained to me that as she watched Living Single on her laptop, she would pause, take a screenshot, text that screenshot to her phone, and then upload the images from her phone to Instagram. The images are not edited, there are no filters or retouching; they appear in this archive the same way anyone would have seen them on TV decades ago. At nearly 6,300 followers, the account is an intimate archive of Black American fashion on television with a relatively modest following of users who share Ching’s admiration and nostalgia for Black sitcoms of the past. At its inception, the account was dedicated solely to documenting fashion from Living Single, but in 2022, Ching expanded the scope to include the documentation of other popular Black women-led 1990s sitcoms like Moesha and Half & Half. Subsequently, she changed the name of the Instagram from @everyoutfitinlivingsingle to @brownstonearchives, a nod to the fact that many of these Black sitcoms were set in urban landscapes with characters often living in brownstone homes, as the women do in Living Single. The show’s main female characters, Khadijah, Maxine, Synclaire, and Regine, are young Black women who navigate the challenges of romantic relationships and their professional lives while their strong friendships keep them grounded. Living Single aired from 1993 to 1998 for a total of five seasons; unable to make it to the new millenium, it is stuck forever in “a ‘90s’ kind of world,” as the theme song exclaims, and so is its iconic fashion.

When I asked Ching (2024b) why she started the account, she said she wanted to take part in a “fun internet hobby” and, at the time, was watching a lot of Black “90s” television. Mesmerized by the humor of the script, vibrancy of the set, and beauty of the costume design, Ching set out to dedicate a digital space to the fashion of this ephemeral piece of Black visual culture. During our talk, Ching and I bonded over our love of Living Single and noted that shows of this nature—particularly ones with all-Black casts—are not as abundant on major television and streaming networks today. Robert Moss (2001) identifies “the shrinking lifespan of the black sitcom” and observes that the number of primetime Black sitcom series went from fifteen down to six in a matter of four years. The downfall of the abundance of Black sitcoms was due to their inability to achieve “crossover status” and attract multiracial viewership, specifically their inability to appeal to white audiences. Rather, Black communities comprised the majority of viewership. Few all-Black-casted shows have reached “crossover status,” and thus a long-running primetime spot. Not only was Living Single canceled, but the fashion, too, was physically discarded. Ching had the opportunity to interview the costume designer for the show, Ceci, who explained that much of the fashion worn by the cast was purged from costume houses in order to make space for fashion collections of other more popular shows. Ceci expressed frustration that those who discarded these costume collections didn’t understand the cultural significance of Black-owned fashion brands of the “90s,” like Phat Pharm and FUBU. The rare Black fashion archive Ceci spent years curating herself had been thrown away.

Many of the shows that did achieve crossover status and largely appealed to white audiences, like Beulah and Amos n’ Andy, were ones that engaged heavily with “stereotypical and retrogressive interpretation[s] of blacks”—or otherwise, Black spectacle (Scott 2014, 743). Beulah and Amos n’ Andy of the 1950s are categorically different from the Black-centric television of the 1990s due to Black activists’ decades of advocacy, and boycotting of certain networks, for more progressive depictions of Black people. The Black sitcoms of the 1990s are not void of stereotypes or spectacle, but they are fundamentally contrasting. Ching describes “90s Black sitcoms as having a distinct “element of play” that draws the viewer in. While these stories were playful and multiplicitous enough to capture Black audiences, these elements seemed to be largely illegible to white audiences, which led to their premature canceling. The precarious and relatively short televised life of Living Single, along with the discarding of the show’s physical wardrobe, establishes Ching’s archive as an especially niche digital space. Instagram accounts with this same documentation purpose of posting television shows” fashion are becoming more abundant, like the very popular @everyoutfitinsexandthecity. However, while the Sex and the City canon lives on through its recent reboot of And Just Like That. . ., Living Single, and so many other Black “90s” sitcoms, remain un-resurrected.

Ching takes her role as a digital archivist seriously; she recognizes the nostalgia that surrounds the show, especially when followers leave reminiscing remarks under posts. Commenters have thanked Ching for dedicating an Instagram page to a show that has meant so much to them. One comment reads, “this entire account is a treasure, I love you. . .” (@brownstonearchives June 26^th, 2020). Under another post, a commenter writes, “You are doing the Lord’s work,” in reference to Ching’s persistent and meticulous archiving of a show almost forgotten (@brownstonearchives August 21, 2019). The archiving also evokes a personal kind of nostalgia for Ching. She writes of her experience as an immigrant to the United States consuming American television as a mode of assimilation:

In 2008, I was very young and had two primary needs: to assimilate and to learn what I didn’t know. Television would help me do those things; it would give me a place to go and I would emerge metabolized, churned. I would learn about documentation, rituals, and the women that were inside of me. Living Single premiered on August 22, 1993, but I wouldn’t watch it until the late aughts, during dire years of my life (Ching 2024).

