Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 1786604418, 9781786604415, 9781786604439

Table of contents :
Work That Body
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture in the Post-2008 Conjuncture
2 The Celebrity Male Nude Leak: Value Creation, Precarity and the Naked Male Body
3 The Spornosexual: The Affective Contradictions of Digital Male Body-Work in an Age of Austerity
4 RuPaul’s Drag Race Body Transformation Tutorials: Drag Queens and Digital Capitalism
5 The Rise of Chemsex: Queering Collective Intimacy in Neoliberal London
6 Conclusion: Bodies in Common
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Work That Body

Radical Cultural Studies Series editors: Fay Brauer, Maggie Humm, Tim Lawrence, Stephen Maddison, Ashwani Sharma and Debra Benita Shaw (Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London, UK) The Radical Cultural Studies series publishes monographs and edited collections to provide new and radical analyses of the culturopolitics, sociopolitics, aesthetics and ethics of contemporary cultures. The series is designed to stimulate debates across and within disciplines, foster new approaches to cultural studies and assess the radical potential of key ideas and theories. Sewing, Fighting and Writing: Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture Maria Tamboukou Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice edited by Debra Benita Shaw and Maggie Humm Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism Dan Hassler-Forest EU, Europe Unfinished: Europe and the Balkans in a Time of Crisis edited by Zlatan Krajina and Nebojša Blanuša Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities Iain Chambers Austerity as Public Mood: Social Anxieties and Social Struggles Kirsten Forkert Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion Edited by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison and Darren Ellis Gender, Sexuality, and Space Culture Kat Deerfield Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture Jamie Hakim Writing the Modern Family: Contemporary Literature, Motherhood and Neoliberal Culture Roberta Garrett (forthcoming)

Work That Body Male Bodies in Digital Culture

Jamie Hakim

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2020 Jamie Hakim All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:

HB 978-1-78660-441-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN: ISBN:

978-1-78660-441-5 (cloth) 978-1-78660-443-9 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Davide and Noah

Contents

Acknowledgementsix Prefacexiii 1

Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture in the Post-2008 Conjuncture

2

The Celebrity Male Nude Leak: Value Creation, Precarity and the Naked Male Body

33

3

The Spornosexual: The Affective Contradictions of Digital Male Body-Work in an Age of Austerity

57

4

RuPaul’s Drag Race Body Transformation Tutorials: Drag Queens and Digital Capitalism

81

5

The Rise of Chemsex: Queering Collective Intimacy in Neoliberal London

109

6

Conclusion: Bodies in Common

133

1

Bibliography149 Index165

vii

Acknowledgements

This book has not been an individual endeavour. Its completion has relied on a collective of people to whom I am incredibly grateful. First and foremost, the book’s editor Stephen Maddison, whose encouragement, insight and commitment to materialist understandings of gender and sexuality gave me the energy to complete what, at times, seemed like an overwhelming task. Alison Winch has been instrumental to every stage of this book. Her keen sense of the scale of what confronts those of us interested in progressive politics, as well as the tools needed in their service, has been a guiding light since the inception of this project. Rachel O’Neill has been a fellow traveller on a journey into trying to understand what neoliberalism has meant for both masculinity and intimacy. Her fierce ethics and intellectual creativity have kept me on my toes while writing this book, and the book is better for it. Discussing the book’s themes with both her and Alison in our reading group on intimacy has helped reinforce their consideration from different feminist perspectives, and this has been invaluable. Su Holmes is my ‘official’ research mentor. Her mentorship goes far beyond her university-sanctioned role in a way that has been both generous and razor sharp, ensuring that every aspect of the research has been as watertight as it could possibly be. Tom Whittaker has been a sounding board for all my ideas, long before this book, and continued to be so throughout it. I owe the book’s title to friend and long-time collaborator Adam Mattera. A shared love of Diana Ross has meant the book’s title refers to Ross’ 1981 hit Work That Body. He suggested naming each of the chapters after the names of Diana Ross songs. And with song titles like Muscles, Love Hangover, Workin’ Overtime that might have been possible, but in the end I decided against. All of the aforementioned people have read sections of this book and have given invaluable feedback. Others have too. They are Yvonne Tasker, Ben ix

x

Acknowledgements

Little, Sanna Inthorn and Zeena Feldman. Catherine Rottenberg’s patient and thoughtful feedback really strengthened the framing of the project and gave me the courage to make its intervention bolder than it was. Catherine and the rest of my comrades in the Care Collective – Andreas Chatzidakis, Jo Littler and Lynne Segal – have bolstered my conviction that intellectual enquiry should be theoretical, but it needs to be conducted politically, with an object in mind, collectively supported and always with great care, in all the senses of that word. The same is true for the Exclusive Faggotry group – Joao Florencio, John Mercer and Charlie Sarson – whose humour, wide knowledge of gay sexual cultures and way with a witty GIF kept me going throughout. John, in particular, has been especially supportive to me all throughout the beginning of my academic career. University of East Anglia’s Feminist Media Studies group – a group of brilliant female scholars – has provided a similarly supportive and encouraging network. I am also grateful to the following people, who invited me to speak at different occasions and have, therefore, allowed me to test out and sharpen the ideas that eventually made into this book: Kath Albury, Pam Aldred, Kerryn Drysdale, Wing Fai-Lung, Jaime Garcia Iglesias, Benjamin Litherland, Chris Porter, Kirsten Schuster and Diego Semerene. I am especially grateful for my Visiting Research Fellowship at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at LaTrobe University in December 2018. Dennis Altman, Steven Angelides, Gary Dowsett, Duane Duncan, Ivy McGowan, David O’Keefe and Andrea Waling all made for a very stimulating and productive visit. I should thank Adam Bourne in particular, not only for being such a brilliant host but especially when it came to the research I have done on chemsex, for providing a model for what robust, rigorous and, especially in such a fraught research area, measured research should look like. Shaka McGlotten and Corey W. Johnson saw the first proposal for the book and made excellent suggestions that improved it from the outset. I am also thankful for the conversations I have had at conferences, symposia and other events that have made me reflect on the work I have done in this project with the following people: Sarah Banet-Weiser, Paul Byron, Debbie Ging, Susanna Passonen, Kristian Moller, Sharif Mowlabocus and Kane Race. I am always thankful for my family: my parents, Paul and Sophie, and niece Ava for the limitless amounts of love and support they give me and that has sustained me throughout the process. And, of course, Davide and Noah, to whom this book is dedicated and without whom it would probably not have been finished. Earlier versions of the work that appears in this book has already appeared as the following:



Acknowledgements xi

Jamie Hakim, ‘ “Fit Is the New Rich”: Male Embodiment in the Age of Austerity’, Soundings, 61 (2015): 84–94. Jamie Hakim, ‘ “The Spornosexual”: The Affective Contradictions of Male BodyWork in Neoliberal Digital Culture’, Journal of Gender Studies, 27:2 (2018): 231–241. Jamie Hakim, ‘Chemsex: Anatomy of a Sex Panic’ in Affect and Social Media, eds. Darren Ellis, Stephen Maddison and Tony Sampson (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 131–140. Jamie Hakim, ‘The Rise of Chemsex: Queering Collective Intimacy in Neoliberal London’, Cultural Studies, 2 (2019): 249–275. Jamie Hakim and Alison Winch, ‘ “I’m Selling the Dream Really Aren’t I?”: Sharing Fit Male Bodies on Social Networking Sites’ in Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical Perspectives, eds. Sandro Carnicelli, David McGillivray and Gayle McPherson (London: Routledge, 2016), 39–52.

Preface

As a closeted gay teenager growing up in London’s suburbs in the 1990s, it was hard to come by media representations of the sexualised male bodies. They could obviously be seen in gay pornography, but, pre-Internet, that involved visiting a sex shop in Soho, nerve-wracking in and of itself, but made more so for me because it would have involved outing myself. Sexualised male bodies could very occasionally be seen in mainstream media, late at night, mostly on Channel 4, on what was called ‘post-pub television’ or the independent films it sometimes broadcast. Sometimes UK-style magazines like The Face and i-D would publish homoerotic fashion photography. There were also the visual materials used to market aspirational male underwear brands – Calvin Klein producing the most iconic of the period.1 This was no trivial matter. Questions of ‘sexualisation’ have long been contested within feminist and queer politics and the implication of the term shifts significantly in the contexts of different social groups. The sexualisation of children is clearly different from that of women, which is different from that of men and so on.2 In terms of what’s at stake when it comes to the difficulty of a closeted gay teenager accessing sexualised images of male bodies, Thomas Waugh’s observations on gay men’s relation to gay pornography resonate profoundly: Pornography has become one of our privileged cultural forms, the expression of that quality for which we are stigmatized, queer-bashed, fired, evicted, jailed, hospitalized, electroshocked, disinherited, raped in prison, refused at the U.S. border, silenced, and ghettoized – that quality being our sexuality.3

What I take from this quote is that media representations of men having sex with each other proves that men do have sex with each other; that sexual xiii

xiv

Preface

acts which were understood to be pathological in the wider culture were, in fact, pleasurable showed that sex between men could be enjoyable, not pathological and incriminating. This extends to the non-pornographic, too. That a man’s body could be represented in visual media in a way that invited erotic spectatorship, even if that representation was intended for a heterosexual female audience, meant that a space could be fashioned in culture for a form of desire that, by the 1990s, may have no longer been illicit or pathologised but was still stigmatised and marginalising. We rightly debate the implications of ‘sexualisation’ as it applies to different types of person, but one of the effects of the relative paucity of images of sexualised male bodies in mainstream culture was the delegitimation of the desire for men’s bodies, something with profound psychic consequences for gay men struggling to come to terms with their sexuality, or indeed anyone who takes male bodies as one of their preferred sexual objects. It is the contention of Work That Body that since around 2008 this situation has changed significantly. Across contemporary culture there has been a proliferation of not only sexualised representations of male bodies but also new forms of sexualised modes of male embodiment, many, but by no means all, of which have emerged in relation to digital media. These new digitally mediated male body practices are not limited to the case studies explored in this book, though these case studies, for reasons that will shortly become clear, do exemplify different aspects of this recent proliferation. They are as follows: the celebrity male nude leak – intimate images of nude male celebrities circulated via Tumblr and Twitter and reported on by celebrity gossip websites; the rise of young British men sharing eroticised gym selfies over social media; and the body transformation tutorials uploaded onto YouTube by participants of popular television show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–), whereby these participants, who mostly identify as men, demonstrate the techniques they use to become a certain version of hyperbolic femininity. The final case study is chemsex – gay and bisexual men using smartphone ‘hookup’ applications to organise group sex encounters where particular types of recreational drugs (chems) are consumed. Covering celebrity culture, fitness culture, drag culture, marginal sexual cultures, as well as cutting across heteronormative, homonormative and queer contexts, these case studies are clearly diverse. They have been chosen in no small part because of my own positionality within contemporary culture and the vantage point this has afforded me on its dynamics. I am a gay man, born in 1979, whose relationship to sexualised modes of male embodiment has changed in ways significant to this book since my frustrated searches for images as a teenage consumer in the 1990s. Between 2001 and 2015, I worked in various editorial positions at Attitude, Europe’s leading gay men’s culture magazine, which meant as an adult I also became involved



Preface xv

in the production of these images. This included organising photo shoots of gay and straight celebrities and ‘real-life’ men who were designed to appeal to a gay male audience. This very frequently meant representing them in sexualised ways. Now that I have written this book this means I am or have been a consumer, producer and cultural analyst of sexualised modes of male embodiment. Like Thomas Waugh I experience these modes of embodiment in a mostly pleasurable way. Moreover, like Waugh, I believe their presence in a still-homophobic and patriarchal culture can have important queer and feminist implications in the ways they legitimate the desire for male bodies, a desire that, despite the advances made by homonormative and post-feminist politics since the 1990s, has not yet quite shaken off its illegitimacy. This is vividly illuminated when we compare this to the desire for female bodies, especially as experienced by cis-gendered, heterosexual men. Queer men and heterosexual women can still face public shaming or violence when expressing the desire for the male body, or at least expressing it in a way deemed excessive. Cis-gendered, heterosexual men face no such policing when expressing their desire for the female body. In fact, as the #metoo movement demonstrated so conclusively, quite the opposite is true: the excessively expressed desire for female bodies is commonplace, can be dangerous for women and is, therefore, in desperate need of policing. Understanding these modes of male embodiment as having potentially important political implications is a different position from that taken by some recent strands of feminism that apprehend digitally mediated, sexualised male embodiment primarily as a form of sexual harassment. This is particularly the case in relation to recent scholarship on ‘dick pics’, or when men send unsolicited pictures of their penises to women.4 It should (but unfortunately still does not) go without saying that any form of non-consensual sexual activity, mediated or not, is a form of violence and requires urgent, critical, scholarly and activist attention. However, this book does not look at acts like these. It is interested in another set of sexual and gendered dynamics entirely – how different groups of men seemingly choose to sexualise their bodies in non-violent ways in response to a certain historical situation. My interest in these modes of embodiment has been shaped, in part, by my social location as a gay man in the cultural conditions outlined earlier. That is not to say that I celebrate the proliferation of sexualised modes of male embodiment in recent years uncritically. In fact, this book understands this proliferation as symptomatic of problematic tendencies within contemporary culture. When it comes to critiquing the misogynistic uses to which sexualised modes of male embodiment can be put, there are others whose social location gives them a far better perspective than me to engage in this important work. In some senses that is a position of privilege, but in others it is not. While the gendered identities of cis-gendered gay men, of course, mean we are rarely

xvi

Preface

subjects of misogynistic violence (not withstanding femmephobia’s impact on gay men who are cis- but femme-presenting), our sexualities mean we are rarely able to assume patriarchal personhood proper. This insider-outsider position can be useful for researching the body practices in this book because as a cis-gendered, gay man I inhabit subject positions within capitalist heteropatriarchy from which these practices emanate, but at the same time my sexuality denaturalises and makes visible aspects of these positions that cisgendered, heterosexual men take for granted. So, while the position I occupy can obscure certain cultural dynamics, it can also make visible others that those who occupy different positions might not see. My place within the conjuncture also helps explain the geographical specificity of these otherwise-diverse case studies. The UK’s popular culture remains heavily influenced by the US. The case studies are mostly British but are inflected by elements of US culture, and as will become apparent in the remainder of the chapter, the shifting Anglo-American context since 1979 is vital to the analysis made in this book. Using these case studies gives an insight into the place of popular culture within these wider geo-political dynamics. As for their diversity, it is precisely because new formations of sexualised male embodiment have appeared across so many diverse contexts within a particular time and place that suggests something is happening across contemporary culture that is worthy of scholarly attention. Work That Body seeks to engage in exactly that: asking why these new formations of digitally mediated modes of sexualised male embodiment have emerged at the moment that they have, without resorting to the facile explanatory frameworks frequently put forward in popular culture: the narcissistic use of digital media. Instead I take a cultural studies approach to these questions, an approach that understands the emergence of all cultural formations as the result of a wide range of complex and interrelated shifts in the culture-at-large. This approach is called ‘conjunctural analysis’ and was developed collectively by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under the directorship of Stuart Hall in the 1970s. I outline this in more detail in chapter 1, but, in brief, conjunctural analysis is an interdisciplinary approach that analyses cultural formations (representations and practices) as responses to the range of social contradictions that constitute a specific historical period (conjuncture). Developed, in part, as a response to Raymond Williams’s criticism of ‘vulgar Marxism’s’ approach to cultural analysis that saw shifts in culture determined by shifts in the economic base, conjunctural analysis instead sees the emergence of cultural phenomena as ‘overdetermined’ by all the contradictions of that historical moment – social, cultural, technological, economic, political, affective and so on.5 Deploying conjunctural analysis to make sense of discrete cultural phenomena, therefore, not only helps make sense of these phenomena but also



Preface xvii

helps illuminate the power dynamics of the historical conjuncture in which they have emerged, so that political interventions can be formulated in a bid to move that conjuncture in more progressive directions. By analysing these digitally mediated modes of male embodiment in this way, this book hopes to make a number of interventions. The first is to contribute to our understanding of the place that digital media has in contemporary culture and the ways it helps shape our everyday lives. The second is to map the ways that the male body is currently being sexualised through digital media and what the wider implications of this are for contemporary culture. Finally, it hopes to contribute to the ongoing project of cultural studies that analyses cultural representations and practices in order to help map contemporary organisations of power. This means that while this is very much a book about the male body and digital culture, ultimately these objects are both de-centred through paying close attention to the ways they are articulated not only in relation to each other but also in relation to the wider conjunctural dynamics in which they have both emerged and helped shape. What, then, is the conjuncture I am trying to analyse in looking at these digitally mediated male body practices? All of these practices have emerged since around 2008: the celebrity male nude leaks since 2011, the male gym selfies since approximately 2008, RuPaul’s Drag Race since 2009 and chemsex since at least 2011. Arguably the most profound historical change that has occurred in the Anglo-American context during this period is the ongoing crisis of neoliberalism since the crash of the financial markets in September 2007. Here neoliberalism is not simply understood as an economic programme but a hegemonic project that, since the 1970s, different class fractions have struggled to put in place across multiple fronts, including the political, the economic, the social, the ideological and the cultural. Since the spectacular failure of neoliberal economics in 2008, there has been an equally spectacular redoubling of this hegemonic project across all spheres of social life that, in the UK context, led to the implementation of austerity measures as a response to the recession that the crash triggered. This itself led to stagnating wages and living conditions particularly among already-vulnerable groups, which led to the steepest growth in inequality in Britain since the Second World War. One of the results of this on the political level has been the shattering of the neoliberal consensus that has defined the ‘political centre’ since Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour Party in 1994. Since 2015 political positions understood to be on the fringes of mainstream politics entered the centre of national life – Keynesian social democrat Jeremy Corbyn was voted in as leader of the Labour Party and, in 2016, the UK voted for Brexit – two historic events that have been widely interpreted as both a response to and significant departures from the ravages wrought on British society by

xviii

Preface

neoliberalism. It is possibly too early to determine when the end of the post2008 conjuncture is, but at the time of writing, 2016 seems like a reasonable, if provisional, bookend. What can looking at digitally mediated male body practices potentially reveal about this conjuncture? Chapter 1 deals with this question in a substantive way, but briefly, both the gendered body and the digital have proven to be key fronts in neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony both prior to and during 2008–2016. As many feminists have argued, the ‘aesthetic labour’6 or beautifying body practices that women have been exhorted to perform under neoliberalism have been one of the major ways that neoliberalism has ‘got under the skin’ of its subjects. And as many scholars of digital media have explored, the truly extraordinary capital accumulation that has resulted from the rise of Silicon Valley has both strengthened and extended neoliberal economic and cultural logics, while also mutating them in ways that these scholars are only now beginning to comprehend. Therefore, it is the premise of this book that by looking at these new male body practices in the context of these emerging digital cultures, we are able to illuminate important and hitherto under-explored aspects of how neoliberalism operates as a hegemonic project during this particular moment of crisis, namely, the historically novel way that men’s bodies, especially in relation to digital media, have been opened up as a front in neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony, either as a site where its interests have been advanced or as a site for counter-hegemonic struggle. In doing so, it reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project: its ability to transform areas of culture previously untouched by older forms of capitalism into sites of value creation while, in different yet related contexts, turning them into sites of potential resistance. At the time of writing (spring 2019) the post-2016 crisis of neoliberalism appears to be reaching a crescendo, at least in the UK, with the chaos of Brexit deepening already-divisive fractures across British society. Perhaps, it is no wonder with so much of our shared sense of a life in common eviscerated by neoliberalism’s attempted transformation of it into competitive market relations. The digitally mediated, sexualised male body may not be the obvious way into understanding how this situation came to be, but it can, I hope this book shows, expose important aspects of the processes that got us here, the experience of its inhabitation and, by the book’s end, even possible ways out. NOTES 1. Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996); Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption (London: UCL Press, 1996).



