Kaciano Barbosa Gadelha (2015):
Virtualização do corpo e sexualidades online: encontros gay,
gênero e performatividade
Dissertation,
Freie Universität Berlin
Nicolas Wasser
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Digitalization and technological tools and advancements are
profoundly de- and reterritorializing urban spaces at a global
level. Leading social media and online app platforms have
redistributed both the sites of identity production and the
circulation of bodies. How do digital communication and new forms of
online-offline encounters affect subjectivity as well as the
(im)materialities of space? And are traditional social theory
concepts able to sufficiently comprehend these changes? Brazilian
queer-feminist theorist Kaciano Gadelha faces these challenges,
taking Bruno Latour’s call for a reassembling of the social
seriously (Latour 2005).
In his dissertation, defended at Freie Universität Berlin, he
studies the universe of online gay dating and networks by critically
reexamining the performativity of sexuality and gender. Gadelha, who
is currently working on gender and queer studies at Universidade
Federal do Ceará, endeavors to understand how gay platform users are
drawing new sexual cartographies by intra-acting with technologies,
humans, non-humans, genders and desires. What emanates from these
moving processes, the author concludes, are not simply new hybrids
or fragmented bodies in the form of digitalized codes and pixels.
Gadelha also observes an intensification of erotic forces that has
given rise to virtual-material spaces and non-identitarian
subjectivities.
The book is comprised of five chapters along with an introduction
and concluding remarks. In its compact introduction, Gadelha
emphasizes situated knowledge (Harraway 1991), which echoes his
personal experiences of “being gay in a big Brazilian city” that had
very restricted spaces for the LGBT community. His participant
approach as a user of online gay dating platforms is interpreted as
assemblages of connection and social “disconnection from normality”
(15). Calling for a “technological perspective of gender” (19),
Gadelha’s research questions take two directions. On the one hand,
he explores which “performativities of gender and sexuality are
being endorsed” (21) through online sites like Gayromeo. On the
other hand, he is engaged with overcoming “constructivist
reductionism” (21), thus seeking a symmetric agency of human, as
well as non-human, actors and new technologies.
Chapter One outlines the theoretical apparatus essential for a
technological perspective on gender. Gadelha’s main concern are the
flaws of constructivist theory and namely the paradoxical insistence
in searching for a “territory of identitarian purity” (60). In the
author’s opinion, this could be corrected by acknowledging the
hybrid conditions in which technological machines and power can
produce sexually differentiated bodies. Chapter Two describes the
technological tools, functions and users’ interactions on Gayromeo.
After a conceptual discussion about online gay communities, Gadelha
exposes his participant research methods as a platform user; this
included online and offline interviews carried out in Germany,
Brazil, Mexico and Austria. A user’s looks and virtual navigations
turn out to lend to a “digital subjectivity to bodies without faces,
for example” (95). Compared to the outcomes of offline meetings,
these subjectivities are filed in an online archive – possessing a
virtual materiality that can be examined by other users independent
of their location (99). Chapters Three and Four explore the
experiences of Gayromeo users through the analytical keys of archive
and repertoire as coined by performance theorist Diana Taylor
(2003). Gadelha describes how many users experience the gay dating
platform as something that liberates their sexuality in empowering
ways. Also, Gadelha focuses on how masculinity and heteronormativity
both change and coexist with online gender performativities (148).
Several users, for instance, admitted to have changed their real age
in their online profiles in order to seem more attractive to other
users. Furthermore, the virtual plays articulate social markers of
race or nationality, often idealizing “foreign territories” (165).
Nevertheless, Gadelha insists that these markers should not to be
seen as “identitarian segmentations”, but rather as “parodic
effects” (175) of performative practices. This sometimes surprising
effort to de- and reconstruct an analytical distinction between
online and offline, virtual and real, continues in Chapter Five
through a theoretical discussion around processes of virtualization.
Drawing upon Deleuze (2007), Gadelha highlights the virtual as a
“perceptive realm” different from that of “the actual present, in
which things are materialized” (176). The subject of the gay dating
platform can chat or flirt with numerous users simultaneously,
something that is not visible or known by other users. Furthermore,
these virtual interactions take place in moments or spaces not
previously defined as gay zones. These “new erotic geographies” and
sexualities, Gadelha observes, have left behind static localization
in favor of an “aesthetics of navigation”, where “pulverized
excitement” defines the erotic momentum of space (216).
This book is captivating by its theoretical acuteness and refined
language. Gadelha skillfully discusses concepts such as
performativity or heteronormativity, that have been put forward by
queer and feminist studies, relating them to his empirical inquiry.
He essentially widens the scope of reflection regarding technology,
sexuality and the virtual with the guidance of recent approaches
from (feminist) new materialism (see Barad 2003). One point of
criticism is certainly the partially fragile balance between empiric
data and theory, as the reader is, at some point, left to speculate
as to whether the narratives of Gayromeo users can be matched with
the arguments of nonrepresentational analytics. Owing to Gadelha’s
strong emphasis on flux and the hybrid, it becomes difficult to
grasp the political implications that are so pervasive in the texts
of feminist authors discussed. Whether online sexualities enable
“affinity politics” (Harraway 1991) remains an open question.
Finally, a historical or time-diagnostic contextualization of how
the interplay of technological innovations and the articulation of
gay identities and gender relations are linked to deep social and
political transformations in urban spaces – as for example the works
of Ernesto Meccia (2011) show – would have been useful.
Nevertheless, Gadelha’s book is highly inspiring in its efforts to
overcome (de)constructivist understandings of (gender)
performativity, space and agency. Thus, it presents an essential
reading for all those interested in processes of digitalization and
sexuality together with new materialist approaches to spatial and
cultural effects of digital technologies.
Bibliography
Barad, Karen (2003): Posthumanist Performativity: toward an
understanding of how matter comes to matter. In: Signs Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), pp. 801-831.
Deleuze, Gilles; Parnet, Claire (2007): Dialogues II. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Haraway, Donna (1991): Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The reinvention
of nature. New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno (2005): Reassembling the social: an introduction to
actor network theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Meccia, Ernesto (2011): La sociedad de los espejos rotos. Apuntes
para una sociología de la gaycidad. In: Sexualidad, Salud y
Sociedad, 8(aug), pp. 131-148.
Taylor, Diana (2003): The archive and the repertoire: performing
cultural memories in the Americas. Durham/London: Duke University
Press
1 http://www.diss.fu-berlin.de/diss/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/FUDISS_derivate_000000017608/BarbosaGadelhaKdiss.pdf