I, too, would watch Living Single for the first time two decades after its premiere as a young twenty-something-year-old in college. At the time, the show wasn’t on any streaming services, and I didn’t have cable television, but my friend had a big silver box TV that could play VHSs and DVDs. One day, my friend returned from a weekend trip home with something we could watch on that archaic television—the first two seasons of Living Single on DVD that they’d found in their mother’s closet. Weeks later, when my friend left for another trip home, I begged them to go again to their mother’s closet to find the next two seasons of Living Single and bring them back. For both Ching and I, Living Single was a show that outlined our coming of age in a sense, as it did for so many Black women before us. @brownstonearchives is not only a fashion Instagram page, but a time capsule, reviving something erased by exclusionary television practices that disregarded Black viewership. From broadcast television, to DVDs buried in a closet, to Instagram archives, Ching engages the vernacular Black cultural characteristic of innovative creativity to extend the digital life of this ephemeral piece of Black visual culture. Unconcerned with the crossover legibility of the account, she reconceptualizes social media technology as a tool for Black cultural preservation rather than a means to amass virality.

The “women that were inside” of Ching were reflected back to her as she fell in love with the show. Even more, Ching saw her queerness reflected, though none of the characters are written as such. “This show is so gay” were Ching’s (2024b) thoughts as she watched and documented, and she wasn’t the only one to think so. Along with the images, Ching sometimes includes her own queer commentary in the captions, recontextualizing the image stills to imagine the main characters within a kind of queer relation. Many of the account’s followers, including myself, engage with her queer commentary in the comments sections, coming to identify with the new meaning placed over the images. In one post featuring Khadijah, played by actress Queen Latifah, the caption reads: “Imagine carrying the whole dyke community on your back while running an independent publication and being the core emotional support person in your friend group. #khadijahive” (@brownstonearchives July 8, 2020). On the same post, a user comments, “I hate the fact that none of the female characters experimented with women. even though they had heterosexual storylines all of them gave bi/lesbian energy,” while another commenter says, “Queen Latifah should be given queer sainthood.” Under a different post with a capture of Maxine in a suit staring longingly into the distance, Ching captions, “REAL HEARTTHROB SHIT,” exclaiming her own queer desire toward Maxine (@bronwstonearchives October 25, 2019). A commenter replies with six red exclamation points, resonating with Ching’s sentiment.

In her archiving process, Ching transposes the significance of these images by imposing a queer speculation that is true to her own perception of the show. The followers that accept and lean into Ching’s queer reading comment to affirm that they too see what Ching sees—a non-heteronormative expression of Black women’s romantic and sexual practices. Queer theorist Cathy Cohen (1997) examines the ways Black women’s sexual practices, through a dominant Western context, are always seen as deviant and non-normative, despite the gender they romantically engage with. She urges us to think through Black women’s marked non-normative sexuality alongside queerness, as queerness is dominantly regarded as a deviant sexuality. In popular television, portrayals of Black women’s sexuality and sexual practices have often fallen into typified tropes—particularly the hypersexual Jezebel and the asexual Mammy. Living Single carefully explores the dating and sex lives of four very different Black women, and while not totally void of tropes, the audience is presented with the fullness and complexities of their intimate lives. Ching’s queer reading of the show is not only self-referential as she personally identifies with the characters, but also provides an expansive presentation of Black women’s sexual practices. It is a reading that refutes the use of Black women’s “deviant” sexuality as visual spectacle.

The followers who engage with Ching’s queer rendering of the women of Living Single gather in the comments sections and create an unintentional digital queer community. Not only do they respond to Ching’s captions, but also to each other—adding their own queer speculation and sometimes tagging friends to join in on the conversation. They express their attraction toward the characters, reminisce over the details of certain episodes, and admire the Black-centric, 1990s-style wardrobe. Ching even offers to share her Hulu password to a follower who asks, “How are you watching the show? . . . Help a sister out” (@brownstonearchives June 25, 2020). In another “heartthrob”-captioned post featuring Maxine, one commenter says, “can I just say I [love] how evident it is that [this] account is run by a queer person” (@brownstonearchives September 18, 2019). Twenty-one others liked the comment, providing a consensus to the statement, and Ching replied with a smiley-face and black heart emoji. Initially conceived as a “fun internet hobby,” Ching’s fashion archive developed into a meaningful site of cultural memory, offering both a space for communal nostalgia and Black queer representational affirmation.

Many of the images of the Living Single women are quite expressive. They are portraits of smirks, eyes-rolls, or mouths wide-open, mid-laugh. The stills are reminiscent of the types of viral emotional images of Black women that are used for memes, like that of Sweet Brown. However, the images from Living Single are captured through an archiving method of care, an appreciation for Black expressive style, and an intention to illuminate the queerness that may not be visible on the surface. The archivist and the account’s followers refuse to engage in a depersonalized process of digital spectacularization and instead transform what is very vulnerable to exploitation on the internet—images of Black women. As a facet of vernacular Black digital culture, @brownstonearchives engages in intimate place-making, fostering a digital kitchen table—or rather, a digital brownstone stoop—where Ching and her followers exchange memories, humor, queer speculations, and Hulu passwords.