Preface xix

2. For discussion, see Feona Attwood, Clare Bale and Meg Barker, The Sexualisation Report (Milton Keynes: Open University, 2013). 3. Thomas Waugh, ‘Men’s Pornography: Gay vs. Straight’, Jump Cut, 30 (March 1985): 30–35. 4. For example: Jessica Ringrose and Emilie Lawrence, ‘Remixing Misandry, Manspreading, and Dick Pics: Networked Feminist Humour on Tumblr’, Feminist Media Studies, 18:4 (2018): 686–704. 5. Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review, 82 (1973): 1–16. 6. Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Chapter 1

Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture in the Post-2008 Conjuncture

On 30 April 2015, journalist Simon Chilvers wrote a feature in The Guardian entitled ‘Why the Penis Is Having a Moment in Men’s Fashion’.1 In it Chilvers claimed, ‘The hottest trend in menswear right now is not about clothing but the lack of it. That’s right, chaps, this season cocks are in – or, perhaps more specifically – out’. He provided the following as evidence: American designer Rick Owen’s autumn/winter 2015 fashion show that sent male models down the catwalk in trousers with peep holes at the crotch; a nude image of a male model on the cover of British men’s fashion magazine Man about Town; and a photo shoot inside competitor magazine Fantastic Man that included a range of differently bodied men, again, fully nude. The promotional cultures of luxury fashion brands do not operate by simply promoting the clothes they want to sell. Instead they attempt to produce media spectacle so as to draw attention to their brands. In this context ‘male full frontals remain the last taboo in an otherwise hyper-sexualised society and still have the power to shock’. The article does not fully deliver on its headline and give a definitive reason why the penis is having a moment in fashion or, put another way, being used to sell luxury goods. It does, however, mention the effects of social media on the promotional strategies of both luxury fashion brands – increased media spectacle to compete on crowded newsfeeds – and the male models working in the sector: ‘Social media is littered with male flesh, with most male models unabashedly posting regular topless six-pack selfies’. For Chilvers, the rise of social media provides a background explanation to the spectaularisation of the sexual male body to sell luxury commodities. In doing so he gestures towards the central pre-occupation of this book – the articulation of the sexualised male body, digital media and neoliberal capitalism since 2008. Since around 2008, there has been a notable increase in the use of digital technologies to sexualise the male body across a variety 1

2

Chapter 1

of contexts – the celebrity male nude leak (chapter 2), the rise of the male gym selfie (chapter 3), the mainstreaming of a certain version of drag queen culture (chapter 4) and the rise of chemsex – gay and bisexual men using hook-up apps to organise sexual encounters where certain drugs (‘chems’) are consumed. Having spent the past few years researching these different contexts, I have arrived at the following conclusion – these digitally mediated male body practices have emerged as a means of negotiating the shifting fortunes of neoliberalism since the financial crisis of 2007/2008. In response to that financial crisis, the neoliberal project was intensified in ways that diminished the means to create value that were available to everyone except global elites – including men, a social category that had been historically relatively well served by capitalism. This brings the lived experience of men closer in line to women’s, that is sexualising your body as one way of negotiating the precarity of the neoliberal everyday. This has led me to argue that what these digitally mediated male body practices reveal is that neoliberalism has a feminising axiomatic, one that works to make more of our lives resemble women’s under-capitalist hetero-patriarchy – even some categories of men. In this chapter I set out the theoretical approach I have taken in order to make this argument. This approach is called ‘conjunctural analysis’ and was pioneered by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) under Stuart Hall in the 1970s. In order to apply conjunctural analysis to these body practices and, therefore, relate their emergence to the various aspects of the historical conjuncture in which they have emerged, this chapter necessarily draws on a number of distinct, yet overlapping, scholarly traditions. It begins by looking to the body studies literature, which has shown how bodies can be used to read the shifting power dynamics of particular historical moments, specifically in terms of how those bodies are gendered, raced, classed and sexualised. It then explores how modes of embodiment have changed under neoliberalism, by first defining how the term ‘neoliberalism’ will be used in the book and then how different scholars have theorised the body in relation to it. The final section turns to digital media studies to discuss how the widespread use of Web 2.0 digital technologies after around 2008 has simultaneously extended and changed the logics of neoliberal capitalism and how these changes in turn relate to contemporary questions of gendered and sexualised embodiment. In doing all of this, this chapter serves two purposes. The first is to provide an account of the historical processes that have led to a situation where more men are using digital media to sexualise their bodies. The second is to discuss which insights from the existing scholarship are helpful for carrying out the conjunctural analysis I have used throughout the remainder of the book. In setting out both the historical and theoretical contexts for this book, this chapter also sets the stage for its major argument: that the articulation of the



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 3

digital to the sexualised male body has been a major and hitherto overlooked vector through which neoliberalism has been negotiated after the 2008 crisis. Digital media has been hugely significant in propping up neoliberal capitalism through offering it new methods of capital accumulation, labour exploitation2 subjectification3 and, importantly for the discussion at hand, embodiment.4 Up until now the media and cultural studies scholarship has been largely concerned with the ways women have been incited to sexualise their bodies to live under not only neoliberalism but older forms of capitalism too.5 What the emergence of the body practices in this book demonstrates, I argue, is that since 2008 the digitally mediated, sexualised male body has been opened as a front in neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony in ways historically associated with women. What this suggests is that neoliberalism has a feminising axiomatic that works on its subjects irrespective of their gendered identities (though with differential effects across genders) and which is intelligible through their bodies. The term ‘feminising’ has two meanings here. The first refers to the way women have historically had to sexualise their bodies as one way of becoming valuable in culture. The second refers to the historical conditions that have provided women with very little choice but to sexualise their bodies as one way of becoming valuable in culture. This second meaning draws on the feminisation of labour debates that note how neoliberalism has weakened the position of workers, so now increased numbers of us experience the precarious working conditions women have long experienced under capitalism. The rise of the digitally mediated male body practices explored here comes at the intersection of these two processes or, what I am calling, neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic. Increased numbers of men are using digital media to sexualise their bodies in order to negotiate living through post-2008 neoliberalism: to either create value when neoliberalism creates so few opportunities for value creation for anyone except global elites or attempt to resist neoliberalism’s isolating, alienating and anxiety-inducing effects. THINKING CONJUNCTURALLY ABOUT THE DIGITALLY MEDIATED MALE BODY More an approach than a methodology, conjunctural analysis was collectively developed at the CCCS in the 1970s. Its unique contribution to the study of culture is how it analyses cultural formations (representations and practices) as responses to the range of social contradictions that constitute a specific historical period or conjuncture. Its roots can be found in the work of two of the biggest influencers on the CCCS: Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams. The term ‘conjuncture’ is Gramsci’s, and it refers to historical periods bookended by different crises. Gramsci distinguishes between conjunctural

4

Chapter 1

and organic crises, with the latter engendering far more profound historical change than the former. For example, the switch from feudalism to capitalism would be organic, whereas the switch between two different modes of capitalism (e.g. socially democratic to neoliberal) would operate at the level of the conjuncture. The degree of change can be measured by assessing the ‘relation of forces’ that emerge after a historical crisis, which, for Gramsci, referred to the various types of relationships between the different political actors in a specific time and place. Unusually for a Marxist writing in the 1920s and 1930s, this meant more than simply the economic relations between political actors.6 Raymond Williams developed this line of thought in his criticisms of ‘vulgar Marxism’s’ economic determinism, which prioritised the economic relations as the primary agent in all moments of historical change. Following Gramsci, Williams instead argued that all the relations of a historical conjuncture – social, cultural, technological, economic, political – had equal capacity to determine its shape.7 The point of historical analysis, then, is to assess how these different relations come together at a given historical moment. The CCCS called this mode of analysis ‘conjunctural analysis’. The first significant piece of conjunctural analysis to be carried out by the CCCS was published as Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order in 1978.8 Its subject was the moral panic on mugging that appeared in the UK in the 1970s. Contrary to popular opinion, which understood this moral panic as directly reflecting an increase in mugging itself, Policing the Crisis argued that this panic was instead symptomatic of the conjunctural crisis the UK was experiencing as a result of the breakdown of the socially democratic postwar settlement. As a way of negotiating living through this crisis, the ruling classes (the media, the police and the state) responded through what the authors described as ‘authoritarian populism’, of which the neoconservative ‘law and order’ rhetoric on mugging was a key component. So prescient was the analysis that many have since argued that the book predicted the rise of Thatcherism as a form of authoritarian populism after 1979. This analysis was only possible precisely because its authors placed mugging within all of its conjunctural relations (not just the economic), and the book ended up revealing as much about Britain in the 1970s as it did about the moral panic on mugging. This is, arguably, conjunctural analysis’ defining property: the placing of cultural formations within all of their conjunctural relations so as to understand not only the cultural formation but the wider historical conjuncture in which it has emerged. Since Policing the Crisis conjunctural analysis has been absorbed into what some called the ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, in which it has become cross-disciplinary common sense to ‘historicise’ and ‘contextualise’ the cultural phenomena under analysis. Conjunctural analysis, however, requires more than this. One of its greatest advocates, Lawrence



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 5

Grossberg, has called conjunctural analysis a form of ‘radical contextualism’ (emphasis added) in that the context does not simply provide the background of the analysis but is the object of the analysis itself.9 There is no consensus among the scholars who explicitly use the approach about what this might look like. Indeed, each of them has used conjunctural analysis in a variety of ways in relation to different empirical contexts.10 Methodological dexterity is a hallmark of conjunctural analysis, precisely because the specificity of each cultural formation and the conjunctures in which each emerges require different theoretical, epistemological and methodological tools to make sense of them. I detail the different tools I have used in each case study at the end of this chapter. Prior to this, however, I will outline the various historical shifts that have led us to the point where men have started to use digital media to sexualise their bodies as a way of negotiating the post-2008 conjuncture. In order to do this properly, I start at the level of the organic and the historical epoch in which bodies can be used in this way at all – namely, modernity. THE BODY IN MODERNITY Body studies scholars have been trying to understand the place of the gendered, raced and classed body in the cultures of modernity since the 1980s and 1990s largely by turning to the foundational work of modern philosopher René Descartes. Feminists, critical race theorists and queer theorists have all pointed to how one of the key ways in which power relations of domination and subordination have functioned between social groups during modernity has been through the mind-body binary that, Descartes argued, was constitutive of the modern subject. Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz perhaps articulated this best in her book Volatile Bodies, in which she argued that one of the fundamental distinctions in Western philosophy from Aristotle up to and including the modern period is that between the mind and the body. Within this dualism, the mind, as productive of rational thought, is the privileged term, and the irrational and interfering body seen as lesser. For Grosz the ‘somatophobia’11 of Western philosophy is highly gendered: one of the primary ways that women’s exclusion from power has been legitimated in Western culture is through the notion that they are irrational and at the mercy of their unruly bodies. A feminist philosophy of the body, Grosz argued, would necessarily take into account the way that women’s bodies carry the burden of ‘Man’s’ freedom to think.12 This mind-body distinction reproduces itself across multiple axes of power throughout modernity. Critical race scholars Kobena Mercer and Patricia Hill Collins have written about how this distinction has been deployed to legitimate the domination of non-European peoples in both colonial and

6

Chapter 1

post-colonial contexts. The representation of the ‘excessive’ embodiment of the people from the African diaspora has been given sexual, violent and sporting inflections.13 If mindly intelligence was ever attributed to non-white peoples, it was never understood as rational. Instead it was represented as devious, untrustworthy and threatening and, again, in need of European control.14 Cultural representations of Jews,15 the working class16 and queers17 were formulated in similar ways – grotesquely embodied, abject, excessively sexual and/or physically threatening – representations that legitimate the domination and control of these groups. There are two dimensions to this logic that are important for the discussion here. The first is the ideal subject of modernity – the white, Christian, middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, productive male whose sovereignty over all other social groups is dependent on his ‘natural’ capacity for rational thought. The second is the idea of the body itself, denigrated under modernity, and in constant need of control, purification and covering up: the basis upon which a social group can be subordinated. THE SEXUALISED GENDERED BODY IN LATE MODERNITY The distribution of power through the mind-body distinction begins to change somewhat during the period that Anthony Giddens has called ‘late modernity’ (the 1960s onwards) when the organising principles of modernity begin to shift as a result of historical processes that are too numerous to recount here. What is important for this discussion is how the body increases in prominence in Anglo-American popular culture as a result of these historical processes. As Giddens influentially argued, this happened because traditional modes of subjectivity, which were predicated on a person’s position within a community, were being replaced by the notion of the (late) modern individual whose subjectivity is being continuously and self-reflexively ‘worked on’.18 Working on the body becomes a key aspect of this self-reflexive project, with, for example, fitness, dress and health becoming signifiers of a person’s identity much more prominently than in earlier historical periods. Scholars of sociology of the body have identified a number of factors that led to the increased cultural prominence of the body at the end of the twentieth century. Primarily they see the post-industrial shift from a production-based economy to a consumption-based one as key, particularly the way this shift was navigated by Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s policy agendas. As Featherstone presciently argued in 1982, these historical processes produced a culture in which individuals are encouraged to replace the state as responsible for their own bodily health as well as become enthusiastic participants in a



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 7

consumer economy whose visual cultures are defined by sex and hedonism. The fit, healthy and eroticised body becomes a form of capital within the peculiar contradictions of this new culture, with Jane Fonda’s workout videos being the most famous illustrative example.19 The fact that a re-branded Jane Fonda – a hetero-feminine, conventionally beautiful, blonde, white ‘sex symbol’ – is the iconic example of this shift is significant in ways that are not fully reflected on by these authors, whose work does not always engage with the gendering dynamics of the increased prominence of the sexualised body in the cultures of late modernity. To fully capture this we need to turn to the feminist scholarship on the politics of beauty. During this period there were two approaches to understanding whether beauty practices empowered or disempowered women. The first is exemplified in the work of authors such as Susan Bordo,20 Susie Orbach21 and Naomi Wolf.22 They argued that one of the major ways that women were subordinated in contemporary culture was through being exhorted to pay excessive and anxiety-inducing attention to their physical appearances – whether through diet, fashion or make-up. The second were authors working within the cultural populist tradition of British cultural studies who argued that both female bonding and creative modes of identity formation could occur through body-based consumption practices, such as shopping for clothes.23 Despite their differences, both perspectives converged around the notion that popular modes of femininity were predicated on particular types of female body-work during this historical conjuncture. The Sexualised Male Body in Late Modernity The fact that women were compelled to pay attention to their bodies through highly gendered beauty practices was, however, not entirely novel. The ‘tobe-looked-at-ness’24 of women’s bodies had been a key feature of Western visual cultures since at least the Renaissance. It arguably intensified at the end of the twentieth century, with the proliferation of mass media such as film25 and magazines26 that both multiplied the amount of images of women available, while also making them more easily accessible to wider audiences. What had greater historical novelty during this conjuncture, despite being less pervasive, was the increased visibility of the sexualised male body in mainstream Anglo-American culture. A series of key cultural studies’ interventions written during this time noted new archetypes of sexualised masculinity that had begun to emerge since at least the 1960s. In 1983 Steve Neale complicated Laura Mulvey’s ideas that men were not to be looked at in classical Hollywood cinema, citing a number of instances where the male body invited erotic spectatorship, albeit through different techniques to those used to represent the female body.27 In a short but influential piece on the

8

Chapter 1

male pin-up, Richard Dyer argued that the heterosexually coded male body could be endowed with to-be-looked-at-ness by ensuring it was still involved in some sort of masculine activity – even just through strained muscles.28 Yvonne Tasker developed Neale’s and Dyer’s ideas by analysing the hyperbolic muscular bodies of both male and female Hollywood stars that had begun populating action films in the 1980s. She argued that these bodies had emerged as a defensive response to the feminist challenge to patriarchy.29 Sean Nixon and Frank Mort both explored the sexualisation of male bodies in the visual cultures of the new consumer economy – 1980s ‘style’ magazines, advertising and other marketing materials – arguing that, in contrast to the pessimistic Marxist readings of people’s engagements with consumerism, these new cultures offered progressive spaces for new masculinities to emerge in response to feminism.30 Something all these critics also mention in their analyses is the rise of the lesbian and gay movements and how the mainstream inevitably had to draw on the long-established visual codes of subcultural gay male photography (pornographic and otherwise) in their erotic renderings of the male body. In Gay and After, Alan Sinfield argued that during this period the mainstreaming of gay culture was dependent on its tighter imbrication with consumerism, which, given the tendencies outlined by Mort and Nixon, meant the greater visibility of the sexualised male body in more commercialised metropolitan gay cultures.31 David Halperin adds to this by arguing that this was also driven by the desire for gay men to appear healthy and sexually desirable to one another during the height of the AIDS crisis.32 NEOLIBERALISM What is missing from all of these accounts of the visibility of the sexualised gendered body between 1980 and 2000, however, is the word ‘neoliberalism’ – despite the fact that we would now recognise many of the historical changes given in these accounts as being constitutive of the long neoliberal conjuncture (1979–). This is largely because cultural studies only really became centrally concerned with neoliberalism as an analytical frame through which culture might be understood during the 2000s. Neoliberalism as a concept has mostly been understood within cultural studies from two different theoretical perspectives – Foucauldian and Marxist. The Foucauldian approach understands neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality deployed by states to exhort their populations to conduct their lives in the state’s interests. The Marxist approach understands neoliberalism as an ideologically driven struggle between alliances of class fractions over the allocation of material resources within a society. In this book I err closer to the Marxist approach, while not entirely losing sight of Foucault, by using



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 9

Stuart Hall’s understanding of neoliberalism as a Gramscian hegemonic project, that necessarily operates both ideologically and materially in order to remain hegemonic. In terms of the digitally mediated male body practices being analysed here, I argue that it is precisely in response to material conditions shaped by the uneven implementation of neoliberal ideology at individual, collective and state levels that these body practices have emerged. Michel Foucault first wrote substantively about neoliberalism in his lectures at the Collège de France. For Foucault, neoliberalism was a set of ideas with different genealogies (German and American) but that ultimately coalesced around a number of main themes. A neoliberal state is one in which society is best run if economic logics are applied to all its domains – the social, the cultural and the political and not just the economic. The economic logics of neoliberalism are quite distinct from those of liberalism, which imagined market economies naturally arose once the state absented itself from the economy. According to neoliberal thinkers, states had to actively, if not violently, intervene to create competitive conditions in all areas of social life. Neoliberal states conceive of their citizens primarily in terms of their human capital – how much income their skills can generate. The ideal subject of neoliberalism, therefore, is homo economicus – a rational, entrepreneurial individual who uses market metrics to optimise his human capital.33 There has been a strong tradition within recent cultural studies scholarship that uses this Foucauldian framework to understand cultural formations in terms of how much they are shaped by neoliberal – individualistic, competitive, entrepreneurial – values and how successful they are at producing ideal neoliberal subjects. Scholarship that uses a Foucauldian approach to understanding neoliberal embodiment is discussed in detail later, and while I have found it helpful in identifying characteristics of cultural formations as neoliberal, I have hesitated to use this approach as the primary framework for this book. I share the reservations about the deployment of Foucault expressed by Nick Couldry and Jo Littler who critique this work for sometimes being too deterministic in the relationship it presumes between a cultural formation and the subjectivity it is said to shape.34 There are aspects of the ‘hypodermic needle’ theory to meaning making in this approach, in that it can sometimes suggest that texts and practices identified as neoliberal almost unproblematically insert this ideology into the people who engage with them. As the audience who studies work carried out in the tradition of British cultural studies persuasively argued, a text might contain a particular ideology but audiences might not accept let alone have their subjectivities shaped by it, even if it is the hegemonic ideology of the time. We might resist or negotiate it. Our subjectivities might be shaped by other ideologies that are in competition with it to become hegemonic. The degree to which cultural texts can shape our subjectivities

10

Chapter 1

is also potentiated and constrained by the material conditions in which cultural texts and the ideologies that inform them circulate, something curiously under-explored by this Foucauldian work.35 In summary, our engagements with culture are much more dynamic, unpredictable and shaped by ideological and material factors separate to the cultural formations we engage with than the Foucauldian approach sometimes allows. The Marxist approach to neoliberalism addresses some of these gaps, by defining neoliberalism as an ideology used to further the material interests of specific classed social actors in their struggle for dominance in particular historical contexts. In this vein, David Harvey has argued that neoliberalism is best understood as ‘a strategy to restore class power’36 deployed by Capital, tired of the wealth it had extracted from Labour being redistributed via the mechanisms of twentieth-century social democracy. In his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey provides historical accounts of the ways that the capitalist classes under Thatcher and Reagan in the UK and the US, respectively, formed alliances to exploit the 1970s crisis of social democracy in order to implement neoliberalism in their respective contexts. These include the deregulation of economic markets, the reduction of welfare and other forms of wealth redistribution, an attack on labour institutions, the privatising of public goods and services, regressive tax measures and the privileging of finance capital in the economy overall. The combined effect of these policies has been the movement of wealth back from Labour to Capital and, subsequently, a sustained growth in structural inequality, not only in the US/UK context but globally. Neoliberal ideology has helped ease the passage of this movement of wealth precisely because it has so effectively convinced enough of us that as self-reliant, autonomous and entrepreneurial individuals we no longer need to rely on the collective redistributive mechanisms of social democracy to secure our life chances, when all the evidence clearly suggests otherwise. Harvey’s account concentrates on the economic and the political consequences of states implementing neoliberal policies. These are important to the digitally mediated male body practices discussed in the following chapters. However, to fully account for their emergence, and what their emergence tells us about the post-2008 conjuncture more generally, we must also understand how neoliberalism operates at the level of culture. Stuart Hall explores neoliberal culture in his essay ‘The Neo-Liberal Revolution’, where he conceptualises neoliberalism, neither as a mode of governmentality nor as struggle between socio-economic classes, but as a Gramscian hegemonic project that, in order to become hegemonic, must unfold through social formations not only socio-economically but ideologically, politically and culturally too. By ‘culturally’ Hall means a culture’s symbolic practices and its common sense – the conceptual frameworks people ‘spontaneously’ use to make sense of their everyday life-worlds. In this essay Hall briefly considers what a



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 11

neoliberal culture is, naming its organising principles as commodification and individualisation. Importantly for the discussion here he points to practices of embodiment to exemplify neoliberal culture: The care-of-the-self and self-fashioning industries – the punishing rigours of the gym, the skills of self-promotion, the stylistic gendering and ‘race-ing’ of commodities, cosmetic surgery, personal trainers, life-style advertising, the public relations industry – feed massively off these trends. . . . The most ‘sustainable’ subject par excellence is probably the figure of the self-sufficient urban traveller-mobile, gym-trim, cycling gear, helmet, water bottle and other survival kit at the ready, unencumbered by ‘commitments’, untethered, roaming free.37

This is a passing observation in Hall’s essay but highly prescient in prefiguring the cultural phenomena analysed in this book. For instance, this quote describes many aspects of ‘spornosexuality’ that are discussed in chapter 3. Understanding neoliberalism as a Gramscian hegemonic project has another benefit beyond the significance this approach attributes to culture. Unlike the more totalising tendencies of some of the Foucauldian scholarship, Hall’s approach sees neoliberalism as an inevitably incomplete project, open to contestation and always at risk of losing the hegemony it temporarily secures. He writes: No project achieves a position of permanent ‘hegemony’. It is a process, not a state of being. No victories are final. Hegemony has constantly to be ‘worked on’, maintained, renewed and revised. Excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose interests have not been taken into account, form the basis of countermovements, resistance, alternative strategies and visions . . . and the struggle over a hegemonic system starts anew. They constitute what Raymond Williams called ‘the emergent’ – and the reason why history is never closed but maintains an open horizon towards the future.38

Two of my case studies demonstrate the success of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project – in how neoliberalism informs the ways that some celebrity men and drag queens have begun to commodify their bodies in a fashion that were not possible before 2008. However, my two other case studies provide empirical evidence for the instability of neoliberalism’s hegemony and sometimes its failure: first, in spornosexuality’s inability to fully satisfy the men who engage with it; and, second, in chemsex’s assembling of collectives of gay and bisexual men in order to negotiate the deleterious effects of neoliberalism on London, specifically its gay scene. Especially in the last example, men exercised a degree of agency within and against neoliberalism’s attempt to hegemonise the entire social field, albeit with limited success. Hall often quoted Marx in this regard, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not

12

Chapter 1

make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’,39 positing a much more agentic, though still constrained, subject of history than the Foucauldian work on neoliberalism sometimes allows. This enables us to think more optimistically about resisting neoliberalism and ‘maintain an open horizon to the future’, something I do in the concluding chapter where I imagine body practices that might further dislodge the hegemony that neoliberalism has managed to maintain, renew and revise even after its failure in 2008. The final way that Hall’s approach has been useful for understanding the digitally mediated male body practices examined in this book is in his development of Gramsci’s term, ‘the conjuncture’, and discussed earlier. In the following section I outline what is significant about the ways in which neoliberalism has organised the post-2008 conjuncture in relation to the body practices I am analysing. Neoliberalism has necessarily mutated a number of times since the Reagan and Thatcher premierships so as to maintain its hegemony. While there are overarching themes and inevitable continuities between these different mutations there are also important divergences – and their mapping is one of the goals of this book. THE POST-2008 CONJUNCTURE: RECESSION, AUSTERITY, PRECARITY As already noted, the body practices analysed in this book all emerged around the end of the 2000s and continued to be practised at least until 2016, the book’s provisional end. This maps onto a period of major crisis for neoliberalism in the Anglo/American context, one whose consequences are yet to be fully understood. The crisis began with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the US, which was so serious that it nearly destroyed the global financial system. At the time of the collapse this was widely interpreted, across the political spectrum, to be the result of this system’s neoliberal deregulation, often narrativised in the media through the figure of the reckless banker. The coordinated response from the governments of the economies most affected was to bail out those banks deemed to be, in an oft-used phrase at the time, ‘too big to fail’. In the UK, Gordon Brown’s Labour government spent £141 billion to bail out the UK banking system.40 The UK economy then went immediately into recession. However, in the build-up to the 2010 general election, the Conservative Party formulated the narrative that it was not neoliberal deregulation and reckless bankers that had caused the crash and subsequent recession, but the Labour government’s fiscal mismanagement, especially its spending on public services. The Conservative Party did not



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 13

quite win the election on this narrative and, in the end, had to form a coalition government with the Liberal-Democrats who, on taking power, continued to push this narrative to support the largest programme of public service cuts since the 1980s. Thus, the crisis of neoliberalism was met by its ideological redoubling – a peculiar contradiction that is a key aspect of the context for the emergence of the body practices of this book. In 2009, David Cameron used the term ‘the age of austerity’ to characterise this ideological redoubling, and, as a consequence, its effects on British society have been of considerable concern to cultural studies scholars. For instance, in terms of policy, Kirsten Forkert outlines the following coalition government initiatives as central to the austerity project: the introduction of the bedroom tax; cutting the educational maintenance allowance; cutting funding to public libraries (357 libraries lost between 2009 and 2013); the Health and Social Care Act (2012), which made privatisation of healthcare potentially easier; cuts to the Sure Start programme, which provides state help to disadvantaged children; notions of ‘workfare’ replacing welfare; and disability benefits being curtailed. These policies appeared to deliberately target those already vulnerable in society, disproportionately affecting young people, people living with disabilities, women, ethnic minorities and those living on the lowest incomes. They also contributed to the deepening of inequality set in motion by the crash and the subsequent recession: the poorest 10 per cent saw their income drop by 38 per cent, whereas the wealthiest saw their wealth increase by a combined £138 billion.41 What is perhaps unique about the age of austerity in comparison to other neoliberal conjunctures is that it affects the historically comfortable middle classes. The social reproduction of this group began to falter in ways it never had during both the socially democratic and neoliberal settlements before 2008. This is particularly the case for middle-class young people who can no longer depend on secure employment and home ownership after graduating from university in the ways their forbearers could.42 All this demonstrates that neoliberalism does not work as a policy agenda even on its own terms. Competitive individualism as the organising principle of all social life does not create a prosperous middle class, let alone a prosperous society as a whole. In fact it constrains the life-worlds of all but the already-hyper-wealthy. Isabell Lorey has called the process by which even capitalism’s middle classes have become uncertain about their future, ‘precarization’.43 Building on Butler’s distinction between ‘precariousness’ (vulnerability as the ontological basis for the shared experience of all human life) and ‘precarity’ (the uneven distribution of precariousness in ways that reinforce hierarchies between social groups) – precarisation is a mode of Foucauldian governmentality deployed by neoliberal states in a bid to organise their populations through the generalisation of insecurity. In line with the cultural studies

14

Chapter 1

scholarship on austerity, Lorey argues that while precariousness used to be experienced only by subordinate social groups, ‘precarization has become “democratized”. Now those who should be the white middle class experience precarity as if it is new. It is no longer located at the “margins”, related to the non-hegemonic’.44 This is a slight departure from the formulation of ‘precarity’ developed within labour studies that looks specifically at the rise of precarious working conditions after the weakening of trade unions under neoliberalism, although for Lorey, this remains a significant aspect: ‘Precarization means more than insecure jobs, more than lack of security given by waged employment. By way of insecurity and danger it embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation’ (emphasis added).45 This overwhelming sense of precariousness and insecurity that embraces the whole of existence for even historically privileged social groups has led many scholars to argue that the austerity moment might be best understood using Raymond Williams’s term ‘structure of feeling’.46 Rebecca Coleman characterises the structure of feeling generated by austerity as a range of interrelated negative affects such as: imaginations that the future cannot be better; as policies aimed at dealing with future levels of debt that affect household finances, creating states of alertness, stress or anxiety about surviving in the present; as anger about or denunciation of a diminished future; and hopes for and investments in alternative ways of life.47

Descriptions such as these eloquently express how crushing it is to live with the diminished material resources of the post-2008 conjuncture and the possible futures this allows, or does not allow, us to imagine. However, in keeping with the rest of the literature on austerity and affect, interventions like this draw attention only to the negative affects of the austerity moment. As such, I am not convinced that these accounts tell the whole story because it is very difficult for ideologies to secure consent and become hegemonic if they offer only negative affect. Lauren Berlant much more persuasively captures the nuanced affective contradictions of living through post-2008 neoliberalism in her concept ‘cruel optimism’. She defines it in the following way: ‘Optimism is cruel when the object that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving’.48 What Berlant is referring to here is what it feels like to believe in neoliberalism’s promise of the self-actualisation of your own human capital in material conditions that incontestably constrain human flourishing for everyone except global elites. The prescience of this concept lies in its ability to capture precisely how neoliberalism secured its hegemony, albeit tenuously, after 2008, through the appeal of what it promises,



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 15

however unfulfillable. It has been particularly useful in explaining why the men who are the subject of this book continued to engage in neoliberal body practices despite the very little material gain they receive in return. NEOLIBERALISM, AUSTERITY, GENDER AND THE BODY What happens to gender and the body within discursive, material and affective conditions such as these? The previous section has already touched on how women were one of the social groups to experience the sharp end of austerity. This is for two reasons: First, women entered the post-2008 conjuncture on a weaker footing to cis-gendered men. For example, they were more likely to be precariously employed than men as well as to be paid less than them. The second reason is that women have been the main beneficiaries of the socially democratic welfare initiatives that austerity measures were whittling away.49 Subsequently, living through this historical moment has been all the more difficult, made even more so by the neoliberal insistence on female self-actualisation, which makes impossible-to-escape structural changes to appear as individual failings for women in all sorts of gendered roles – as mothers,50 consumers51 and employees.52 Of course this is experienced differentially by different women, with working class women, women of colour and immigrant women feeling the brunt of the dismantling of the welfare state more acutely than their white middle-class sisters. While women have suffered most during the austerity moment, the way men have experienced it as men is important for the argument being set out in this book. Indeed, much less has been written on men during austerity. What has been written draws attention to how men have historically been expected to be ‘breadwinners’, a position made all the more achievable for even working class men during the height of social democracy. This expectation does not change under neoliberalism. In fact, as Tasker and Negra argue, gender norming intensifies during this period53 while the means for most men to achieve and sustain this role diminish drastically. As Cornwall argues, ‘The abject failure of millions of men to live up to [neoliberalism’s] injunctions . . . is one of the most striking features of contemporary life’.54 Alan Greig compounds this observation, writing that ‘the consequences have been severe’, at least psychically if not always materially, for a social group who has benefited most from capitalist patriarchy, producing a range of ‘anxious masculinities’.55 The anxious masculinities produced by neoliberalism, intensified by recession and austerity, have taken on dark and sometimes violent forms. Indeed, pickup artists, seduction communities and ‘incels’ have all been theorised by feminist scholars as masculinities that have developed in relation to

16

Chapter 1

neoliberalism – either through living out its ideological injunctions56 or being shaped in relation to its failure as an economic system.57 According to body studies scholars, bodies have registered these historical changes in two distinct ways – both extreme and inevitably classed, gendered and raced. The first is in relation to the so-called obesity epidemic both before and after 2008. Some argue that the rise of obesity among the working class and people of colour in the US can be understood as a response to the contradictions of living through the neoliberal everyday. Berlant argues that the ‘over-eating’ that produces the obese body is a form of cruel optimism, offering a ‘reprieve’ for subordinated populations marked out for ‘slow death’ in a profoundly unequal neoliberal society.58 Guthman and Dupuis link the material conditions bought about by neoliberalism more explicitly to its ideological edicts, arguing that ‘the neoliberal shift in personhood from citizen to consumer encourages (over) eating at the same time that neoliberal notions of discipline vilify it’.59 The second way that cultural studies scholars argue the body has registered the changes of neoliberalism is through the ‘aesthetic labour’ that women are exhorted to perform to produce the slender, glamorous and beautiful body so exalted in the visual cultures of contemporary consumerism. The gendered politics of beauty in the over-developed North has been an important strand of feminism since so-called second wavers protested the 1969 Miss America beauty contest. As discussed earlier, the politics of beauty was a central strand in body studies in the 1980s and 1990s, largely because of material and discursive changes we now recognise as neoliberal, though they were not named as such in the literature. The scholar who has done the most to think through neoliberalism and the ‘beautiful’ female body is Rosalind Gill. In her landmark essay ‘Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility’,60 she argues that post-feminist media cultures often centre on ‘beautifying’ the female body in ways that are presented as empowering and pleasurable but in fact are both anxiety-inducing and ultimately subordinating of women. Popular media’s makeover genre is key within this paradigm. The rationales underpinning these representations and practices were, Gill argued, ones we would recognise as neoliberal – the individual consumer self-reflexively choosing to work on her body in a way that should feel empowering. This has led Gill to argue in subsequent work that post-feminism is better understood as ‘gendered neoliberalism’ and to ask, with Christina Scharff, if neoliberalism is always already gendered and whether women are its ideal subjects.61 This is an intriguing and provocative question, one that in many ways provides a springboard for the arguments made throughout this book. Three of the four case studies I examine in the following chapters could be understood as aesthetic labour in Elias, Gill and Scharff’s terms, and all of them are being



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 17

understood as ways that the male body has become a site where the cultural politics of neoliberalism have been negotiated during the age of austerity. This is not to dispute Gill and Scharff’s suggestion but to argue that what they propose about neoliberalism, femininity and the female body has begun to shape, in some cases, masculinity and male bodies too, at least since 2008. That, neoliberalism during the age of austerity, has weakened the social positions of all but the hyper-wealthy, including constituencies of men previously well served by Western capitalism, in ways that are gendering and feminising. When I use the word ‘feminising’ here, I am drawing on its use by feminist labour scholars who have argued that in the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist regimes of capital accumulation during the 1970s, the most significant forms of labour carried out by everyone represent the work that women undertook before post-Fordism, that is ‘flexible’ and poorly paid, in service economies and involving affective, relational or semiotic labour.62 Doing this work represents a historic weakening of Labour’s relationship to Capital. The body practices discussed in this book provide evidence of neoliberalism’s capacities for feminisation both aesthetically (sexualising the body for value creation, or hyperbolically dressing up as a woman) and because the men who engage in these practices are doing so precisely because their social position has been weakened as a result of neoliberalism’s redoubling in the age of austerity. This has led me to argue that what the emergence of these body practices demonstrates is that neoliberalism has a feminising axiomatic, in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense of the word, that is a set of rules that organise the conditions of possibility of any given system. As a hegemonic project, neoliberalism sets out to reorganise social formations in the interests of global elites at the expense of everyone else regardless of gender in a fashion that women have long experienced under capitalist hetero-patriarchy. As I have already argued, the effects of this feminising axiomatic have been far more debilitating for women, ethnic minorities, migrants, the young and differently abled people than they have for men, but that men have become subject to it all is a conjuncturally specific phenomenon that requires serious attention. The rise of digitally mediated alt-right formations of masculinity, including the election of Donald Trump, during the same conjuncture can be understood as a desperate attempt to violently reassert older forms of patriarchal domination in response to neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic to which men have now become subject. We might argue that because the weakening of these men’s positions during this conjuncture has this feminising dimension, the alt-right blames women and feminists and not neoliberalism for the anxious way they feel about their new situations with sometimes murderous consequences.63 The rise of the digitally mediated male body practices that are the subject of this book, I am arguing, is another less violent response to this feminising axiomatic. In order to fully understand the relationship between these newly

18

Chapter 1

emergent body practices and neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic, however, it will first be necessary to understand the place of the digital within them. DIGITAL CAPITALISM The term ‘digital’ is so broad that it can be applied to a range of information, media and computer technologies. In this book, however, I am interested specifically in the networking and communicative capacities of Web 2.0 social media platforms. In using conjunctural analysis, I want to avoid a technologically deterministic account of the rise of the digitally mediated modes of sexualised male embodiment that I am analysing: it is not simply because these technologies have become so central to contemporary communicative practices that these modes of male embodiment have emerged. There is no direct or causal line between the affordances of these technologies and their uses. Social groups use technologies in sometimes unpredictable ways, often against their intended use, although they also often use them as they are intended too. It is only by situating these technologies and the way they are used within their most salient conjunctural relations that we are able to fully apprehend the historical significance of the practices they engender. Therefore, the following section will look at the relationship between these digital technologies and neoliberalism as a hegemonic project – one that works not only economically but crucially for the discussion at hand, at the levels of gender and the body. Have these digital technologies advanced, forestalled or reconfigured neoliberalism as a hegemonic project at these levels? Specifically, what modes of gendered embodiment have been potentiated and constrained in relation to Web 2.0 social media during the post-2008 crisis of neoliberalism? The relationship between the rise of digital technologies and neoliberal capitalism has been theorised in different ways. Some of the earliest ‘technoutopian’ interventions imagined that digitally networked technologies could be the impetus for a twenty-first-century anti-capitalist revolution. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, two of the most influential contemporary leftist thinkers, optimistically argued of the Internet that ‘today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’.64 Other scholars writing around the same time, and mindful of the working practices and modes of capital accumulation used in ‘Silicon Valley’, were far more pessimistic than Hardt and Negri, arguing that the political economy of digital technologies has been a site where neoliberal capitalism has been



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 19

more firmly entrenched.65 And, indeed, the more pessimistic predictions have largely borne out. The emergence and wide public use of Web 2.0, social media platforms, smartphones and big data, all since around 2008, has led to one of the largest concentrations of wealth into the smallest amounts of hands in recorded history66 and played no small part in propping up capitalism as an economic system during its greatest crisis since the Great Depression. This has been achieved through an assemblage of interrelated and deliberately opaque mechanisms that had mostly bypassed public scrutiny until the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 when it became public knowledge that Facebook data was being used in ways users may not have consented to had they known. What is important about these mechanisms for the discussion here is how they work to monetise human activity not previously believed to be monetisable. Digital platforms do this by creating an attractive interface where a particular type of human activity can be recorded as digital data, stored and then either processed as information that can improve the interface’s functioning or sold to other businesses. For example, Facebook does this to human relationships, wearable technologies do this to our bodily functions and Internet-of-Thingstype technologies do this to ambient aspects of our domestic lives. The corporate infrastructures that support these interfaces are incredibly slight in relation to the size of their wealth and to similar-size businesses in other industries, so their overheads are very low.67 They also rely on the free labour of their users,68 who are mostly ignorant of these mechanisms despite ‘consenting’ to them when they tick the tick-box consent forms.69 Every aspect of this can be understood as an intensification of the accumulatory capacities of neoliberal capitalism, which has variously been called post-post-Fordism,70 platform capitalism,71 surveillance capitalism72 and big data capitalism.73 Significantly for practices of embodiment, however, the spectre of Hardt and Negri’s ‘spontaneous and elementary communism’ never quite disappears for reasons discussed later in this chapter. DIGITAL BODIES Digital capitalism does not only work as a mode of neoliberal capital accumulation but also significantly intersects with forms of neoliberal cultural production, sociality, subjectivity and embodiment. In fact, I would argue that the coincidence of the rise of digital capitalism and the redoubling of neoliberalism after the financial crisis are two of the most important historical forces that give the culture of the post-2008 conjuncture its distinctiveness. Many of the newly emergent cultural practices of this period have been produced at their intersection: the alt-right, working in the app-mediated gig

20

Chapter 1

economy (e.g. Uber)74 and digitally mediated anti-austerity politics75 are just three examples. The digitally mediated male body practices that I am concerned with can also be located at this intersection. Indeed, tracing the wider politics of digital embodiment has been an important strand within digital media studies for two decades now. Some of the first scholarship on this subject contains many of the techno-utopian tendencies of the early days of the discipline, seeing in the Internet the potential to be liberated from oppressive body-based identity categories: an argument called the disembodiment thesis.76 This argument was based on pre–social media forms of Internet communication that took place in multi-user dimensions (MUDS) such as multi-player online games or chat rooms. MUDS provided modes of communication such as online avatars and text boxes where the body-based differences that constitute contemporary identity hierarchies (e.g. gender, race and able-bodied-ness) could be temporarily evaded. This radical potential becomes more complicated as Internet technologies innovate within a culture where neoliberalism continues to be hegemonic. This complexity is organised through the tension between the networking capacities of the Internet and the ways these networking capacities have been retooled under neoliberalism to both accumulate capital and commodify, individualise and make competitive the relations between the users that they network. The quantified self (QS) movement neatly encapsulates the contradictions of digital embodiment under neoliberalism. QS encourages people to use wearable technologies that measure particular bodily activities, usually related to health and fitness. These technologies then create data from these activities that is either shared with other users or sold to other companies. Deborah Lupton has mapped the various ways that these are neoliberal technologies par excellence, not only encouraging their users to continuously self-optimise and self-improve through competition with other users but also turning our everyday body practices into ‘digital data assemblages’ that enable the companies who own QS platforms to monetise our bodily activities through converting them into commodifiable digital data.77 Fotopolou and O’Riordan note these tendencies too but also point to the cooperative and networking capacities of wearable technologies through either the platforms where the data is shared or narrativised as life-logs or the offline spaces where QS enthusiasts share practices and experiences.78 In these two conflicting accounts of QS, we arguably see, at least the beginnings of, Hardt and Negri’s network-generated ‘potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’ being constrained by a culture that works as hard as it can to foreclose this very thing. The same tension between cooperative and competitive forms of digital embodiment is also apparent in the practices by which visual representations of bodies are digitally networked, one of the key concerns of this book. One of the important post-MUDs technological innovations through which this



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 21

tension has unfolded is the profile picture that most social media profiles require. The most common image used as a profile picture is a portrait – the visual technology that has done the most to centralise the individual as a key node within the ideological terrain of modernity. The academic debates around the rise of the ‘selfie’ as digitally networked self-portrait have unpacked precisely the way they advance competitive individualistic agendas, while simultaneously both networking and giving voice to the social experiences of spatially disparate groups who have historically been unable to self-represent in the media.79 Sarah Banet-Weiser and Alison Hearn extend these debates in their discussions of ‘self-branding’, or the use of networked technologies to signify the self as a brand in much the same way a corporation would brand its products or services.80 Selfies are a key but are not the only strategy that people use to self-brand in their professional and personal lives. This is the digitally mediated self/body thoroughly permeated by neoliberal logics and is apparent in many aspects of the body practices in this book. The cooperative/competitive tension similarly organises the ways the digitally mediated sexualised gendered body is understood during this conjuncture. There is a strong strain within this literature that examines how the articulation between the sexualised body and the digital is a particularly important site where contemporary body politics are being negotiated. Sometimes this is framed in relation to neoliberalism, but often it is not. Mostly this work is concerned with the female body and takes a variety of positions on what its relationship to the digital is. For instance, there have been a range of feminist interventions that have argued how digital media is extending the oppressive body politics of post-feminist, patriarchal and neoliberal media cultures through the specific affordances of digital technologies – either through intensified self-surveillance (e.g. QS technologies) or through women surveilling each other to live up to contemporary beauty norms.81 Amy Shields Dobson has looked at similar digitally mediated body practices as these scholars but arrives at quite a different conclusion. She argues that young women use social media to exaggerate, and not straightforwardly live out, post-feminism’s injunctions for shameless self-display as a mode of resistance to them.82 Jessica Ringrose, with a variety of collaborators, sees the radical potential of networked technologies fully realised in her empirical work on digitally mediated gendered embodiment. Ringrose and her coauthors consistently show how young women use networked technologies, not to perpetuate neoliberal ideals and post-feminist beauty norms, but instead to collectively organise against them as online and offline feminist groups.83 Whereas there is a growing and lively field on digital neoliberalism and female embodiment, much less has been written on male bodies. Moreover, the scholarship that does write on male bodies has focused almost exclusively on queer male bodies. Like the work on female embodiment, it also oscillates

22

Chapter 1

between, on the one hand, understanding digital media as sites of resistance to contemporary power structures (neoliberal or otherwise) and, on the other, seeing them as key tools through which these power structures are reproduced. An example of the former is Rebecca Farber’s study of trans-men who use the anonymity provided by Reddit chat rooms (a contemporary MUDS interface that does not require profile pictures) to form communities and to exchange information about transing body practices.84 An example of the latter is Sharif Mowlabocus’s germinal work on the dating and hook-up website Gaydar. Mowlabocus argues that the aesthetics of Gaydar’s profile pictures were dominated by the narrow and exclusive pornographic codes that have long been central to the representations of the male body in metropolitan gay male subcultures.85 Carl Bonner-Thompson finds similar dynamics happening on the gay male hook-up application Grindr in Newcastle.86 There is also some work that more explicitly situates digital male body politics within neoliberalism. For instance, Stephen Maddison has shown how online gay pornography has both incorporated aspects of neoliberalism and, in line with porn studies work that shows how the Internet has made previously marginal pornographies more widely available,87 also provided the space for resistance to it.88 In an article that most closely resembles the approach I am taking in this book, Harvey, Ringrose and Gill look at the ways, young, predominantly black boys circulate sexualised images of their bodies through their social media profiles as one strategy to eke out a sense of value in a London neighbourhood whose materially depressed state has been worsened through the UK coalition government’s austerity measures. Their situating of digital male body practices within temporally and spatially specific material conditions in this article is rare across all the fields that take digitally mediated body practices as their object. Many digital media studies look at this question by focusing on the relationship between users and digital technologies/texts, with conjunctural questions present but faded into the background. The sort of approach taken by Harvey, Ringrose and Gill, I believe, has enormous explanatory power.89 We do not engage with media technologies and texts (digital or otherwise) in isolation from the historical conditions in which we find ourselves. Therefore, our analyses of their use benefit when we place these historical conditions front and centre. This is precisely what I hope this book does. WORK THAT BODY: MALE BODIES IN DIGITAL CULTURE Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture makes a number of contributions to a number of different fields. The first is to contribute to the