The archive is a public account and does not gatekeep who follows or comments; thus, misreadings of Ching’s queer context occur. In a post of characters Regine and Maxine, the caption reads “america’s favorite couple” and a user comments, “the coy facial expressions omfg,” acknowledging the affectionate body language between them (@brownstonearchives March 23, 2019). In this captured still, Maxine and Regine sit shoulder-to-shoulder on their living room couch. Regine ties her shoe with a grin across her face, and Maxine looks down at her shyly smiling. In another post from a different episode, Maxine and Regine once again sit close on the living room couch and the caption reads, “Happy sunday from ur resident domestic dykes” (@brownstonearchives April 7, 2019). One user comments, “So good,” while another says, “Wait, what? Am I missing something?” The user’s confusion about Maxine and Regine’s imagined coupling doesn’t get resolved. Ching doesn’t reply to the comment to explain or justify her queer reading of the characters who are cast as platonic friends in the show. The comment is not removed, the confusion lingers, and the image remains.

The archive became queer almost unintentionally and is never branded explicitly as queer in the handle or biography. In fact, Ching was initially unsure how the queer context would be received. She says she thought to herself, “Oh, I don’t know if they’re going to fuck with this, but. . . this is the only way I can think. . . and also a lot of it is just me retelling the story, right?” (Ching 2024). In a sense, Ching’s archiving practice that transforms the images into queer narratives acts as a mode of digital self-making. Just as American television acted as an informatic tool for assimilation, her archiving practice is self-referential—each post acting as her own digital avatar. When many of her followers widely accepted and even further engaged her queer recontextualizing, Ching was pleased. “Everybody else was being gay with it, and I was like, lovely. Great. I’m glad that there’s understanding” (Ching 2024). With a similar premise and archiving style, the account @everylesbianandtheirfashion features the fashion of queer celebrity women, particularly actresses and singers. At 221,000 followers, @everylesbianandtheirfashion is more public and attracts much more engagement with its broader circulation. Black women are rarely featured on this account, and when bisexual women, or women whose sexuality is unconfirmed, are featured, the account’s followers express frustration. The comment sections fill with users questioning the validity of the featured person’s sexuality, telling the curator to only post lesbians since that’s what the account claims to do. The users call for transparency, while @everyoutfitinlivingsingle disengages with rigid notions of identity and embraces malleability. If one attempted to survey lesbian or queer fashion accounts on Instagram through a keyword search, while @everylesbianandtheirfashion would appear, @brownstonearchives would not. The kind of queer community formation that makes up @brownstonearchives can be defined as what scholar Muñoz (1999, 146) calls “counterpublics”—queer of color “communities and relational chains of resistance that contest the dominant public sphere.” These relational communities engage in a practice of disidentification that Muñoz describes as a pushing against white cisgender heteronormativity, a practice that insists upon an inability to be categorized or made legible according to dominant notions of identity. As they withdraw from rigid categorization, counterpublics convey a multiplicity only legible to certain queer communities, an approach that echoes Abidin’s notion of refracted publics. @brownstonearchives engages a selective (il)legibility as it refuses to explicitly brand itself as a queer digital space nor explain or qualify its queer rendering of Living Single. Rather, the account draws in committed followers through a seemingly shared understanding that Living Single is in fact a queer show, even though it isn’t. What, on the surface, appears to simply be a television fashion account is really a site of Black queer intimate space-making. @brownstonearchives exists below the radar, unable to be coherently registered as queer, as it nestles itself within the marginalized, yet expansiveness, of vernacular Black digital culture.

Even in 2025, Living Single’s vibrant Instagram archive still doesn’t reach the crossover status needed to attain social media virality. The account’s innovative creativity, intimate place-making, and selective (il)legibility—all facets of vernacular Black digital culture—allow for users to relate to more expansive, unidentifiable, unquantifiable renderings of Black queerness. Vernacular Black digital culture does not completely avert the vulnerability of commodification, as it exists within a digital platform that fosters exploitation. Yet, it subtly evades detection based on its unconventional renderings of Black queer identity and simultaneously engages a creative and intimate digital community. With viral images of Blackness systemically at risk of exploitation online, @brownstonearchvies offers us a glimpse into the Black cultural productions resting outside of viral internet culture, and the creative cultivation the account engages to remain there.

Conclusion

In this paper, I examined the urgent contemporary discourses around digital anti-Blackness, particularly the ways in which Blackness is used as a fungible sentimental resource, remixed as memetic material, made viral, and commodified. Current discourses around the issues of digital anti-Blackness primarily center Black ownership of Black digital cultural productions to remedy this ongoing digital exploitation. However, this paper veers from solutions of ownership to propose an alternate course of questions—can the vernacular corners of the Black digital world embrace a type of ambiguity that places them largely out of view, unable to be captured and commodified? To answer, I propose and articulate the characteristics of vernacular Black digital culture, a space contrary to viral internet culture. My examination of the Instagram account @brownstonearchives is a case study that exemplifies vernacular Black digital culture as it engages creative innovation, intimate place-making, and selective (il)legibility. Within this vernacular space, Black cultural production is carefully archived and intra-communally celebrated rather than exploited as a sentimental resource for virality. @brownstonearchives fosters an unexpected and intimate Black queer community through a kind of quiet recognition—a digital ethos that echoes, “if you know, you know.”