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 23

cross-disciplinary work on gendered embodiment. For the reasons outlined earlier, there is less scholarship on male bodies in this field. It is the contention of this book that the male body has taken on an increased salience in the post-2008 conjuncture: namely, it has intensified as a site where the cultural politics of neoliberalism are being negotiated. As a response to the diminished material resources available to even heterosexual, white, male, middle-class men after 2008, different categories of men have been using digital media to sexualise their bodies in ways that we would recognise as both neoliberal and feminising. Others have been using digital media to sexualise their bodies in ways that resist neoliberalism’s attempts at territorialising every aspect of the social field. This book accounts for these newly emergent cultural practices and in doing so builds on and extends the existing media and cultural studies and sociological work on male bodies. In accounting for these practices this book also makes a contribution to the media and cultural studies work on neoliberal culture. It builds on Rosalind Gill’s and Christine Scharff’s insightful suggestion that neoliberalism is always already gendered and that women are its ideals subjects. The book does so by arguing that neoliberalism, especially after 2008, is always already gendering and that it feminises all those it attempts to subject. To reiterate, here feminisation refers to both the weakening of social, cultural, political and economic power of those of us subject to neoliberalism and the aesthetics of the cultural practices we have to engage in as a result. Work That Body argues, therefore, that neoliberalism has a feminising axiomatic – one that deliberately sets out to reorganise the rules of the system so that all of us experience our everyday lives in a fashion akin to how women have undercapitalist hetero-patriarchy before the crisis of neoliberalism in 2008. This book shows that this axiomatic works across the bodies of everyone except global elites, regardless of gender, though clearly between genders in a highly differentiated fashion. Scholars contributing to feminist media studies are right to point out that it is women as women who suffer more under neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic, and disabled, ethnic minority, migrant and working class women who suffer the most. However, after 2008 men have begun to suffer in historically novel ways too, and in ways that look remarkably similar to how their female compatriots do. This reveals something about the mutations neoliberalism has undergone in order to maintain, renew and revise its hegemony during the post-2008 conjuncture. In revealing this dynamic, this book hopes to contribute to the media and cultural studies’ understanding of the wider operations of neoliberal culture too. The final contribution this book hopes to make is methodological. Though conjunctural analysis is used in cultural studies, it has yet to be applied in a sustained fashion in any of the body studies, feminist media studies or digital media studies work on digital embodiment, as it has been practised since it

24

Chapter 1

was developed at the CCCS. There are scholars who argue that conjunctural analysis was one of cultural studies’ single greatest contributions to intellectual enquiry. This is debatable, but nevertheless I remain convinced of its remarkable explanatory capacities in understanding why cultural formations emerge how and when they do, by placing them within all (or at least their most salient) conjunctural relations, as well as their relationships to wider hegemonic projects. This broadly Gramscian approach has had real benefits in understanding the digitally mediated male body practices that are the subject of this book. Unlike many digital media studies’ work on similar practices, it broadens the focus out from the user and the digital media technology/text onto their place within the wider historical conditions (ideological and material) in which both are found. This wider focus enables, I believe, a far stronger sense of the historical significance of these practices, as well as how they might be used in counter-/hegemonic struggles. A related benefit is precisely the way this approach allows for imaginings of counter-hegemonic struggle. Some of the Foucauldian work that dominates understandings of gendered embodiment has neoliberalism as so totalising and determining a historical force it makes it difficult to imagine a way out from underneath it. As the Stuart Hall quote cited earlier attests, the approach taken in this book not only has allowed us to see how neoliberalism has successfully territorialised some male bodies but underscores cases where it has failed alongside cases where the male body is used in resistance to it. It allows those of us subject to neoliberalism a degree of agency to at least negotiate, if not outright resist, this hegemonic project even when its force appears so overwhelming. I have used this approach to make the arguments I have over a variety of case studies. The first (chapter 2) is the celebrity male nude leak, or when full-frontal images of male celebrities are leaked over digital platforms in a way that constitutes a limited form of value creation for that celebrity and the various businesses invested in their success. In that chapter I argue that the first celebrity male nude leak of this kind was pop star Chris Brown’s in 2011. Since then there have been a slew of similar leaks, mostly from men working in reality television, but also from higher-profile celebrities too (e.g. Justin Bieber, Orlando Bloom). Up until the Chris Brown leak it was rare to see representations of penises in visual culture at all, let alone celebrity penises, especially when compared to the widespread visibility of female nudity. In that chapter I analyse some of these images and texts that constitute the leaks as well as draw on interviews with entertainment professionals to argue that the new visibility of the celebrity male penis, as well as the different forms of value that it can create, represents a shift in the Anglo/American symbolic order in which some, mostly working class men, are no longer afforded the privileges that it once provided them. Drawing on Alison Hearn’s work on self-branding, this chapter looks at the working conditions these



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 25

celebrities find themselves in – ‘flexible’ contracts, low or no pay, constant ­freelancing – to argue that the neoliberalisation of the entertainment industries has left its celebrities in such a weak position that one of the few choices they have is to sexualise their naked bodies in ways we historically associate with women. In doing so they hope to maintain a presence in the attention economy in a fashion that might create some sort of value for them. Typical of neoliberal economics, the value they as labourers end up creating for themselves is very low in comparison to the value they create for the digital platforms that circulate the images. This is my first example of neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic, successfully transforming male embodiment in relation to the digital. The second is the subject of chapter 3 – the spornosexual. The term ‘spornosexual’ was popularised by journalist Mark Simpson in 2014 and is a portmanteau of the words ‘sport star’, ‘porn star’ and ‘metrosexual’. The word refers to a man who eats and exercises to create a ‘lean-muscular’ body so that he can circulate sexualised images of it over social media. In this chapter I show how there has been an empirically observable rise in men engaging in these practices since around 2008, and I interview six of these men to find out why that might be. Again, working on the body in order to appear ‘sexy’ is something typically associated with women, so the fact that more men have begun to do so during this conjuncture warrants scrutiny. What became apparent through the interviews was that, not unlike the male celebrities of the previous chapter, these non-celebrity men had fewer opportunities for value creation in austerity Britain; thus, they turned to digitally mediating sexualised versions of their bodies to feel valuable. The emphasis on feeling is important here because they all recognised that the ‘actual’ – economic, social or cultural – value that they created was very limited. What they received instead were short bursts of joy from seeing images of their bodies commented on, like or shared on the social media accounts. These bursts of joyful affect were only short, and in the chapter, the interviewees talked much more about the sad affects of engaging in such exhausting spornosexual labour when they knew it created such limited value. In this sense spornosexuality can be seen as a form of Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism and, therefore, demonstrates that when neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic transforms male bodies, its effects are never totalising. I end the chapter arguing that it is precisely in the spaces where neoliberalism fails that we can begin to work up resistance to it. Chapter 4 moves away from straightforwardly cis-gendered masculinity into drag queen subcultures – specifically the popular television programme RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–). If the previous two chapters understood the emergence of new heightened forms of conventional masculinity, perhaps counter-intuitively, as evidence of neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic, this chapter looks at a body practice that is neither new nor conventionally

26

Chapter 1

masculine – the art of drag. The success of RuPaul’s Drag Race has made drag as a form of gendered embodiment the most popular it has ever been. This chapter asks how this came to be by tracing the conjuncturally specific conditions of possibility for its success. It does this by building on existing materialist scholarship on the place of drag in pre-2008 LGBT subcultures, to argue that the show’s success is dependent on the space opened up for it in contemporary culture – where digital capitalism’s new sex/gender order intersects with gendered neoliberalism’s beauty norms. It looks to the technological affordances of social media platforms such as Tumblr that, at least up until the so-called adult content was banned in 2018, connected people with hitherto marginalised sexual identities and consolidated them into the multiplicity of sexual identities (LGBTQIA+) that have characterised the latter half of the 2010s. Through analysing the RuPaul’s Drag Race online body tutorials (the clearest and most concise expression of its ideology of drag as gendered embodiment) what becomes clear is that its version of drag has become so successful precisely because it brings the hegemonic beauty norms of gendered neoliberalism to digital capitalism’s sex/gender order. It is the bringing of the two together which defines its success, meaning that a form of gendered embodiment that once subverted, or at least evaded, capitalism, has now been captured to further its interests. If the first three case studies offer sites where the male body has been territorialised by neoliberalism with varying degrees of success, the case study that provides the basis for chapter 5 gives us a glimpse of how digital media might be used to perhaps not resist neoliberalism but offer reprieve from it. This chapter takes chemsex as its subject. Chemsex is a term coined by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to refer to group sex encounters between gay and bisexual men, mostly organised through hook-up applications, in which some combination of the recreational drugs GHB/GBL, crystalised methamphetamine and mephedrone is consumed. In 2011, reports of chemsex to the NHS reached such a level that it felt it should organise a response. In 2015 there was a moral panic on chemsex across Britain’s media that explained it as an always self-destructive practice that gay and bisexual men engaged with because they were somehow ontologically incapable of authentic intimacy. In this chapter I draw on a document analysis as well as interviews with gay and bisexual men who have engaged in chemsex to argue that this digitally mediated male body practice has emerged most concentratedly in London as a response to the effect of neoliberalism on the city, specifically its gay scene. What chemsex encounters offer is a space of feeling together in a city where the material space for gay men to gather has drastically diminished as a result of neoliberal gentrification. This is compounded where gay and bisexual men, like everyone else, are encouraged to think of themselves as specks of self-optimising human capital in continuous



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 27

competition with each other. The joyful affects of an intense collective activity like chemsex offer some reprieve from this. In distinction to the previous chapters that provide examples of men sexualising their bodies to keep up with neoliberalism, chemsex shows how male bodies can be sexualised in some sort of thwarted resistance to it. In the conclusion I tease out the partially realised resistant potential of chemsex in a discussion of how digitally mediated sexualised modes of gendered embodiment might be used in anti-neoliberal politics. I do this by looking at the recent emergence of ‘the commons’ as a way of framing this sort of politics with its emphasis on collectively working in the common good, as opposed to individualistically working in competition with each other. For obvious reasons, I focus on the already existing projects of the digital commons and what might be called the corporeal commons. I end the book by arguing that the articulation of these two projects together, as a part of a wider counter-hegemonic struggle that operates on multiple fronts, can we deterritorialise modernity’s body-based hierarchies. Only then we can move beyond the neoliberal present into a progressive post-neoliberal future so that power is distributed equally across all bodies on equal terms.

NOTES 1. Simon Chilvers, ‘Why the Penis Is Having a Moment in Men’s Fashion’, The Guardian, 11 May 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/apr/30/ why-the-penis-is-having-a-moment-in-mens-fashion. 2. Nick Srnieck, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). 3. Alison Hearn, ‘Verified: Self-Presentation, Identity Management, and Selfhood in the Age of Big Data’, Popular Communication, 15:2 (2017): 62–77. 4. Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self: A  Sociology of Self-Tracking (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 5. Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 6. Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995). 7. Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review, 82 (1973): 1–16. 8. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978). 9. Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 10. For example, ibid.; Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, ‘Interpreting the Crisis’, Soundings, 44 (2010): 8–22; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2016), 85–106.

28

Chapter 1

11. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 5. 12. Ibid. 13. Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994). 14. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). 15. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991). 16. Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage, 1997). 17. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 2011). 18. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 19. Mike Featherstone, ‘The Body in Consumer Culture’, Theory, Culture and Society, 1:2 (1982): 18–33. 20. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 21. Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue (London: Arrow, 1989). 22. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: Vintage, 1991). 23. Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); Mica Nava, Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism (London: Sage, 1992). 24. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 833–844. 25. Ibid. 26. Wolf, The Beauty Myth. 27. Steve Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, Screen, 24:6 (1983): 2–17. 28. Richard Dyer, ‘Don’t Look Now’, Screen, 23:3–4 (1982): 61–73. 29. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993). 30. Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996); Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption (London: UCL Press, 1996). 31. Alan Sinfield, Gay and After (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998). 32. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 33. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 34. Nick Couldry and Jo Littler, ‘Work, Power and Performance: Analysing the “Reality” Game of the Apprentice’, Cultural Sociology, 5:2 (2011): 263–279. 35. For an overview see: James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg and Ellen Wartella, eds., The Audience and Its Landscape (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996).



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 29

36. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46. 37. Stuart Hall, ‘The Neo-Liberal Revolution’, Cultural Studies, 25:6 (2011): 722. 38. Ibid., 727–728. 39. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 595. 40. Kirsten Forkert, Austerity as Public Mood: Social Anxieties and Social Struggles (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 15. 41. Ibid., 16–17. 42. Rebecca Brammall, Jeremy Gilbert and James Meadway, ‘What Is Austerity?’ New Formations, 87 (2016): 119–140; Ben Little, ‘A Growing Discontent: Class and Generation under Neoliberalism’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 56 (2014): 27–40. 43. Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (London: Verso, 2015), British Library Digital Collections. 44. Jasbir Puar et al., ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović’, TDR: The Drama Review, 56:4 (2012): 172. 45. Lorey, State of Insecurity: 14.0. 46. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Brammall, Gilbert and Meadway, ‘What Is Austerity?’; Rebecca Coleman, ‘Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity Mood’, New Formations, 87 (2016): 83–101; Forkert, Austerity as Public Mood: Social Anxieties and Social Struggles; Esther Hitchen, ‘Living and Feeling the Austere’, New Formations, 87 (2016): 102–118. 47. Coleman, ‘Austerity Futures’, 84. 48. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2. 49. Beatrix Campbell, ‘After Neoliberalism: The Need for a Gender Revolution’, Soundings, 56 (2014): 10–26. 50. Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim, Mothering through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 51. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds., Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 52. Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 53. Negra and Tasker, Gendering the Recession, 1. 54. Andrea Cornwall, ‘Introduction: Masculinities under Neoliberalism’ in Masculinities under Neoliberalism, eds. Andrea Cornwall, Frank G. Karioris and Nancy Lindisfarne (London: Zed Books, 2016), 50.4, British Library Digital Collections. 55. Alan Greig, ‘Anxious States and Directions for Masculinities Work with Men’ in Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities, eds. Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström and Alan Greig (London: Zed Books, 2011), 219. 56. Rachel O’Neill, Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Medford: Polity, 2018).

30

Chapter 1

57. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Jack Braitch, ‘The Con in Confidence: Pick Up Artists, Honor Terrorism and the Failure of Neoliberalism’, pre-publication version. 58. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95–120. 59. Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis, ‘Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and The Politics of Fat’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (2006): 427. 60. Rosalind Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:2 (2007): 147–166. 61. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, ‘Introduction’ in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, eds. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. 62. Lisa Adkins, ‘Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor after the Financial Crisis’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 111:4 (2012): 621–641; Angela McRobbie, ‘Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime’, New Formations, 70 (2011): 60–76; Cristina Morini, ‘The Feminization of Labour in Cognitive Capitalism’, Feminist Review, 87 (2007): 40–59. 63. Banet-Weiser and Braitch, ‘The Con in Confidence’. 64. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 294. 65. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Tizianna Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 66. Ben Little and Alison Winch, The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 67. Srnieck, Platform Capitalism. 68. Terranova, Network Culture. 69. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). 70. Jeremy Gilbert, Andy Goffey and Robin Murray, ‘Post-Post-Fordism in the Era of Platforms’, New Formations, 84 (2014/2015): 184–208. 71. Srnieck, Platform Capitalism. 72. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 73. Christian Fuchs, ‘ “Günther Anders” Undiscovered Critical Theory of Technology in the Age of Big Data Capitalism’, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 15:2 (2017): 582–611. 74. Alessandro Gandini, ‘Labour Process Theory and the Gig Economy’, Human Relations (2018), doi: 10.1177/0018726718790002. 75. Paulo Gerbaudo, The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2018). 76. John Edward Campbell, Getting It on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity (London: Routledge, 2004); Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). 77. Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self: A  Sociology of Self-Tracking (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 78. Aristea Fotopoulou and Kate O’Riordan, ‘Training to Self-Care: Fitness Tracking, Biopedagogy and the Healthy Consumer’, Health Sociology Review, 26:1 (2016): 54–68.



Introduction: Male Bodies in Digital Culture 31

79. Theresa Senft and Nancy Baym, ‘Selfies Introduction – What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon’, International Journal of Communication, 9 (2015): 1588–1606. 80. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic TM: Politics and Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Hearn, ‘Verified’. 81. Ana Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill, ‘Beauty Surveillance: The Digital SelfMonitoring Cultures of Neoliberalism’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21:1 (2018): 59–77; Alison Winch, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 82. Amy Shields Dobson, ‘Performative Shamelessness on Young Women’s Social Network Sites: Shielding the Self and Resisting Gender Melancholia’, Feminism & Psychology 24:1 (2014): 97–114. 83. For example: Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller, Digital Feminist Activism Girls and Women Fight Back against Rape Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 84. Rebecca Farber, ‘ “Transing” Fitness and Remapping Transgender Male Masculinity in Online Message Boards’, Journal of Gender Studies, 26:3 (2017): 254–268. 85. Sharif Mowlabocus, Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2016). 86. Carl Bonner-Thompson, ‘ “The Meat Market”: Production and Regulation of Masculinities on the Grindr Grid in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK’, Gender, Place & Culture (2017): 1611–1625. 87. Feona Attwood, ed., Porn.Com: Making Sense of Online Pornography (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Susanna Paasonen, Carnal Resonance Affect and Online Pornography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). 88. Stephen Maddison, ‘Beyond the Entrepreneurial Voyeur?: Sex, Porn and Cultural Politics’. New Formations, 80 (2013): 102–118. 89. Laura Harvey, Jessica Ringrose and Rosalind Gill, ‘Swagger, Ratings and Masculinity: Theorising the Circulation of Social and Cultural Value in Teenage Boys’ Digital Peer Networks’, Sociological Research Online, 18:4 (2013): 1–11.

Chapter 2

The Celebrity Male Nude Leak: Value Creation, Precarity and the Naked Male Body

On 8 February 2009, R&B singer Chris Brown turned himself into the Los Angeles Police Department after physically attacking girlfriend Rihanna so severely that she required hospitalisation. On 22 June 2009 he pleaded guilty to charges of felony assault and making criminal threats. Brown’s career subsequently went into free fall – with radio stations refusing to play his music, award shows cancelling his appearances and Brown being prohibited entry into the UK and thus not being able to complete the UK leg of a European tour. Despite the crisis management PR deployed by Brown’s management team, which included an interview with Larry King and an apologetic YouTube video, Brown’s career as a pop star seemed to have ended. That was until 4 March 2011 when a full-frontal naked selfie of Brown was ‘leaked’ via hip-hop website WorldStarHipHop.com accompanied by the text: ‘One Of Chris Brown’s Ex Chicks [sic] drops off & leaks Breezys [Brown’s] [sic] bathroom sexting pix! Its [sic] not clear if the girl is planning to drop anymore. Browns new album F.A.M.E is due to be released on March 22nd [sic]’.1 This leaked image generated a wealth of online commentary both from celebrity gossip journalists and social media users. The gossip journalists questioned whether his ex-girlfriend could have leaked the pictures because Brown’s hair had been dyed blonde after the couple had reportedly ended their relationship. Some pointed out how close the leak was to the album release date. On 5 March 2011, mediatakeout.com wrote: ‘Chris Brown is doing EVERYTHING to try and revive his career’ (original emphasis). His single Look at Me Now was released six days after the image leaked. It included the lyrics – ‘Oops, I said “on my dick”/I ain’t really mean to say “on my dick”/But since we’re talking about my dick/ All of you haters say hi to it (I’m done)’. The album F.A.M.E. was released a week later, reaching no. 1 on both the Billboard 100 and R&B charts, 33

34

Chapter 2

eventually becoming a twice-platinum-selling record. Shortly after Chris Brown returned to his pre-2009 levels of success. Although it is impossible to say with absolute certainty, everything around the leaked image – its timing and the reference in the song lyrics – suggests that it was strategically leaked in a bid to rehabilitate Chris Brown’s music career. Even if the leak was not deliberate, it clearly contributed to the rebranding of Chris Brown from persona non grata in the music industry back into the successful R&B star that he had been until February 2009. Since then the celebrity male nude leak has become a notable feature of celebrity culture. Shortly after the Brown leak, nude images of British pop star Dappy appeared on the Internet and were reported on by the British tabloids, a week before he released a single that referenced Chris Brown in its lyrics. Subsequently Dappy admitted that, inspired by Chris Brown, he orchestrated the leak in a bid to promote his single.2 Between 2011 and 2016 celebrity male nude leaks were a mainstay for popular gay websites cocktailsandcocktalk.com and omg.blog. These include a range of celebrities from global megastars such as Justin Bieber and Orlando Bloom, to a host of reality TV participants for whom it seems the nude leak has almost become an essential step in attempting to launch their celebrity career. These leaks all follow more or less the same pattern. The men involved in them mostly, though not always, possess or hope to create celebrity brands that are organised around cis-gendered, heterosexual masculinity. They are also conventionally attractive by dominant media standards – young and worked-out – either established or aspiring ‘sex symbols’. The images are usually either a selfie taken in a bedroom or a bathroom, or they are a screengrab from a cybersex encounter that took place on a chat platform like Skype or Snapchat. Less frequently, paparazzi images also contribute to this sort of media event. For the non-paparazzi images, they are distributed, or leaked, in two ways. Either are they posted somewhere on the Internet, often Twitter or Tumblr, and then reported on by the celebrity press or the rights to the picture are sold to the press by a third party, usually believed to be a representative of the celebrity. Not all celebrity male nude leaks are as obviously strategic as Chris Brown’s and Dappy’s. There are some in which all the evidence suggests quite the opposite – that they were leaked against the celebrity’s intentions and interests. While this chapter covers both types of leak, it is not interested in establishing whether the leaks were intentional or not. What it is interested in are the ways these digitally mediated, celebrity male nude leaks make the nude male body visible within popular culture, and for the value that they create as a result. Historically, the fully naked male body has been all but invisible in modern Western culture (particularly in comparison to the naked female body) and has, therefore, been comparatively resistant to modern



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 35

capitalism’s commodifying drives. In the celebrity male nude leak we are seeing the visibility of the nude male body increase in ways that create value for a whole range of different parties within the entertainment industries – for the companies whose product the leak coincides with, for the celebrities themselves and for the media outlets that report on them. What is happening in contemporary culture that the naked male body, particularly the celebrity naked male body, has become both visible and valuable in ways that were unimaginable in even just the decade before the Chris Brown leak? THE GENDERED LOGICS OF CELEBRITY NUDITY In order to answer this question properly it will first be necessary to outline the gendered logics of celebrity nudity prior to the emergence of the leaks during the 2008–2016 conjuncture. To fully understand the visual dimensions of these logics it is worth returning to Richard Dyer’s groundbreaking work on classic Hollywood stardom. Dyer argued that one of the central dynamics in the successful construction of a classic Hollywood star was the slow bleed of apparently private information about the actor into the public realm via entertainment para-texts such as newspaper gossip columns and entertainment magazines.3 Adam Knee argues that this is precisely how celebrity nudity works in his analysis of celebrity skin magazines – a low-status type of para-text that published allegedly ‘unofficial’ images of nude celebrities. Knee writes, ‘In this context, the body takes its place as the ultimately visually verifiable realm of the private’ (original emphasis).4 Little else within contemporary culture is understood to be as private or intimate as a person’s naked body and given that the dialectic between public spectacle and intimate self is so constitutive of stardom, this is what gives the publication of celebrity nudes their cultural power. This has become even more pronounced in contemporary celebrity culture precisely because there has been a decisive shift towards what has historically been understood as the extra-textual, and, therefore, the intimate, in constituting the celebrity ‘text’.5 In a context in which representing the intimate matters so much more to the construction of celebrity, the visualisation of the naked body subsequently takes on an increased salience. As Holmes and Redmond argue in their distinction between contemporary celebrity and more traditional forms of stardom, ‘It is the naked, stripped or unzipped body of the star or celebrity that arguably suggests a definite shift in the way famous people are represented’.6 Careers can now be launched as a result of the widespread circulation of images of celebrity nudes and sex tapes (e.g. Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton), and celebrity gossip magazines or websites can increase their circulation/impressions by publishing images that draw

36

Chapter 2

attention to wayward body parts: the ‘up-skirt shot’ – a photo taken by positioning an upward facing camera, mostly non-consensually, between the legs of a woman wearing a skirt – being one example that received media attention in the summer of 2018. How the visibility of the celebrity naked body plays out with regard to value creation has also been commented on within celebrity studies literature. There are different positions on what precisely celebrity more generally creates value from. For Redmond7 and Littler8 celebrity creates value from the intimacy an audience feels with a celebrity text. Following a different line of argument Rojek claims that it is desire, and not intimacy, that creates value in celebrity culture, or the mobilisation of abstract desire in a way that enables a deep identification with celebrities.9 Turner articulates how desire generates value creation explicitly in the context of the celebrity nude: ‘The availability of the celebrity as a commodity and as an object of desire must not be overlooked as a fundamental component of their attraction. The nude celebrity magazines and sites exploit this to the hilt, offering the ultimate sign of availability – the unlicensed display of their naked bodies’.10 Whether it is desire or intimacy that creates value in the context of celebrity nudity, and I think both ideas have purchase, it is the visualisation of the celebrity female nude that is far more valuable than the celebrity male nude, pointing to ‘the high commercial valuation and paradoxically low cultural status of the female body in Hollywood’11 and the entertainment industries more widely. The majority of celebrity nudes have been ‘overwhelmingly’12 women, and subsequently almost all the celebrity studies literature on the phenomenon has explored female examples exclusively.13 The relative absence of visualisations of the nude male body in contemporary popular culture has been theorised within a small body of cultural studies literature from the 1990s and 2000s. This literature accounts for this absence from a feminist-inflected Lacanian perspective that distinguishes the visible penis (the most significant aspect of male nudity) from Lacan’s phallus as the transcendental, and, therefore, unrepresentable, signifier that organises the symbolic order. This is achieved in visual culture by ‘mechanisms of effacement by which the specificity of the physical penis is simultaneously privileged and obscured through the idealization of the phallus’.14 What this means is that in order to maintain a social order organised around the phallus as an ultimate symbol of social power, the considerably less awesome real-world penis must remain invisible, lest the phallic order be undermined. One of the examples Toby Miller gives as evidence for this is the clause that Michael Douglas had written into his contract for Basic Instinct (1992) that guaranteed coverage of his genitals in a film whose cultural significance pivoted on the fact that female co-star Sharon Stone exposed hers.15



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 37

During this historical period the penis was exposed in popular culture but in a highly regulated way so as, from this Lacanian perspective, not to disturb these patriarchal power structures. Kibby and Costello call this the ‘nervous uncovering’16 of the penis, and it has two modalities – comic and phallic. Peter Lehman and Elizabeth Stephens comment on the comic modality through particular types of verbal representation of penises that keep real penises out of sight. Stephens’s examples are the widely mediated descriptions of Bill Clinton and Michael Jackson’s penises in their high-profile harassment and child abuse cases, both of which turned them into figures of ridicule as opposed to objects of desire. Peter Lehman notes how jokes about small penises are routinely made in Hollywood cinema, so as to contain the ability of the real-world penis to undermine the phallocentric social order.17 The best illustration of the phallic mode of penile uncovering is in the only media genre that the penis is fully visible in any sustained manner – pornography. Pornography deploys a whole host of representational strategies from, for example, casting, framing, editing, cropping to the use of Viagra, to make the real-world penis resemble our ideas of the phallus in as hyperbolic a fashion as possible.18 NEOLIBERALISM, REALITY TELEVISION AND THE SEXUALISED BODY The celebrity male nude leak, I am arguing here, represents a shift in the hegemonic gendered logics of celebrity nudity of the pre-2008 period. The sheer amount of images of nude male celebrities since the Chris Brown leak demonstrates that we have moved beyond the ‘nervous uncovering’ of male genitalia during the 1990s and the near total absence before then. What has happened in celebrity culture that could explain this shift? Given that the majority (though importantly, not all) of the nude leaks are from reality TV participants, it will be worth focusing on this part of contemporary celebrity culture to answer this question. These include celebrities like Gaz Beadle from Geordie Shore (2011–), Kirk Norcross from The Only Way Is Essex (2010–), Brandon Myers and Richard Cull from Bromans (2017), Alex Bowen, Daniel Lukakis, Joshua Ritchie and Max Moley from Love Island (2015–) and Spencer Matthews and Jamie Laing from Made in Chelsea (2011–). Given the approach taken in this book, this section will look at reality television by outlining the material conditions in which these participants find themselves. The material conditions of the reality TV sector have been well accounted for in the media studies literature on this topic. Alison Hearn makes the case that reality television is best not understood as a television genre but as a

38

Chapter 2

set of material conditions: ‘In the simplest sense, reality television names a series of cost-cutting measures in mainstream television production enacted by management as a response to the economic pressures faced by the television industry transnationally in the late 1980s and 1990s’.19 These pressures can be characterised as the neoliberalisation of the US television industry at the end of the 1980s, specifically the increased competition that came about through the industry’s deregulation and the subsequent growth in the number of television channels. This deregulation challenged the established business models of network era TV, and one way the industry responded was through driving down labour costs. The well-unionised workforce went on strike, and so the networks and new cable channels had to develop cheap TV shows that used non-unionised labour. With its use of story-editors and not writers, ‘real people’ and not actors, and lower production budgets that produced an amateurish aesthetic that is widely perceived to confer authenticity onto the content – reality TV was born.20 Since its emergence in the late 1980s the genre has matured to include global mega-franchises like Got Talent and Big Brother. These more expensive productions do not include substantially larger labour costs (e.g. talent shows still rely on the free labour of their contestants) and were funded by being thoroughly saturated in branding opportunities, including branded merchandise, aggressive product placement, increased sponsorship and donorship and the development of sophisticated multi-platform strategies.21 It is at the intersection of these precarious labour conditions and aggressively branded environments of this archetypal neoliberal genre that we begin to see the conditions of possibility for the celebrity male nude leak begin to take shape. In a series of articles Alison Hearn outlines how in these conditions reality TV participants have to ‘self-brand’ – adopt the aggressive multi-platform branding approaches of the shows they appear in and turn themselves into brands because they are employed on so little pay and in such precarious working conditions. In an article on British reality TV show Geordie Shore, Helen Wood, extends this analysis beyond the industrial conditions into the wider economic climate of post-2008 Newcastle, and argues that with so little capital (in all its Bourdieusian senses) at their disposal the working class participants of the show have to use their bodies in hyperbolic sexualised performances to create value – what she calls the ‘new labour relations of media visibility’. For Wood these relations are highly classed. It is precisely because they are working class in an economically depressed part of the UK that the contestants engaged with these new labour relations.22 Wood’s analysis is thoroughly persuasive and comes from a very similar perspective to that taken in this book. However, there are differences between the ‘new labour relations of media visibility’ as they play out on Geordie Shore compared to how they play out in the celebrity nude leak. The first



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 39

is the degree of sexual explicitness. According to Wood, Geordie Shore engages in a nervous uncovering of gendered bodies ‘rarely showing genitalia’ and largely relying on hyperbolic verbal descriptions of sexual encounters. This is plainly not the case in the celebrity male nude leak. The gendered nature of these engagements is also different. In Geordie Shore, while both the female and male contestants engage with these new labour relations of media visibility, it is the sexual ‘flaunting’23 of the women that is privileged in the show – a gender dynamic quite different from the leaks. There is also a different class dynamic: though the majority of these leaks come from reality TV participants, many of whom read as working class, others do not and this needs accounting for. All of these differences are significant and so require a different analysis. The analysis I make of the rise of the celebrity male nude leak is that their emergence points to shifts in the relation between gender, class, labour and capital that have occurred during the 2008–2016 conjuncture, specifically the ways they have become manifest in the entertainment industries. Building on the arguments set out in relation to gendered celebrity nudity and the working conditions of reality TV, I argue that the fact that sexualised images of the celebrity male nude body can be circulated to create value in similar ways to those we historically associate with the celebrity female body is evidence of how labour and value creation have been ‘feminised’ during neoliberalism’s continued struggle for hegemony. The term ‘feminised’ here is used in the class inflected way feminist labour scholars uses this term to mean weakened under post-Fordist regimes of capital accumulation, and is intensifying under post-2008 digital capitalism. This is evidenced by the various ways digital media is understood to confer intimacy on the celebrity body; the feminised way the male body is represented in the leaks, and through the gendered types of value that this intimacy creates in the celebrity economy. Historically it is the celebrity female body that has been subject to these processes. The fact that they are now being applied to the celebrity male body since at least 2011, I argue in this chapter, is evidence of the gendered and classed ways that neoliberalism in its post-2008, Anglo-American iteration, is weakening even relatively privileged social groups in a historically novel fashion. I make this argument by combining visual analysis of some of the leaked images as well as drawing on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with entertainment industry professionals. The analysis of the images allows us to see how the male body is being gendered. The use of the interviews provides evidence for not only how these leaks create value across the entertainment industries but also the classed and gendered ways that this mode of value creation is rationalised within them. For these leaks to function properly they have to appear to have occurred without the celebrity’s prior knowledge, so they are not something these professionals (let alone the celebrities)

40

Chapter 2

are always willing to speak about. Therefore, I have relied on convenience sampling based on personal contacts I developed within the industry while working as a magazine editor for over a decade. I have interviewed the editor of a gay celebrity and gossip website, a journalist who also media trains celebrities, a PR who specialises in social media, a men’s magazine and celebrity journalist and a PR for a television company who used to work as a TV journalist. DIGITAL MEDIA AND INTIMACY One essential component in the emergence of these leaks and their creating value out of the visibly nude celebrity male body is the affordance of the digital technologies through which they are shared as well as the cultures these affordances have helped produce. Specifically, how the more agile affordances of digital media have affected cultures of publishing as well as the way digital media can be understood to confer greater intimacy on the objects, persons, events and ideas that they mediate. Digital media’s greater agility compared to print is significant in this context in a number of ways. The first is how material can be unpublished from websites and social media platforms. This is clearly not the case in print media. According to the TV journalist I interviewed this makes editors hesitant to publish the leaked images in their newspapers: ‘Social media and websites . . . can whack [a picture] up and take it down 10 minutes later. Once it’s published in a paper, it’s published, so they are quite strict about that . . . they can get hammered for it’. Though there are no laws prohibiting the publication of images of penises in print media, the Independent Press Standard Organisation’s editors’ code of practice states ‘editors will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual’s private life without consent’.24 The permanence of print publishing means editors are less likely to take risks publishing material that might be construed to breach privacy compared to websites and other digital platforms. This sometimes means that a newspaper’s website will publish pictures that its print edition would not. For example the Daily Mirror published nude images of Orlando Bloom on its website but not in its newspaper.25 Print media also has to either own the rights of an image or pay its owner for usage before it can publish the image. Although in some of the leaks ownership of the rights of the images is negotiated (see the following discussion) mostly it is not, either because they have genuinely been leaked or because if celebrities or their representative enter into negotiations they risk exposing a strategic leak’s inauthenticity. Images can be posted anonymously on Twitter



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 41

and Tumblr and, therefore, bypass the questions of image ownership – no one can be identified to be sued. There is also the question of how much space there is to print photographs on the page of a newspaper compared to a webpage, where there are far fewer limitations. For example in ‘#TheFappening’, one of the most high-profile cases of a female celebrity nude leak, hyperlinks to hundreds of photographs were uploaded onto a website.26 Newspapers, on the other hand, tend to limit themselves to printing one photograph to accompany a news story. This has led to a culture of Internet-based celebrity journalism that favours photography over text – a culture that is far more conducive to the image-based leaks. The final way, and perhaps most significant for the discussion here, that digital media and intimacy come together in the celebrity male nude leak is through the way digital media is perceived to confer greater intimacy on the things they mediate. There are different perspectives on this in relation to the mediation of celebrity. Some have argued that digital media has made unattainable stars more attainable27 and celebrity behaviours more accessible to different publics through the expansion of interaction and participation that the affordances of social media allow between celebrity and fans.28 The basic idea here is that the celebrity carries a smartphone around with them and is spontaneously posting content fashioned out of their everyday life, engaging with fans on social media platforms in an un-premeditated way. Sarah Thomas persuasively argues that this is not always the case and that digital mediations of celebrity can be just as ‘inauthentically’ mediated as older forms of stardom.29 The fact there are social media managers, like the one interviewed for this chapter, strongly attests to the unspontaneous mediation of celebrity via social media. This digitally conferred rhetoric of apparently increased intimacy, authentic or not, is clearly at play in the celebrity male nude leak. Historically celebrity nude images were taken by paparazzi using long-lens cameras and thus infiltrated a private space at a distance. These images are voyeuristic as opposed to intimate. The bulk of the recent nude leaks are digital and are narrativised as having been taken from a sexting conversation or sex encounter with an intimate partner. This is legitimated through the appearance of the immediately recognisable technologies of everyday ‘sexting’ within the intimate settings of the leaked images. This can be the celebrity holding a smartphone to take a picture of themselves in a bedroom or bathroom mirror, or through the Skype and Snapchat screen layouts overlaid on the nude images. With the screenshots of the Skype chats you also see an image of the sexual partner in the corner of the screen. Often a series of Snapchat screenshots will be leaked so that the text that celebrity sent to his sexual partner – usually intimate sex talk – is also visible.

42

Chapter 2

INTIMATELY VISUALISING THE CELEBRITY MALE BODY The intimacy conferred on the leaked images by the visible presence of digital media within them is intensified if we look at the ways the male bodies are represented in the leaked images. What is distinct about the visual style of the images is their intimacy and the feminising effect of this intimacy on the very careful negotiation between masculinity and femininity that all sexualised mediated representations of male bodies have to undergo in order for them to remain desirably masculine in mainstream, hetero-patriarchal culture. At first glance there is little that is feminine about the images. The majority (though by no means all) of the celebrities involved in these leaks have brands that are organised around conventional heterosexual masculinity. Almost all of them possess fashionably lean-muscular bodies. Many of them are clearly straining in ways that make these muscles more visible – something that both Richard Dyer30 and Yvonne Tasker31 have argued distinguish the male from the female pin-up – the possession and display of muscles differentiates the active masculine body from its passive feminine counterpart (regardless of its biological sex). The representations of the penises very much draw on the conventions of pornography so that they resemble our ideas of the phallus rather than comically drawing attention to how different they are to it. Always erect or almost erect, these penises are mostly front and centre in the image, and thus their primary focus – their display is the purpose of these images. Reinforcing its phallic resemblance, sometimes the leaked images explicitly depict a heterosexual sexual encounter – usually the male celebrity penetrating a female partner. A closer look, however, reveals an important dynamic that differentiates these leaks from their straightforwardly phallic predecessors. These are intimate images and beyond the presence of digital media in the images, their intimacy comes through in a number of ways. They are intimate, in the most basic sense because they reveal a part of the body widely considered private and intimate, sometimes in an intimate act with a sexual partner. The style of image is also intimate. The images are poor quality: grainy and out of focus, in ways that make them look amateurish and not designed for public consumption. Finally, the images are almost always set in an intimate space – most often a bathroom or a bedroom. In the history of modern Western visual culture, the depiction of a nude body in an intimate or domestic space has served to feminise that body. Most commonly these are images of women (nude women reclining in boudoirs is a staple of Western art history) although there is also a more subcultural tradition of homoerotic imagery of male bodies depicted like this, for example David Hockney’s paintings of nude men in both bedrooms and bathrooms.



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 43

The image at the centre of the Chris Brown leak is an exemplary case of the gendered negotiations that occur in the visualisation of the male body in the celebrity male nude leak. Brown’s phallic masculinity is maintained in different ways. In the image a naked Brown stands squarely in front of a bathroom mirror, using a smartphone to take what is essentially a self-portrait. His body is lean, with its feint muscular definition highlighted by a tattoo that covers both pectoral muscles and his right arm. In the media commentary around the image there were different takes on the size of Brown’s penis, but I think it is fair to say that it looks larger than average. Its phallicism is reinforced by the way Brown’s gaze through the smartphone into the mirror and onto his penis draws your attention to it, making it the focus of the image. These phallic elements reinforce the masculinity of Brown’s celebrity brand. Entering into negotiation with this masculinity are the feminised elements of intimacy that I am arguing are typical of this photographic genre. In the image, Brown stands in an intimate space, a bathroom: the walls and floor are tiled and there are a towel rack and discarded towels to the left of the image. Intimacy is conferred on the image through a combination of the iPhone – a technology of everyday sexting – and the way worldhiphop.com narrativised the image as having been leaked by Brown’s girlfriend. The image is meant to have captured an intimate encounter. The ‘leaked’ as opposed to deliberately distributed nature of the image is authenticated (whether we believe it or not) through its poor quality. The right third of the image is just white light and the remainder is not fully saturated with colour. In this regard, the quality of the image falls short of the glossy styles that mark ‘official’ celebrity photography, making it look like the amateur photography partners ‘sext’ to each other. The image is also watermarked with the worldhiphop.com logo, suggesting they now have the rights to the image – gesturing to the value the image created for whoever sold its rights (allegedly the girlfriend) and that it will create for the website. How careful this negotiation between the masculine and the feminine, the public and the intimate, is perhaps best illustrated by the leaked images that male celebrities and their management team attempt to remove from the Internet because, we could plausibly speculate, this gendered negotiation was unsuccessful. A case in point is X Factor contestant Sam Callahan’s nude leak in 2016. Callahan fits much of the earlier description of a desirable sex symbol, according to the sexualised gender norms of the current mediascape (boyish good looks and lean-muscular body) and has continued to be marketed as such since he was launched as a celebrity on the UK version of the X Factor in 2013. His leak, however, did not focus on his penis, highlighting his anus instead. In a series of screenshots from what appeared to be a cybersex encounter that took place over Skype, Callahan arches his back and inserts his finger into his exposed anus. The editor of the gay website that I interviewed

44

Chapter 2

explained that someone from Callahan’s management team asked him to remove the images from the website, which he did. Presumably other websites were contacted too because these images can now only be found on an anonymous Tumblr blog. We can only speculate precisely why they made the request. However, given that another story on my interviewee’s website contains a link to a picture of an erect penis that the accompanying text alleges is Callahan’s, it is quite plausible that the management team felt that the feminisation of having a body anally penetrated was more than Callahan’s fledgling brand could bear, if he wanted to remain a viable sex symbol.32 This highly gendered visualisation of his naked body was not going to create the necessary value for Callahan, his team or the various people financially invested in his celebrity. VALUE CREATION AND THE CELEBRITY MALE NUDE LEAK So while the celebrity male nude leak in no way represents a radical departure from the ways visual representations of the desirable male body can create value in the entertainment industries, their making visible of the celebrity penis does represent a significant shift. This section explores this in more depth through a closer analysis of the interviews with entertainment professionals and by comparing male nude leaks with their female equivalents. All the entertainment professionals interviewed attested to the fact that these leaks create value for the media that report on them. The social media PR said: everyone is looking to drive traffic to their own socials. The leverage of having the first picture . . . you can really capitalize on that. . . . Realistically you want the dirt. Who did Kim Kardashian sleep with? That’s the shit that sells.

Where do the nudes fit into that? I would say it’s the top ten per cent.

The website editor I interviewed confirmed this, explaining that on his gay magazine-style website the leaks were one of the most popular categories of content he produced, generating a substantial amount of views, likes and shares and, therefore, creating some of the highest income via the affiliate advertising service he used. It is not only gossip websites and their associated social media that are able to capitalise on these leaks but traditional media too as well as the celebrities themselves. This is achieved through selling the rights of the image(s)



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 45

to a major media outlet. This is almost always done via a third party – the sexual partner, or the paparazzo – though it is widely believed within the industry that the celebrities are somehow involved in the background of these negotiations. The media trainer I interviewed said: ‘I know a lot of celebrities do work with paparazzi don’t they? . . . They get a cut. So they’ll say to the paparazzo if you take a picture on the beach of me cavorting with my girlfriend, we’ll split the proceeds. But I think it’s all under the radar so the celebrity can go “oh, I didn’t know” ’. Keeping the celebrity publicly invisible in these negotiations maintains the apparent authenticity that is so constitutive of mediated celebrity and, therefore, the value that the images are able to create through their circulation. One last way that value is extracted from these images is more immaterially – primarily the enhancement and maintenance of a celebrity’s brand within what Alice Marwick has called the ‘attention economy’. The website editor said, ‘It’s definitely a way to get attention if you are in front of the tabloids butt naked – especially if you are a man’. The television journalist/PR confirmed this after I asked him if he thought the Justin Bieber and Orlando Bloom nude leaks had damaged their brands. He replied, ‘I don’t think it has. The pictures are still out there and these people are still popular. It hasn’t defined them. It’s just added to them really and maybe enhance it because they were seen as hunky stud-like guys’. Gender and Labour The fact that the celebrity nude male body has become a vector through which value can be created at all, I have already argued, is historically significant. But the details of the relationship between gender and value and the labour undertaken to create it in this specific context emerged in a far more granular way in the interviews. There was an awareness on the part of all the interviewees that creating different types of value from nude images was gendered – with all of them citing Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton as, in the words of the media trainer I spoke to, ‘forging the path here’ with men following suit. The media trainer then went on to reflect on how this played out in his experience of training the contestants on a reality TV show in which on-screen sex and nudity were key components: ‘The one thing that struck me . . . is that the women had a game plan and the men were in for it a laugh. The women all felt it was some sort of career move. . . . The boys seemed far more naïve about it’. Here we see sexualised performances in this type of reality TV described as a form of labour that women both have pioneered and are more adept at undertaking, so it becomes possible to see it as feminine form of labour. However, when we look across the interviews it is clear that the implications of male and female celebrities undertaking this feminine form of labour

46

Chapter 2

are quite different. Firstly, female bodies come under far greater scrutiny both on the TV shows and when images or sex tapes are leaked. The social media PR said, ‘People are far more critical of female bodies than they are of male bodies and that . . . she’s got cellulite, she’s got this. . . . I saw a picture of one of the Friend’s cast members the other day and he looked like shit but no-ones like “look at his man boobs” ’. The TV journalist/PR confirmed this explaining there were two ways that female celebrities were perceived after a nude leak: ‘Women are always understood to be much more a victim or if they had something to do with it, slutty or slaggy. One or the other. Whereas guys its more “phwoar look at that girls” kind of thing’. This leads to women having to perform far more celebrity labour in order to keep their feminine propriety intact so that they can continue creating value in the long term. One need only compare the carefully strategised publicity assault Kim Kardashian deployed after her leaked sex tape33 compared to the non-chalant way Chris Brown handled his leak, in a radio interview that was filmed and then posted to YouTube.34 Paradoxically the female celebrities are able to create more value through mediating sexualised representations of their body despite the greater opprobrium they face when they do, fitting entirely within the logics of mediated celebrity nudity outlined earlier – the low cultural status but higher commercial valuation of the female body within contemporary culture. However, with the exception of a few high-profile leaks and sex tapes that were managed with particular business nous, the leaks, whether male or female, create relatively little value for the celebrities particularly in comparison to the value they create for the media outlets that circulate them. As the editor of the gay website said: ‘They think . . . the more naked they get the more famous they are going to be. . . . The sites get bored. Once you’ve seen that dick pic, the site just stops reporting on them’. In keeping with the logics of capitalism, though a continuous flow of different nude leaks and sex tapes can create value for the gossip press (the owners of the means of production), their value is limited (as so many feminine forms of value are) for the celebrity whose labour this value is extracted from. Class and Value When discussing the nude leaks my interviewees almost always drew on reality TV to provide examples, for example celebrities like Gaz Beadle from Geordie Shore and Kirk Norcross from The Only Way Is Essex. This makes sense, because even though a variety of male celebrities have been involved in these leaks, the majority do come from this sector of the industry. There are, however, also ideological connotations to this television genre – associated, as it is, with working class female audiences35 and often depicting particular versions of working class life and, therefore, relying on working class labour.36 All of this has implications for the sorts of value that celebrities are



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 47

able to create by labouring within it. How reality TV participants fit into and achieve mobility within the entertainment industry’s classed hierarchy was outlined by the magazine journalist I interviewed, by explaining whether men’s magazines with differently classed audiences would cover them or not: Where do reality TV stars fit into the men’s magazines sector? I suspect Esquire would not touch reality TV. I could see GQ covering Love Island . . . but it would be about it as a phenomenon as opposed to each of the celebrities. Men’s Health is different because they have done the boys from Made in Chelsea. The boys from reality TV are their demographic. They went with Made In Chelsea because it felt classier, maybe? I feel they could have down TOWIE people too. . . . I supposed they got Made in Chelsea in because these are ‘real people’. It’s an endorsement of the show to an extent but it’s taking them out of Made In Chelsea and putting them into Men’s Health which is taking the naffness out of it.

How much is it to do with taste and class? Yeah. I couldn’t see Men’s Health doing the boys from Geordie Shore. There’ll be an element of aspiration to it and the boys from Made In Chelsea are quite moneyed and fairly glamorous and wear expensive clothes. I can’t see how you put the boys from Geordie Shore in. Their clothes are a bit cheaper and their nights out are lairier. It’s much more working class. It’s harder to elevate it to the level they want to.

Ever since the reinvention of men’s magazines in the 1980s, the sector’s business model has operated through bringing audiences with large disposable incomes to high-end advertisers through filling their pages with aspirational content.37 The previous quote outlines how editors apply this highly classed logic to the people they chose to include in the pages of their magazines. The most aspirational titles – Esquire and GQ – either ‘would not touch reality TV’ or would only cover it is a ‘phenomenon’ as opposed to interview its participants, who they presume would not fit in with the aspirations of their readers. Men’s Health, which carries similar luxury advertising but deliberately cultivates a wider appeal, would cover the upper-class participants of Made in Chelsea, but not the ‘cheap’ and ‘lairier’ working class participants of Geordie Shore. According to this journalist the sorts of value that classed representations of masculinity can create within the entertainment industries are inextricably tied to sex and intimacy not only within the leaks but also the other sorts of labour these celebrities are able to carry out. The nude leaks always seem like an attempt to keep you visible beyond your TV show. You have to be careful about where they are going to take you. Mostly

48

Chapter 2

it leads to nightclub appearances, fairly low-rent advertising deals and stuff on Instagram. A nude leak keeps you on that level where everything is sexually charged and it’s just about objectifying you. That’s problematic in terms of getting to the next level. So then to put your clothes back on and become a presenter on ITV, which would seem to be the next step for a reality TV star, becomes much tougher to achieve.

If you are a man who has only appeared on reality television, and you choose to sexualise your body through something like a nude leak, the value you will be able to create in the long term through the sorts of celebrity labour it will enable you to perform will be limited. Given that the nude leaks create so little value for reality television participants beyond short-term presence within the attention economy and that these leaks have little chance of giving them a long-term career and anything like the means for enduring value creation, what would motivate them to do it? According to the TV journalist/PR I interviewed: Reality TV is probably the lowest end of the celebrity tree and they don’t really make much money. TOWIE are probably paid a day rate of about £75 – that low. It’s just expenses. They have tried to go on strike. They make their money from personal appearances and magazines deals but the production company takes a cut of those profits. They’re famous but they are not rich. When it comes to money they are open to all sorts of avenues.

So it’s feasible to imagine that they know these leaks get them into the press and they can make money out of it. Yes. . . . The young guys who a lot of these pictures involve . . . they’re hunky, they’re good looking, they have no problem getting naked and a lot of the time their doing this on the TV shows, so they wouldn’t be upset about these images being there because that’s what they’ve built their brands around. Why not make a bit of money out of it as well?

This quote returns us to the working conditions of reality television outlined at the beginning of the chapter. Even in a structured reality television show like The Only Way Is Essex, which relies on more ‘durable’ talent than earlier ‘generations’ of reality TV and, therefore, gives the participants more value and negotiating power in the labour market,38 the pay just covers expenses. It is in the material conditions of this most neoliberal of TV genres that these participants become ‘hyper-exploited’39 and have little choice but to flaunt their hyperbolically sexualised bodies in a bid to self-brand even if, for reality TV stars at least, the leaks are unlikely to build a long-term career that creates very much in the way of enduring value. If on the TV shows this flaunting comes largely from the female participants, in the digitally mediated leaks,



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 49

men are using digital technologies and the cultures that have developed in relation to them to flaunt their sexualised naked bodies off (the television) screen. Having argued all of this, how is it possible to make sense of celebrity male nude leaks outside the reality TV sector? Celebrities such as Orlando Bloom and Justin Bieber work in different parts of the industry, with considerably better, in fact extraordinary, pay. For instance, Orlando Bloom is reportedly paid over $2 million per film, and over $10 million for his roles in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.40 Though their pay is far better, these celebrities are employed in similarly precarious working conditions. Since the decline of the studio system, Hollywood actors have long been deprived of the possibility of job-for-life-style long-term contracts. Most high-level stars are archetypal freelancers, operating within a highly competitive job market, in which a person’s value can plummet overnight, a situation from which the person might never recover. These working conditions have long preceded the conjuncture in which the celebrity male nude leak has emerged so do not, in and of themselves, explain this emergence. However, Hollywood and older, more lucrative sectors of the entertainment industries are not siloed from each other. What happens in one sector will have implications for another, particularly in an age where celebrities are no longer defined by a single talent but by their ability to operate as brands that can generate value across multiple sectors. The place of reality television is important here because it has set the agenda in so many ways for working practices across the entertainment industry. Most significantly for this discussion, it reformulated, from the ‘bottom up’, the new, mostly digital, attention economy, that all celebrities, including those at the ‘top’, have to operate within in order to keep ‘eyes’ on their brands. Kim Kardashian has arguably been the most successful celebrity of the 2008–2016 conjuncture, precisely because her and her management team have so successfully navigated this new celebrity terrain shaped by reality TV, sexualised media content and the self-branding affordances of social media. ‘Low-class’ celebrities, like Kardashian, regardless of their actual class background have, to a large extent, redefined what constitutes celebrity labour, with celebrities like reality TV participants and Orlando Bloom and Justin Bieber having to follow suit. This is articulated by the magazine editor I interviewed: With Orlando Bloom I had forgotten about him as an actor. If you look on IMDB it hasn’t been great for a while. I wasn’t au fait with the day-to-day machinations of Katy Perry’s romantic life so the take away for me was ‘Oh Orlando Bloom is doing well for himself, he’s going out with Katy Perry’. I felt like that it lifted him into an area I didn’t see him in. And of course, again he’s not ugly. He’s well endowed. With Justin you can’t really see that there’s a

50

Chapter 2

strategy or that he needs more publicity. I think with Justin Bieber, he’s one of the biggest pop stars in the world, and really revered but he just really wants attention doesn’t he? He’s a good looking young man who looks good naked and he’ll see other people doing that in his social networks and stuff. Based on past behaviour it feels like it’s something he’d want to get involved in.

This reconfiguration of the classed nature of celebrity labour – driven from the bottom of the hierarchy but affecting all of it – parallels the reconfiguration of class after the 2008 neoliberal crisis. As I argued in chapter 1 while women, people of colour, the working classes, young people, disabled people and immigrants have been the social groups most affected by this crisis, what is arguably unique about it are the ways it has affected groups that have historically been more immune to the vagaries of Anglo-American capitalism after 1945: men and the middle classes. As Lauren Berlant has argued, ‘Precarity provides the dominant structure and experience of the present moment, cutting across class and localities’41 although with clearly different consequences for differently privileged social groups. It is in this context that the classed nature of the celebrity male nude leak makes sense. Though the majority involve working class men performing in a television genre depicting versions of working class life and watched by primarily working class audiences, there are those that involve upper/middle-class men (Made In Chelsea, Orlando Bloom) and those that work in far better-remunerated areas of the industry (Justin Bieber). This suggests that if it is historically a sign of a person’s social subordination that they create value through sexualised representations of their naked body – the emergence of the celebrity male nude leak is symbolic of the gendered and classed ways that even historically privileged groups have been subordinated by the changed material conditions of the 2008–2016 conjuncture.

RETHINKING CLASS AND GENDER UNDER NEOLIBERALISM If the celebrity male nude leak has emerged as a result of the way digital media is being used to create value from intimate representations of the nude male body in response to material conditions shaped by neoliberalism, what is the significance of their emergence to our understandings of neoliberalism? In Alison Hearn’s argument around reality TV and self-branding she goes on to argue that the precarious working conditions they experience exemplify characteristics of the dominant forms of labour under post-Fordism. The term ‘post-Fordism’ refers to the regime of capital accumulation that came to dominate Western economies after the 1970s, and is, therefore, fundamentally



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 51

constitutive of the long neoliberal moment (1979– ). Under post-Fordism the most significant labour carried out by people has been affective and/or semiotic labour in information or service economies that are characterised by insecure working conditions. The autonomist Marxist school of thought, from which Hearn writes from, argues that these working conditions are much more favourable to capital than they are to labour than under Fordism, which, though rigid, deferential and hierarchal, provided long-term security and a reasonable salary for its male workers to support their family. In this regard, many feminist labour scholars argue that post-Fordist labour resembles the work women carried out under Fordism and have argued that, in this regard, all labour has been feminised under post-Fordism.42 Given this broader historical context it becomes possible to see the celebrity male nude leak as similarly exemplifying post-Fordist labour relations as they have mutated after the financial crash into what some scholars have called post-post-Fordism, platform or digital capitalism. To return to the argument set out in chapter 1 – after the 2008 financial crisis digital media became central to neoliberalism’s continued struggle for hegemony, effecting a paradigm shift in the way capital was accumulated across global economies. In the Anglo-American context digital media contributed to neoliberalism’s redoubling of its efforts in response to its spectacular failure producing a set of material conditions that have weakened the social positions of everyone except global elites, even men and the middle classes. The celebrity male nude leak can be understood in this context, representing a spectacular intensification of the way all forms of labour have been feminised/weakened in the post-2008 conjuncture (e.g. the further precaritisation in digital gig economies) and how this feminisation is playing out in the relationship that digital media has to the male body. What this amounts to is a different understanding to the way media and cultural studies have understood the relationship between neoliberalism and gender during the 2008–2016 conjuncture. A major theme in the literature on this issue has argued how gender has polarised after the post-2008 recession with patriarchy entrenching itself in heightened forms of both traditional masculinity and femininity.43 On the one hand misogynistic and violent forms of masculinity have grown over the Internet as a response to the failures of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project.44 On the other, traditional femininities have acquired greater value in neoliberal media cultures.45 For instance, in an influential intervention Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff have asked, ‘could it be that neoliberalism is always already gendered, and that women are constructed as its ideal subjects?’ (original emphasis).46 The celebrity male nude leak represents a different tendency that has emerged in relation to post-2008 conjuncture – with neoliberalism here understood as not only an ideology but also the material conditions that this ideology creates in

52

Chapter 2

particular contexts. What the celebrity male nude leak arguably exemplifies is that neoliberalism after 2008 has not been always already gendered, but always already gendering, containing a feminising axiomatic that operates across its subjects, irrespective of their biological sex. Following feminist accounts of post-Fordist labour, what feminisation means here is the weakening of a subject’s position under capitalism as a result of both neoliberal capital’s assault on the material conditions that its subjects find themselves in – in this case, in the working conditions of the entertainment industries – and its relentless drive to extract value from things previously understood to be uncommodifiable – in this case, the nude male body. This is not to argue that neoliberalism has not also polarised traditional gender expression in other cases, just that in order to fully grasp the gendering nature of neoliberalism, particularly after 2008, this tendency needs to be accounted for too. There are, of course, limits to this feminisation. Another way of using the celebrity male nude leak to think through what has happened to class and gender under neoliberalism after 2008 is to ask, what does this newly popular way of visualising and creating value out of the celebrity male penis mean for the phallocratic social order, as conceived of by the Lacanian theorists of penis visibility? If visualising the real-world penis in culture undermines the symbolic order, has the phallus been dislodged as its transcendental signifier? In part these questions have already been answered – the elements of phallicism in the representation of the penises in the leaks work to partially mitigate this from happening. To answer them more substantively it is worth turning to the case of US politician Anthony Weiner who served as a New York City congressman from 1999 to 2011. Between 2011 and 2016 Weiner was involved in a series of nude leaks that resulted in irreparable damage to his reputation, the end of his marriage and his career as a politician.47 Weiner is not an entertainment industry professional; nor is he conventionally attractive in the ways necessary to become a media sex symbol; nor did the pictures represent his penis in accordance with the phallic norms prevalent in the rest of the leaks. He is a middle-aged, white-ish, middle-class politician. In most ways he represents the social group that continues to control and exercise power in contemporary culture. He represents the phallus and the symbolic order that could not bear the visualisation of his penis were it to remain intact, and as a result continued access to the control of the symbolic has been denied to him. I write white-ish because Weiner is Jewish which, though frequently coded as a white ethnicity in Anglo-American racial hierarchies, has an ambivalent relationship to ‘proper’ whiteness. This is not insignificant here. One trope of anti-Semitic discourse is the abjectly sexual male and Weiner’s scandals are arguably made culturally intelligible through recourse to these discourses. Nevertheless he is the best example we have of a ‘patriarchal’ nude leak. We have yet to see the penis of a ‘proper’ patriarch48 – itself



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 53

revealing of how the gendered, classed and racialised phallus of the AngloAmerican elite has strained to maintain its position as organiser of the symbolic within the ‘feminising’ material conditions of the post-2008 conjuncture for which they have been responsible. NOTES 1. ‘An Ex Girl from One of Your Favorite Male R&B Singers Leaks His Naked Cell Phone Pix in the Bathroom!’ last modified 4 March 2011, http://www.world starhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhS240c4r4Hmu3nUmx. 2. Carl Greenwood, ‘Watch Dappy Reveal He Leaked HIS OWN Naked Photo as Publicity Stunt to Get Single to Number One’, Irish Mirror, last modified 6 January 2014, https://www.irishmirror.ie/showbiz/celebrity-news/dappy-leaked-nakedpicture-celebrity-2992567. 3. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1979); Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). 4. Adam Knee, ‘Celebrity Skins: The Illicit Textuality of the Celebrity Nude Magazine’ in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, eds. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (London: Routledge, 2006), 169. 5. P. D. Marshall, ‘New Media-New Self: The Changing Power of Celebrity’ in The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. P. D. Marshall (London: Routledge, 2006), 634–644. 6. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, ‘Fame Body: Introduction’ in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, eds. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (London: Routledge, 2006), 122. 7. Sean Redmond, ‘Intimate Fame Everywhere’ in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, eds. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (London: Routledge, 2006), 27–44. 8. Jo Littler, ‘Making Fame Ordinary: Intimacy, Reflexivity and “Keeping It Real” ’ Mediactive, 2 (2004): 8–25. 9. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), 189. 10. Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004), 125. 11. Knee, ‘Celebrity Skins’, 172. 12. Ibid. 13. Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Caitlin E. Lawson, ‘Pixels, Porn, and Private Selves: Intimacy and Authenticity in the Celebrity Nude Photo Hack’, Celebrity Studies, 6:4 (2015): 607–609; Holmes and Redmond, ‘Fame Body’; Knee, ‘Celebrity Skins’; Alexandra Sastre, ‘Hottentot in the Age of Reality TV: Sexuality, Race, and Kim Kardashian’s Visible Body’, Celebrity Studies, 5:1–2 (2014): 123–137; Turner, Understanding Celebrity. 14. Elizabeth Stephens, ‘The Spectacularized Penis: Contemporary Representations of the Phallic Male Body’, Men and Masculinities, 10:1 (2007): 85–98. 15. Toby Miller, Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

54

Chapter 2

16. Marjorie Kibby and Brigid Costello, ‘Displaying the Phallus: Masculinity and the Performance of Sexuality on the Internet’, Men and Masculinities, 1:4 (1999): 352–364. 17. Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007). 18. Stephen Maddison, ‘ “The Second Sexual Revolution”: Big Pharma, Porn and the Biopolitical Penis’, Topia, 22 (2009): 35–53. 19. Alison Hearn, ‘Producing “Reality” Branded Content, Branded Selves, Precarious Futures’ in A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Oullette (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 439. 20. Susan Murray and Laurie Oullette, ‘Introduction’ in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Oullette (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1–22; Chad Raphael, ‘The Political-Economic Origins of Reali-TV’ in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Oullette (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 123–140; Andrew Ross, ‘Reality Television and the Political Economy of Amateurism’ in A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Oullette (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 29–39. 21. June Deery, ‘Mapping Commercialisation in Reality Television’ in A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Oullette (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 11–28. 22. Helen Wood, ‘The Politics of Hyperbole on Geordie Shore: Class, Gender, Youth and Excess’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20:1 (2017): 39–55. 23. Misha Kavka, ‘Reality TV and the Gendered Politics of Flaunting’ in Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television, ed. Brenda Weber (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 54–75. 24. ‘Editor’s Code of Practice’, Independent Press Standards Organisation, last modified 1 January 2018, https://www.ipso.co.uk/editors-code-of-practice/#Privacy. 25. Rebecca Merriman, ‘Orlando Bloom NAKED Pictures Revealed in All Their Glory – Now Choose the Censored or Uncensored Version’, Daily Mirror, last modified 4 August 2016, https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ orlando-bloom-naked-pictures-revealed-8563109. 26. Lawson, ‘Pixels, Porn, and Private Selves’. 27. Elizabeth Ellcessor, ‘Tweeting @feliciaday: Online Social Media, Convergence, and Subcultural Stardom’, Cinema Journal, 51:2 (2012): 46–66; Nick Muntean and Anne Helen Petersen, ‘Celebrity Twitter: Strategies of Intrusion and Disclosure in the Age of Technoculture’, M/c Journal, 12:5 (2009), http://journal. media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/194/. 28. Alice Marwick and danah boyd, ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience’, New Media and Society, 13:1 (2010): 114–133. 29. Sarah Thomas, ‘Celebrity in the “Twitterverse”: History, Authenticity and the Multiplicity of Stardom Situating the “Newness” of Twitter’, Celebrity Studies, 5:3 (2014): 242–255. 30. Richard Dyer, ‘Don’t Look Now’, Screen, 23: 3–4 (1982): 61–73.



The Celebrity Male Nude Leak 55

31. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993). 32. The idea that anal penetration threatens patriarchal formations of masculinity was formulated in Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ October, 43 (1987): 197–222. For a more recent discussion on representations of male anuses, especially how their penetration might maintain phallic properties, see Stephen Maddison, ‘Is the Rectum Still a Grave? Anal Sex, Pornography, and Transgression’ in Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, eds. Ted Gournelos and David J. Gunkel (London: Continuum, 2012), 86–100. 33. Sastre, ‘Hottentot in the Age of Reality TV’. 34. ‘Chris Brown Leaked Naked Picture Interview’, YouTube, last modified 16 March 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpqXN-NAONU. 35. Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood, Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value (London: Routledge, 2012); Faye Woods, ‘Classed Femininity, Performativity and Camp in British Structured Reality Programming’, Television and New Media, 15:3 (2014): 197–214. 36. Wood, ‘The Politics of Hyperbole on Geordie Shore’. 37. Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996); Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption (London : UCL Press, 1996). 38. Hugh Curnutt, ‘Durable Participants: A Generational Approach to Reality TV’s “Ordinary” Labor Pool’, Media, Culture & Society, 33:7 (2011): 1061–1076. 39. Milly Williamson, Celebrity: Capitalism and the Making of Fame (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 40. ‘Orlando Bloom Movie Career Statistics’, Statistic Brain Research Institute, accessed 19 September 2018, https://www.statisticbrain.com/orlando-bloommovie-film-career-earnings/. 41. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, Duke University Press: 2011), 192. 42. Lisa Adkins, ‘Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor after the Financial Crisis’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 111:4 (2012): 621–641; Angela McRobbie, ‘Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime’, New Formations, 70 (2011): 60–76; Cristina Morini, ‘The Feminization of Labour in Cognitive Capitalism’, Feminist Review, 87 (2007): 40–59. 43. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, ‘Introduction. Gender and Recessionary Culture’ in Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, eds. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 1–30. 44. Jack Bratich and Sarah Banet-Weiser, ‘The Con in Confidence: Pick Up Artists, Honor Terrorism, and the Failure of Neoliberalism’, pre-publication version; Debbie Ging, ‘Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere’, Men and Masculinities (2017), last modified 10 May 2017, https://doi.org/1 0.1177/1097184X17706401. 45. Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds. Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

56

Chapter 2

46. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, ‘Introduction’ in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, eds. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. 47. In 2017 Weiner was found guilty of transferring obscene material to a minor, after he sent nude selfies to a fifteen-year-old girl. The dynamics of this incident are different to the previous cases and have therefore not been included in the analysis. 48. There have been a number of attempts to undermine the power of ‘proper’ patriarch Donald Trump by representing him nude and with a small penis. Artist Illma Gore painted him in this fashion; porn star Stormy Daniels mockingly described Trump’s small penis on US television show Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and before he was elected, a statue of Trump with a micro-penis and no testicles appeared in New York City’s Union Square. That this satirical strategy might symbolically undermine Trump’s patriarchal power is further evidence of the phallocratic arrangements of Anglo-American culture. Of course, we have, as of the time of writing, not actually seen celebrity-as-president Trump’s penis.

Chapter 3

The Spornosexual: The Affective Contradictions of Digital Male Body-Work in an Age of Austerity

In July 2014, cultural commentator Mark Simpson coined the term ‘spornosexual’ to signify a new articulation of masculinity that had begun emerging across different locations within contemporary culture. A portmanteau of the words ‘sportsman’, ‘porn star’ ‘and metrosexual’, a spornosexual is a young man who attempts to fashion a spectacularly muscular body in order to share images of it over social media platforms. Simpson elaborates: With their painstakingly pumped and chiselled bodies, muscle-enhancing tattoos, piercings, adorable beards and plunging necklines it’s eye-catchingly clear that second-generation metrosexuality is less about clothes than it was for the first. Eagerly self-objectifying, second generation metrosexuality is totally tarty. Their own bodies (more than clobber and product) have become the ultimate accessories, fashioning them at the gym into a hot commodity – one that they share and compare in an online marketplace.1

Immediately after Simpson published the article in which this quote appeared the term was taken up across a range of different media outlets including follow-up articles in The Daily Telegraph,2 The Guardian,3 Vice.com,4 Esquire5 and the Evening Standard.6 Not all the media commentary used the term ‘spornosexual’ to describe this phenomenon. For example, Vice.com used the term ‘modern douchebag’, indicating the pejorative tone taken in much of the commentary, which understood spornosexuals as vain, narcissistic, improperly embodied men. The Daily Telegraph coverage in particular had subtle tones of class hatred seeming to suggest that spornosexuals were working class men with bad taste and little idea how to spend money. For example, Tim Stanley wrote, ‘The spornosexual is really only interested in how they look to themselves – it is narcissistic. By toning and perfuming and recording every ripple with Facebook selfies, they’ve converted their bodies 57

58

Chapter 3

into their own masturbatory aids’ using the apparently moneyed yet workingclass male stars of reality television programme The Only Way Is Essex as his examples. He argued that spornosexuality represents the ‘victory of money and trash’.7 This chapter attempts to make sense of spornosexuality, using the tools provided by cultural studies to understand if there has been a rise of men working on their bodies and sharing images of them over social media and, if there has, why that might be – beyond the crass reasons given in some of the media coverage. It does this by first briefly establishing the quantitative dimensions of spornosexuality by drawing on different sets of statistics to provide evidence of its growth. It then draws on interviews with six men who engage in these practices to understand why they do. Throughout the chapter it situates both sets of data within conjunctural shifts that have occurred during the rise of spornosexuality, in order to theorise what its rise might reveal about the conjuncture in which it has emerged. In doing all of this, this chapter begins by arguing that since 2008 there has been an empirically observable rise in young British men sharing images of their worked-out bodies on social media platforms, understanding this rise as both an embodied and mediated response to the precarious structures of feeling produced by neoliberal austerity. As young men’s traditional breadwinning capacities have been eroded within a post-financial crisis austerity economy, they have begun to deploy a form of value creation historically associated with less privileged groups: body-work. In speaking to the men who engage in this body-work, this chapter finds evidence of Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’8 – a contradictory structure of feeling produced by neoliberal cultural practices that paradoxically impede the expansive transformations that they so spectacularly promise. It concludes by moving beyond Berlant to argue that within the interviewee’s incipient self-consciousness of the ‘cruelty’ of this particular form of cruel optimism lies the potential of resistance to neoliberalism’s ongoing territorialisation of our everyday lives. THE RISE OF SHARING IMAGES OF FIT MALE BODIES ON SOCIAL MEDIA The first step in making this argument is to establish whether spornosexuality was simply a media invention or a genuine sociological phenomenon. A look at different datasets suggest that since 2008 there has been an empirically observable rise in young men fashioning muscular bodies and sharing images of them online. Arguably, the most significant indicator comes from data produced by the Active People Survey9 (2015) that measures weekly sports participation in the UK and is carried out by the organisation Sport England on



The Spornosexual 59

behalf of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. After having surveyed approximately 200,000 people every year since 2006, Sport England found a significant year-on-year increase in the amount of sixteen- to twenty-fiveyear-old men attending the gym. In 2006, 14.7 per cent of sixteen- to twentyfive-year-old men in Britain went to the gym at least once a week. In 2014 this figure increased to 21.2 per cent.10 This is one of the largest increases in the amount of any social group doing any type of sport at least once a week in the same period. A year later, market research company Nielsen found that sales of sports nutrition products that are used to strip body fat and build muscle increased by 40 per cent in Britain’s ten largest supermarkets. This was the second-largest growth in sales of any product sold in supermarkets in that year.11 This substantial increase in young men going to the gym is reflected in the sorts of media that this demographic is both consuming and producing. In 2009 the print version of the men’s gym and fitness magazine Men’s Health not only became the best-selling title in the British men’s magazine market12 but, at the time when the term ‘spornosexual’ was coined, was selling nearly twice as many print copies as its nearest competitor – the well-established GQ.13 This is during a moment in which the overall consumer magazine market is dramatically decreasing in circulation.14 In terms of digital media, the word ‘selfie’ was named the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013, and the term ‘healthie’ was coined around the same time to signify a fitness-related selfie. At the time of writing a substantial number of ‘healthies’ have aggregated around the following hashtags on Instagram: #fitness (304 million), #fitfam (95.6 million), #fitspo (60.9 million) and #muscle (44.9 million). A large proportion of these are faintly eroticised images of men displaying their muscular bodies. THE MALE BODY, NEOLIBERAL AUSTERITY AND PRECARIOUS STRUCTURES OF FEELING The rise of this particular, digitally mediated form of body-work might have started around 2008, but the idea that men perform body-work, that the male body can be transformed into media spectacle or that scholars have tried to make sense of these practices and representations in terms of their historical moment is not. A series of studies have explored different sites where the male body has become more visible in the period that Anthony Giddens has called late modernity:15 in Hollywood cinema,16 in the mainstreaming of practices associated with metropolitan gay culture17 and in the visual cultures of consumerism, such as advertising, magazines and retail space.18 For the majority of these critics, these figures represented embodied responses to

60

Chapter 3

changes in society brought about by feminism, gay liberation and the AIDS crisis in the context of an expanding consumer culture. They argue that their emergence, particularly after the 1970s, was significant because historically the male body had been far less visible than the female body in the popular cultures of modernity. This, it has been argued, is because of the relationship between the body and (late-) modern hierarchies of power which have been organised according to the Cartesian privileging of the mind over the body. This has meant that during this period those who have held power – middle-class, white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, men – have defined themselves through their mind while at the same time defining those they have subordinated – the female, the queer, the working class and those racialised as non-white – through their bodies.19 What this has meant in terms of value creation is that the former group has historically been employed as high-paid decision makers while the latter have their bodies to put to low or no-paid work – whether through manual labour, domestic labour, sex work or slavery. What is being argued here is that the rise of this new digitally mediated body practice among young, white, middle-class, cis-gendered men is evidence of shifts in the late modern hierarchies of power that have recently been occurring in Britain. The rise in men going to the gym and sharing images of their worked-out bodies began around 2008. This coincides with the intensification of neoliberalism that occurred in response to the 2008 economic crisis through the austerity measures that have been imposed in Britain and across Europe. As discussed later in this chapter, this is no coincidence. There is a correlation between the rise of this practice and the intensification of neoliberalism through measures of so-called austerity. This new digitally mediated body practice, it is argued here, is an embodied and mediated response to shifts in power that are taking place during the austerity moment. Neoliberalism, Subjectivity, Leisure The literatures on neoliberal and austerity cultures are wide and contain work from a range of different perspectives, much of which can be used to help make sense of different aspects of this emergent cultural practice. As outlined in the introductory chapter in this book I am approaching neoliberalism as both an ideology and shifting sets of conjuncturally specific material conditions that its application has created since it became hegemonic in the Anglo-American context in the late twentieth century. Ideologically, its central tenet is the notion that the redistributive social democratic state is essentially tyrannical, inhibiting the individual’s capacity for autonomous, competitive, hard-working entrepreneurship.20 As a hegemonic project, neoliberalism necessarily works on multiple fronts. Most significantly for the discussion at hand, this includes our subjectivities and on the collapse of the leisure/labour distinction.



The Spornosexual 61

Anthony Giddens and Nikolas Rose are two of the most influential social theorists to conceptualise the effects on neoliberalism on contemporary subjectivities.21 The ideal neoliberal subject is the entrepreneurial self, in which our subjectivities are constantly worked on and where the images of the individual both at work and outside work are aligned ‘with the human technologies for the government of enterprise’.22 Consequently citizens, and not the state, are made accountable for their own (self-)regulation. In particular, subjects are expected to assume a reflexive selfhood through which they must constantly invent themselves in response to the labour market. According to Giddens the self is ‘made’; it is an undertaking that is continuously worked and reflected upon. ‘Working’ on the self is the emblematic way that neoliberalism brings the protestant work ethic to bear on domains outside our working lives. Another way that this happens that has particular significance for spornosexuality is in the collapse of the labour/leisure distinction under neoliberalism. To understand this it is worth turning to Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s book The New Spirit of Capitalism, which explores the collapse of labour into leisure by looking at managerial texts from the 1960s and 1990s. The discourses produced in the 1990s texts aimed to blur the distinction between leisure and work.23 Prior to the period identified by Boltanski and Chiapello, Fordism had created leisure as a separate sphere to labour so that workers could be rejuvenated and more effectively contribute to the accumulation of capital. This separation of the two was criticised as ‘dehumanising’ by radicals in the 1960s. Boltanski and Chiapello point out how capitalist institutions incorporated this critique in their interests in a way that was more dehumanising than was imaginable under Fordism. The new professional mechanisms that came into place to do this ‘penetrate more deeply into people’s inner selves – people are expected to “give” themselves to their work’.24 Under supposedly more free working conditions, professional life has become precariously organised as a portfolio of projects and thus not only work but all of ‘life is conceived as a succession of projects’,25 rendering the distinction between labour and leisure under neoliberalism obsolete, and applying the protestant work ethic to all areas of a person’s life. Young Men, Austerity, Digital Media The term ‘austerity’ can be understood in relation to both the intensification of these neoliberal ideologies after the 2008 financial crisis and the material conditions that they have created. The defining characteristic of these post2008 material conditions has been the widening inequality and the retrenchment of power along a variety of different axes – for example, class,26 gender27 and race.28 Given that the social group being scrutinised here are young men

62

Chapter 3

(the oldest interviewee was thirty in 2008 and the youngest was fifteen), it is worth elaborating on how power is being retrenched along the axis of generation. Ben Little has argued that one of the demographic segments most affected by neoliberal austerity is the generation of people born after 1980.29 He argues that one of the reasons for this is that the people belonging to post1980 generation have not been of working age long enough to accumulate the capital necessary to protect themselves from the severity of the austerity economy. This economy is defined by, among other things, prohibitively high house prices, the withdrawal of housing benefit and the introduction of the bedroom tax; the loss of secure long-term contracts; increased tuition fees as well as the loss of the Education Maintenance Allowance and the rise in pension ages. Taken together, these policies have made life increasingly precarious for young people since the economic crisis. In fact, for many critics of neoliberalism, precarity has been this defining characteristic of the post-2008 historical conjuncture. Conventionally, the term ‘precarity’ has been understood in relation to ‘precarious’ working conditions – low pay, weakened trade unions, shortterm/zero-hour contracts and reduced opportunity for any sort of employment.30 Recently, however, the term has been used more expansively to characterise the lived experience of the neoliberal everyday. One of the most influential writers to propose this is Lauren Berlant in her 2011 book Cruel Optimism, in which she argues, ‘Precarity provides the dominant structure and experience of the present moment, cutting across class and localities’.31 For Berlant, such is the hegemony of neoliberalism that it is not just our working conditions that are experienced as precarious, but also our everyday lives. Similarly, precarity is not just experienced by those on low wages and short-term contracts but society as a whole. Precarity is thus the defining structure of feeling of the current historical moment and is characterised by what Berlant calls cruel optimism: A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being.32

She goes on: ‘Optimism is cruel when the object that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving’.33 For Berlant, cruel optimism is the logical outcome of existing in a society in which fantasies of what constitute a good life have become so spectacular (e.g. the consumer cultures of the global rich), but the means of achieving them have been so radically diminished. We are optimistic for things that we are unlikely to achieve – hence its cruelty – and as a result we exist in a constant state of precarity.



The Spornosexual 63

One strategy that people have deployed to navigate contemporary precarity is self-branding over social media.34 Self-branding, or conceiving of and representing the self in the same way that a marketing or brand-manager would conceive of a product, is a social media strategy that Alison Hearn argues, reality television celebrities had to develop in response to their precarious working conditions. With little to no pay and no contract, union representation or studio support, these celebrities have to use whatever means they have available to them so they can extract as much value as they can from what little they own; that is, they use the affordances of social media to sell themselves as brands. Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that this neoliberal logic of digital self-branding has extended beyond reality television and into everyday life more generally. She writes, ‘Areas of our lives that have historically been considered non-commercial and “authentic” – namely religion, creativity, politics, the self – have recently become branded spaces’.35 As discussed later, digital self-branding is a key practice for ‘ordinary’ spornosexuals to navigate precarity. It is at the convergence of these different post-2008 conjunctural shifts that the emergence of the spornosexual makes sense. Working men of all classes were the chief beneficiaries of Fordism and the social democratic settlement that aligned with it. Most middle and working class men were afforded ‘jobs for life’, union-protected employment and a ‘breadwinner’s’ wage that could support a family, if occasionally supplemented by social security. This changes, especially for working class men, under post-Fordism, in which their lived experience begins to resemble women’s and other minority groups’, in that they become more likely to create value in service industries, and in increasingly precarious working conditions. After the financial crisis, precarity becomes generalised across much of the Anglo-American context and the possibilities for value creation become stymied for even middle-class men, younger ones in particular. As I argued in chapter 1, this is a key way that the post-2008 conjuncture acquires its specificity. As a response to this new context some young men have used the tools made available to them by digital capitalism – smartphones and social media platforms – and, propelled by neoliberal ideology, have sexualised their bodies in a bid to feel valuable when the means of value creation that this social group were once able to rely on have been eroded by neoliberal austerity. Speaking to men who engage in this practice reveals that sexualising their body requires hard work with very little value created as a result, causing them anxiety as well as the realisation that the promises of post-2008 neoliberalism might never be fulfilled. The remainder of the chapter will provide the evidence for this and concludes by discussing the implications this has for our current understandings of gendered embodiment under neoliberalism.

64

Chapter 3

METHODS In order to understand what it feels like to struggle to create value within a specific set of conjunctural arrangements, I have used Raymond Williams’s concept of a ‘structure of feeling’ to frame the methodological approach of this chapter. According to Williams, ‘a structure of feeling’ is the way it feels to live during a particular historical moment and is traceable through analysing the popular culture of a particular social formation.36 Different methods have been used to analyse popular culture in order to map structures of feeling and affective states more generally: textual analysis,37 auto-ethnography38 and interviews.39 Given that working to achieve a particular type of athletic body in order to share images across social media platforms involves a range of practices which include – but which cannot be reduced to – acts of (self-)representation (negating textual analysis as the main method) and given that I do not engage in these practices myself (negating auto-ethnography), I settled on interviewing six men who do. The interviews, which were semi-structured and in depth, focused on how they achieved their worked-out bodies and how they shared images of them on social media, while also exploring what motivates their engagement in these practices and what engaging in them feels like overall. Given that I have already sketched out quantitative trends earlier, the interview data is not seeking to position itself as representative. Rather, it is intended to offer insight into aspects of contemporary neoliberal structures of feeling, as related to this new form of body-work. In turn, as the data is intended to be illustrative as opposed to representative, I have used a small number of participants. The sample was built through snowballing from personal contacts. Three of the interviewees work as fitness professionals. Two of them engage in these practices in their leisure time. One of them is a journalist who became a ‘spornosexual’ for three months in order to write an experiential magazine feature. All the interviewees identify as white and middle class (although one says he is from a working class background). All of them are aged between twenty and thirty-five, and three of the interviewees identify as gay and three as heterosexual. (Revealingly, there was no obvious distinction in the experience of these practices between the gay and straight interviewees.) The interviews took between thirty minutes and two hours. After transcribing them, I then performed a thematic analysis, in order to see which themes emerged across the interviews most frequently. The interviewees’ descriptions of their engagements with this new form of body-work were underpinned by the logics of neoliberalism in a number of ways. The most frequently mentioned was how hard the participants needed to work to achieve their goals but often for little in the way of meaningful return; or, in Berlant’s terms, striving for expansive transformations that recent historical



The Spornosexual 65

conditions have made impossible to achieve. Therefore, this has been chosen as the main theme that structures the following analysis. It does this by using the concepts of labour (as striving) and capital (as the goal of this striving), particularly the different forms of capital influentially developed by Pierre Bourdieu.40 Previous media and cultural studies scholarship has tended to approach similar phenomena to the one under discussion here primarily through the frame of representation. This is the case with work on the male body cited earlier as well as with the recent scholarship on self-representation in digital culture.41 Echoing perspectives developed within the sociology of the body,42 I understand this particular form of digitally mediated male body-work as an assemblage of cultural practices which includes, but cannot be reduced to, acts of (self-) representation because it involves both fashioning the materiality of male bodies in accordance with contemporary beauty ideals and the production, circulation and consumption of images of those bodies in digital space. These practices cannot be separated and involve a multiplicity of competencies and knowledges: ways of eating and exercising, ways of taking digital photographs, skills of post-production and skills of using social-networking sites as both a producer and a consumer. THE LABOUR OF DIGITALLY MEDIATED MALE BODY-WORK All the interviewees detailed the extensive labour that they put into both producing a muscular body and sharing images of it on social media platforms. For example, fitness professional Davide43 attends the gym four times a week. The time taken from preparing his gym bag to arriving back home after he has finished totals, he claims, four hours with two hours of that actually spent working out. Davide also spends an hour every morning cooking eight small meals that he will eat at regular intervals during the day so as to ensure his body receives the right type and amount of nutrients to produce the sort of muscular body for which he strives. Davide is studying for a nutrition degree so it is possible to argue that this also contributes towards his labour. What is interesting is that non-professional Jonny spends more time in the gym than Davide – sometimes five times a week and frequently twice a day. Mark, who wrote the experiential magazine feature, estimated that for three months at least half his day was spent engaged in practices related to perfecting a ‘spornosexual’ body. Jonny describes what might be called the ideal spornosexual body as ‘being toned – muscular arms, muscular pecs, muscular shoulders, skinny waist, V-shaped, good legs, rounded bottom. All American jock . . . Abercrombie fitness models’. It is significant for the argument being made

66

Chapter 3

here that Jonny cites the iconic models from popular fashion brand Abercrombie & Fitch as the ideal he is striving to achieve, given the importance of the visual imagery of consumer brands to neoliberal capital accumulation. Significantly this hard labour frequently occurred in domains historically understood to be leisure time, specifically in relation to holidays abroad and the food the interviewees consumed. The significance of a holiday to spornosexual practice was that it gave the interviewees the opportunity to display their bodies by a swimming pool or on a beach, both connoting aspirational glamour and encapsulating that controversial phrase ‘beach body ready’. Jonny explained in his interview that in the weeks prior to going on holiday he would ensure that he would consistently reach his weekly maximum of ten training sessions at the gym. He said, ‘If I’m going abroad and there’s somewhere that I want to take my top off I would do a cardio session in the evening and a weights session in the morning’. In the interview he went as far as claiming that all his labour in the gym is directed towards displaying his fit body while abroad: ‘What’s your goal? At this very moment in time I am going on a cruise for work and if I’m very honest my goal would be leaner in a course of a week and realistically that’s not going to happen so my goal is to be as lean as possible in the timeframe that I have.

So there’s no ultimate goal? No. For me the goal is driven by a beach or an opportunity.

In this series of statements taken from Jonny’s interview we see labour territorialising leisure in a number of different ways: in the hard physical labour he performs leading up to being on a beach; in the fact that appearing on a beach is the goal for all his spornosexual labour; and in the interesting equivalence that he establishes between ‘a beach’, a widely used metonym for a holiday, and the word ‘opportunity’. Jonny uses the word ‘opportunity’ to refer to sharing images of his fit body on social media. This opportunity could be part of a beach holiday or of professional assignment such as promoting a cruise ship, though as a PR manager the assignment would not necessarily require him to have a fit body in the same way as it would for the fitness professionals I interviewed. The logic underpinning Jonny’s statement illustrates Boltanski and Chiapello’s discussion of the project as part of contemporary labour practices that have taken over our whole lives. Jonny talks about preparing for this ‘opportunity’ as a short-term project that involves achieving a goal within a certain timeframe. What is significant here is that the ‘opportunity’



The Spornosexual 67

to share his fit body is a form of labour that feeds from both his professional and recreational life. The blurring of these two spheres is further evidenced in his Facebook profile which has multiple images of him topless on the beach and which contains both personal and professional contacts. Another area frequently associated with leisure time but transformed into hard physical spornosexual labour was the consumption of food. Davide describes his strict eating regime, outlined earlier: ‘I always see myself in the mirror and I’m always looking better and better and know this is all to do with my nutrition and my training and I keep doing it to get better and better. I know if I stop one of the factors in this process I’m not going to have the results that I’m having’. The labour involved in maintaining the eating regime is extensive, and the language that Davide employs reflects the business framework through which he cultivates his body as self-brand. Food is a ‘factor’, and he scrutinises the ‘process’ through which he sculpts his body for ‘results’ in order to ‘get better and better’. His body, which is his livelihood, is ‘like a good machine you have to give it good fuel’. It’s like 2 years now that I’m waking up an hour before to cook all my meals for the day. . . . So that’s pretty admirable from outside because it’s so hard to do if you’re not passionate about something . . . diet is the basis of everything. You have to eat 7 or 8 meals a day so every 2 hours 3 hours I’m eating something.

Davide discusses the sacrifice involved in following this regime for two years – ‘I sacrifice sometimes nice dinners’ – but he claims it does not take an affective toll. In fact he asserts quite the opposite: Because I’m understanding that I’m living a really healthy and good life as a result this kind of body and this kind of mentality. I never feel bored or sad. I always feel grateful for the food I’m eating. Sometimes if I feel tired I know what type of food to put in, the kind of the work to put in. Even to change my mood. So it helps me. So the health makes me feel better.

Mark is a journalist who practised a similarly strict diet and exercise regime as Davide for three months for the purposes of writing an experiential magazine feature (another example of work saturating private life). Nevertheless, he has always regularly attended the gym, having trained as a wrestler at school and then working out as a young adult. Motivated only by the purposes of writing a magazine feature, Mark’s experience of the eating and exercising required to achieve a body like Davide’s was considerably less joyful than the fitness professional: I despised everything about the food regime. It’s so deadening and wretched to eat things you have been prescribed. Even if you are not a great gourmand or

68

Chapter 3

bon vivant, if you think about it everything you eat you make that choice. Three times a day you make a choice to eat a thing that pleases you. You make a qualitative decision: ‘I shall have that’. And having that totally removed from you I found harrowing. I ate some boring shit . . . I spent hours . . . I tried to cook as correct a thing I could with in as little time as possible. But every night I had to measure and weigh and the whole thing was just boring and awful and the food was unsatisfying and that just really took its toll psychologically.

Here Mark is describing the same practice of eating as labour that Davide participates in: the punishing schedule, the precise quantification of food and the eating of foods that enable the production of a body that is deemed successful in accordance with spornosexual ideals. He uses the French terms ‘gourmand’ and ‘bon vivant’ to describe the pleasures of eating as a leisure pursuit, as well as eating as one of simple pleasure or choice. During his three-month exercise regime, eating as labour is clearly a negative affective experience for Mark, revealing one of the problems of leisure becoming work under neoliberalism. It is also worthwhile reflecting here how a work project so deeply penetrated Mark’s personal time and intimate life. Digital Spornosexual Labour Colin, Davide and Matt were the interviewees who gave the most detailed account of the labour involved in producing and circulating imagery of their worked-out bodies. Like Jonny, discussed earlier, Colin prefers to produce this imagery when he is abroad because he believes pictures of his muscular body in swimwear against a backdrop of the beach or a swimming pool more convincingly ‘sell the dream’ – an interesting choice of words considering not only how neoliberal entrepreneurship inform practices of ‘self-branding’ but also the discussion of the neoliberalisation of leisure time above. He or a friend will use a smartphone to take several shots of one pose. He then chooses and produces the image in a way that will maximise how ‘hot’ he thinks he looks. ‘Hotness’ is based on a how muscular he looks and how minimal his body fat is. The image will be cropped to increase the look of musculature, and he will add an Instagram filter to whiten his teeth which he feels are discoloured. He then posts the image to Instagram – which he chooses over other social media platforms because of its focus on photography. Sometimes he will store a backlog of images from these photo shoots in his smartphone, which he periodically shares when he is back in Britain to continue ‘selling the dream’. He is aware of the best time to post images to Instagram in order to maximise the amount of likes, re-grams and comments he will receive (during the morning and evening commutes and lunchtime) and posts accordingly. Like Colin, interviewee Matt is also aware of the best

The Spornosexual 69



times to post in order to maximise the amount of likes their pictures receive and has developed a complex social media strategy in order to give the impression that he is not trying too hard: My approach in life is that if you’re trying too hard people are going to see and it’s going to look obvious. I try and do things naturally. I know the best time to post something is 9 or 10 because people are at work and they’ve checked their emails and just go on Facebook quickly. And because I work with two different time zones South Africa and here. . . . And because I know that if I start getting likes it goes higher up on people’s newsfeeds and stuff. I know if I release something on South Africa time and it gets likes it means it goes higher up on people’s newsfeeds in the UK. I know that. And if, I wouldn’t say . . . I suppose there is a slight influence. The majority of the time I go out, I take a picture and I put it up straight away. I do post bad pictures of myself as well. I don’t do a photo shoot. Every now and then I think ‘that’s a good picture I’ll put that one up’ but I do put bad pictures up as well.

Professional fitness model Davide takes a different, but no less-thoughtthrough, approach to maximising the popularity of his Instagram posts: he tags bodybuilders who are more successful than him in order to make his images visible to as wide an audience as possible. As part of his self-branding strategy Davide also posts images of ‘my life’ – such as the books that he is reading, the food he eats – as well as his professional life, which is his body: ‘I wake up – body shot – and other stuff’. This strategic creation and manipulation of networks echoes Boltanski and Chiapello’s identification of the importance of creating interpersonal networks as part of the ‘life as project’ under neoliberalism. The difference between Boltanksi and Chiapelo’s ‘projective’ subject and the interviewees is that the former strategically cultivate networks in order to advance their careers and sustain their livelihoods whereas the latter are also doing it to market themselves as successful projects. Spornosexual Capital What capital is all of this hard labour designed to produce? From the answers given by the participants it would seem that what might be called ‘spornosexual’ capital combines erotic capital44,45 (the cultivation of sexual desirability) with social capital (the amount and status of people with whom we are networked).46 Colin talked about erotic capital most plainly when I asked why he followed other men who engage in the same body-work on Instagram: ‘Because I want to look hot in the way they look hot. . . . They inspire me to go to the gym’. Similarly, Jonny and Davide both cite ‘appearance’ as the reason they started going to the gym but then go on to cite another reason that they keep going – health. Jonny said, ‘Basically, it starts with appearance and

70

Chapter 3

then you realise it can make you a healthier person. I think your driven by the appearance thing first’. Davide concurs: I think when you’re younger it’s the appearance thing. So you look better in front of girls and then your friends and then they like you more because they actually judge you for what your physique looks like. Then I’m growing and then I’m realizing different things and I’m studying and I’m getting more mature. And I’m understanding this way of life is good and quite healthy. And then health goes more than the appearance.

It is interesting to consider Davide and Jonny’s claim that appearance got them to the gym but health keeps them there. Certainly the types of selfies that Jonny continues to post on different social media platforms suggest an interest in accumulating erotic capital as opposed to a healthy body and, as detailed later in this chapter, both he and Colin persistently raise issues around poor mental health in relation to his and other people’s engagement in these practices. In this context, erotic capital cannot be uncoupled from social capital. On social media platforms, social capital can be measured by the number of likes, tags, shares and comments the images receive. All the interviewees talked about the importance of peer response to the images they circulated. The fitness professionals talked about how important the accumulation of social capital was to the accumulation of economic capital. It is now common practice within the fitness industry for the amount of likes, followers, tags, comments and so on to be one of the reasons a client decides to use your service. The non-professionals mainly talked about how their affective responses to receiving (or not receiving) likes, comments, tags and so on – and are, therefore, discussed later in this chapter in relation to the section of the affectivity of these practices. One of the most important aspects of Bourdieu’s notion of capital is the exchange value that it has outside the field in which it is accumulated. As discussed earlier, there is a distinction between the professionals and the non-professionals in this regard in that the former can convert spornosexual capital into economic capital. Nevertheless, even the professionals were aware of the limited role that spornosexual capital played in this. Davide was at pains to say that it was his nutrition degree and ‘meeting people at fitness expos’ (more conventional forms of cultural and social capital) that played a bigger role in advancing his career than the amount of followers he got on Instagram: ‘“oh Davide got 1000 followers”. Well they can close down their app. If I won that competition if I got that degree it will always be on whatever profile I open up in my life’. For the non-professionals, who do not convert spornosexual capital into economic capital, the value it produces is



The Spornosexual 71

even more precarious. Colin concisely articulates the limited exchange value of spornosexual capital when he says: ‘It’s such a self-obsession and doesn’t equate to anything really for the future, for building yourself as a person’. Jonny sees spornosexual capital, by its very nature, in a constant state of depletion: You are driving yourself mad about your appearance and about what you look like. Am I arms big enough? Is my belly too big? Are my pecs big enough, could they be smaller? . . . I don’t think it’s ever something that you necessarily resolve. I’m always going to be like, ‘do I want bigger arms? Do I want smaller arms?’ All of these things . . . I think the men in the gym are striving to a point of perfection and what’s the next point of perfection?

Davide says something similar but experiences the constant accumulation of ever-depleting spornosexual capital as something positive: ‘My physique for me is a piece of art because you actually develop everyday. . . . Like when you’re doing a painting and you need some more details. It’s like me when I am in front of the mirror and I think I want some more details in this part. So I actually work. . . . And it never ends and it’s a good thing’. Davide’s positive assessment could be down to the fact that he has made his body his career and that he is, therefore, able to accumulate a variety of different capitals in relation to it. What is significant here is that both he and Jonny talk about these practices as endless labour and for the non-professionals, it produces everdepleting capital with limited exchange value, even within the field in which it is accumulated.

CRUEL OPTIMISM: SPORNOSEXUALITY’S AFFECTIVE CONTRADICTIONS Given that the discussion so far has focused on a form of time-consuming body-work that offers little in the way of valuable return, we might expect the affectivity generated by engaging in it to be largely negative. Of course, these practices would not have become as popular as they have if this was the case. What emerged across the interviews was a contradictory picture constructed out of a complex mixture of positive and negative affects. Having said this, the interviewees did talk about moments of straightforward joy that they experienced when engaging in this assemblage of practices. Davide talked about it in relation to the body-work that he does: I never feel bored or sad. . . . You feel more powerful. You feel more determined. . . . In everyday situations you will act better than another who feels

72

Chapter 3

sad, bored, depressed because you get a better feeling with people. They see you in a different way because if they see you have a good energy they want to be around you. . . . So you feel proud of yourself because you’re working hard.

In the following quote Jonny talks about the joy he experienced while engaging in the various aspects of this practice: Basically when you see your reflection and you’re happy with it. When you take a selfie and you look good. When you get tagged in pictures in social media. The elation that you get from that. When you’re in the gym and you notice you can lift heavier. All things like that. Or when people comment and say your attractive and whatever else.

Never feeling bored or sad, power, determination, good energy, pride, happiness and elation: it seems to be the achievements of these joyful affects which animate a cultural practice defined – in Davide’s words – by ‘working hard’ and that offers so little in the way of enduring value. However, the rest of the interviews suggested something far more affectively contradictory and complex than this. One of the discourses that were most frequently drawn on throughout the interviews in order to describe this affective complexity was the popular discourse of mental health; words such as ‘crazy’, ‘mental’ and ‘obsession’ were repeatedly used by the interviewees. For example, in the following quote Colin interprets sharing images of muscular bodies as ‘crazy’. I mean I think it is a bit crazy. . . . Some people like . . . showing where . . . their body is up to on things . . . their progress. But I don’t think it is ever that really. If it was you’d just keep that picture to yourself, why would you bother sharing it?

Why do they bother sharing it? I think they want to be thought of as amazing. I don’t know . . . I think it is a bit mental, the whole thing. . . . Going to the gym obsessively and posting photos and getting comments.

Why? Because it’s such a self-obsession and doesn’t equate to anything really for the future, for building yourself as a person, building your body. I think it’s just massively self-obsessed. It’s like people who go to therapy too much. They turn into that weird self-obsessed . . . like they are the most important thing. Which I don’t think is very healthy. (Emphasis added)

What Colin identifies as ‘mental’ and ‘crazy’ is compounded by Mark who is very articulate about the affective spaces he entered near the end of his



The Spornosexual 73

three-month stint working out in the ways that our other participants do in their everyday lives: It forced me into the genuine mindsets of people who have become obsessed by their bodies because I knew that any time I wanted to jack it in that regardless I would have to take these [topless] photos [for the magazine feature] and suddenly I was looking at [my personal trainer’s] website and looking at all his other body transformations and trying to work out whether my fat loss had been as good as that guy’s fat loss or had my biceps . . . I got into mental stuff. Who cares? But for a while I was ‘oh he’s get two inches on his trapezius muscles’ you know you go down this rabbit hole of obsessive stuff. (Original emphasis)

The interviewees’ use of words such as ‘crazy’, ‘mental’ and ‘obsessive’ are not being used here as evidence that engaging in these practices indicates poor mental health – however that might be defined. Instead what is being argued is that the persistent use of these words is evidence of both the intensity and complexity of the affectivity these practices produce. Though in this quote Colin is using these words in a negative way, concepts like ‘obsession’, ‘crazy’ and ‘mental’ are frequently used to denote intense affective states which are peculiar mixtures of joyful and sad affects. We might think of obsessive fandom, religious fervour or political zeal as similarly intense ways of feeling that are not so easily understood as straightforwardly positive or negative but are each specific mixtures of the two that are organised in response to the particular conditions of different cultural contexts. Different scholars have also noted that living through post-2008 neoliberalism involves intense and complicated affective contradictions, using different cultural contexts as their case studies. Jeremy Gilbert has argued that neoliberalism has only continued to be successful in Western Europe through what he terms ‘disaffected consent’ – the begrudging and resigned acceptance of the anxiety generated within the neoliberal everyday, because of the lack of viable political alternatives.47 He describes the formal stasis of British dance music in the 2000s, and particularly the ‘inchoate dissatisfaction’ expressed in dubstep, as being exemplary instances of this neoliberal structure of feeling. I think the emergence of spornosexuality tells a slightly different story. I would argue that the highs offered by neoliberalism are so spectacular – even though they are so rarely actualised – that people do not give their consent to it in a disaffected way. Rather, they labour hard to achieve its ideals, even in their leisure time. This is despite the generalised anxiety that is produced in their pursuit – evident as much in spornosexuality as in the sound of dubstep. This is because people need to feel valuable, using whatever means are available to them, especially in contexts where there are decreasing opportunities to do so. It is, I would argue, these affective contradictions that are the key

74

Chapter 3

to the success of neoliberal ideals in the struggle for hegemony during the present historical conjuncture. Other cultural critics have described similar contradictions existing within what they understand to be the hegemonic structures of feeling of the current moment. Phil Cohen describes what he sees as a form of ‘high culture – which oscillates between states of manic excitement and chronic depression’.48 This is more extreme than what my interviewees are describing. Lawrence Grossberg has described a much more multifaceted structure of feeling, which includes irony, cynicism, fear, terror, rage, anxiety and alienation, as well as the disarticulation of affect from other aspects of the social formation.49 Analysing a different national context within a much longer temporal frame (post-1970s, USA), this particular way of describing the macro-organisation of affect, too, does not quite match what the interviewees said. As I argued earlier, the description of a contemporary structure of feeling that comes closest to my interviewees’ description of their struggle to embody neoliberal ideals is Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, or ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’. The term that was frequently used by my interviewees that I think best illustrates this is ‘addiction’. Colin talked about the addictive nature of consuming images of other men’s fit bodies on Instagram: It’s very addictive. . . . I really have to stop myself looking at it sometimes. . . . Like when I am on the train in the morning, I’ll just be on that the whole way. I won’t even notice where I am or anything. I’ll suddenly be at my destination. But if I am in a car on the way to a job I’ll often get a headache by the time I arrive by looking at the phone.

Jonny talked about the addictive nature of exercise as a ‘positive addiction’ highlighting its affective contradictions when practised in this particular way in this specific culture: Running is something that clears your mind . . . you just forget about everything and just get lost in it. . . . It also gets quite addictive because you see the changes and this is how you’re feeling better. When you’re doing it in LA where everyone is motivated by looking good and feeling good and there’s enough education around it to pick up on it, it becomes quite cathartic. I then read Eat, Pray, Love at the same time as all of this and so it all fused together with all of this exercising . . . and then I wanted to learn how to meditate and everything was coming together at a point where all these good addictions, all of these positive addictions were coming together to improve myself through appearance but stuff happening internally as well.

Jonny’s notion of positive addiction builds on Berlant’s cruel optimism in how it describes the compulsion to strive for something in ways that do not,



The Spornosexual 75

following Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of affect, straightforwardly either augment or diminish your capacity to act.50 Here, Jonny has highlighted the joyful aspects of his engagement with this assemblage of practices but elsewhere he talks explicitly about its contradictions: Confusion. What do I want to do? Do I want to get big? Do I want to get small? Cardio or weights? Bulked or lean? . . . Unless you know what you’re doing ultimately you’re getting to the point where you know you look good and then you become addicted to reading all [the gym and fitness magazines] and not really knowing.

Particularly in the first quote, Jonny is situating these affective contradictions (‘feeling good’/‘feeling confused’) within the promises of the neoliberal good life contained within the glamorous, self-improving, health culture associated with a particular representation of Los Angeles. On the one hand, Jonny’s striving to embody these goals through the body-work he is doing made him ‘feel better’ but as he continued to ‘addictively’ pursue them he mainly felt ‘confusion’ in a way that the second quote arguably shows as suspending his capacity to act – or in Berlant’s terms impeded the transformations it so spectacularly promised. Nevertheless, Jonny, like the other interviewees, continues to addictively pursue these goals, because the joys of accumulating spornosexual capital are one of the few remaining for young men in the post-2008 conjuncture. If we accept the argument put forward in the previous section, that this new form of body-work is a typical neoliberal cultural practice, then perhaps the descriptions given by the interviewees offer us an insight into one of the ways that neoliberalism secures its hegemony more generally – through the promise of experiencing joyful affective intensities despite being unable to offer most people anything of enduring value: what Lauren Berlant has called cruel optimism.

CONCLUSION Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff have suggested that women are the ideal subjects of neoliberalism, and one of the ways this manifests itself is in the surveillance of their own bodies.51 This chapter builds on this insight by arguing that the rise of men working out and sharing images of their muscular bodies on social media platforms points to shifts in the configuration of contemporary power relations that have occurred since 2008 in which members of a social group that was historically able to use their minds for the purposes of value creation are now increasingly having to rely on their bodies. In so doing it provides evidence for this book’s central argument: that

76

Chapter 3

neoliberalism after 2008 has had a feminising axiomatic, one that works to make more of our lives resemble women’s under-capitalist hetero-patriarchy both through the precarious conditions we live in and in the way we are encouraged to sexualise our bodies as compensation. Moreover, by speaking to men who engage in spornosexual practice about what has proven to be a very limited form of value creation, it becomes possible to map the affective contradictions of not only this particular practice but, arguably, a more general structure of feeling that has dominated the post-2008 neoliberal everyday – a structure of feeling that Lauren Berlant has called cruel optimism. However, this is not all this analysis has revealed. As the quotes from the interviews demonstrate, there is an incipient selfconsciousness on the part of the interviewees that engaging in this practice is not only a limited mode of value creation but also one whose pursuit is beset by occasionally incapacitating affective contradictions. This moves the analysis of cruel optimism beyond Berlant’s, which offers little insight into what people make of inhabiting this precarious structure of feeling she has so persuasively identified. It also moves the analysis beyond some of the findings of the Foucauldian work on gendered embodiment discussed in chapter 1, which had the effects of similar body practices on the production of neoliberal subjectification as so totalising that it became impossible to imagine a way out. Though hardly the beginning of a popular anti-neoliberal consciousness, the nascent awareness that neoliberal ideals cannot deliver on what they promise should offer hope to those of us interested in contesting their territorialisation of our everyday lives. It is here where the potential of a popular resistance to them can be located.

NOTES 1. Mark Simpson, ‘The Metrosexual Is Dead. Long Live the “Spornosexual” ’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 10 June 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/fashionand-style/10881682/The-metrosexual-is-dead.-Long-live-the-spornosexual.html. 2. Theo Merz, ‘It’s Not Easy Being a Spornosexual Man’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 9 July 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/fashion-and-style/10954824/ Its-not-easy-being-a-spornosexual-man.html; Theo Merz, ‘Quiz: Are You a Spornosexual?’ The Daily Telegraph, last modified 17 July 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ men/the-filter/10891810/Quiz-Are-you-a-spornosexual.html; Louise Peacock, ‘If This Is What Spornosexual Means, Then God Help Us All’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 17 July 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10894876/ Spornosexuality-If-this-is-what-spornosexual-means-then-god-help-us-all.html; Tim Stanley, ‘ “Spornosexuality”: An Evolutionary Step Backwards for Men’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 12 June 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/­thinkingman/10895389/Spornosexuality-an-evolutionary-step-backwards-for-men.html;



The Spornosexual 77

Jenny Wotherspoon, ‘Meet the New Breed of Chest-Waxing, Hair-Straightening, Weight-Lifting Spornosexuals’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 30 December 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10954865/Meet-the-newbreed-of-chest-waxing-hair-straightening-weight-lifting-spornosexuals.html. 3. Suzanne Moore, ‘The Decay of Women Is Obsessively Charted. Now Men Are Finding Out How It Feels’, The Guardian, last modified 30 July 2014, http://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/30/decay-women-men-finding-out. 4. Clive Martin, ‘How Sad Young Douchebags Took Over Modern Britain’, Vice.com, last modified 13 March 2014, http://www.vice.com/en_uk/print/ anatomy-of-a-new-modern-douchebag. 5. Max Olesker, ‘The Rise and Rise of the Spornosexual’, last modified 12 January 2015, https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/news/a7588/the-rise-and-rise-ofthe-spornosexual. 6. Nick Curtis, ‘Mansformation: How Matthew Lewis, Calvin Harris and Chris Pratt Went from Geek to God’, The Evening Standard, last modified 28 May 2015, http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/mansformation-how-matthew-lewiscalvin-harris-and-chris-pratt-went-from-geek-to-god-10281840.html. 7. Stanley, ‘Spornosexuality’. 8. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 9. Sport England, Active People Survey, 2013–2014 (UK Data Service, 2016). 10. There is no data available for 2015 and 2016 (see https://activepeople .­sportengland.org/Result#Id=168532&OutputType=1). After 2016 the methodology of the survey changed, making a direct comparison with previous years difficult to achieve. 11. Rebecca Smithers, ‘E-Cigarettes and Sports Nutrition Products Lead Grocery Sales Boost’, The Guardian, last modified 30 December 2014, http://www.theguardian. com/business/2014/dec/30/e-cigarettes-sports-nutrition-supermarkets-sales-rise-uk. 12. Stephen Brook, ‘Men’s Magazines and Women’s Glossies Share the Pain of Recession’, The Guardian, last modified 13 August 2009, http://www.theguardian. com/media/2009/aug/13/magazine-abcs-mens-womens. 13. In 2018, the commuter magazine Shortlist had overtaken Men’s Health as market leader in terms of circulation. However, the circulation figures of commuter and news shelf magazines are calculated differently. The former count their entire print run, whereas the latter count only the copies they sell. In 2018 Men’s Health still led in terms of news shelf titles, with a circulation of 175,683 compared to GQ’s 115,006. Freddy Mayhew, ‘Men’s Lifestyle Magazine ABCs: Men’s Fitness Is Biggest Circulation Loser as GQ and Shortlist Hold Firm’, Press Gazette, last modified 19 February 2018, https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/mens-lifestyle-magazine-abcsmens-fitness-is-biggest-circulation-loser-as-gq-and-shortlist-hold-firm/. 14. Mark Sweney, ‘UK Consumer Magazines Lost Nearly 1m Print Sales in First Half of 2014 – ABC’, The Guardian, last modified 14 August 2014, http://www. theguardian.com/media/2014/aug/14/uk-consumer-magazines-print-sales-2014. 15. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 16. Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997); Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993).

78

Chapter 3

17. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (London: Cassell, 1994); Alan Sinfield, Gay and After (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998). 18. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford, eds., Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988); Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996); Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption (London: UCL Press, 1996). 19. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 20. Stuart Hall, ‘The Neo-Liberal Revolution’, Cultural Studies, 25:6 (2011): 705–728. 21. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity; Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 22. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 104. 23. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007). 24. Ibid., 98. 25. Ibid., 110. 26. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 27. Beatrix Campbell, ‘After Neoliberalism: The Need for a Gender Revolution’, Soundings, 56 (2014): 10–26. 28. Sally Davison and George Shire, ‘Race, Migration and Neoliberalism’, Soundings, 59 (2014): 81–95. 29. Ben Little, ‘A Growing Discontent: Class and Generation under Neoliberalism’, Soundings, 56 (2014): 27–40. 30. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 31. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 192. 32. Ibid., 1. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic TM: Politics and Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Alison Hearn, ‘Producing “Reality” Branded Content, Branded Selves, Precarious Futures’ in A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Oullette (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 439. 35. Banet-Weiser, Authentic TM, 14. 36. This version of ‘structure of feeling’ is the one developed in Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). The meaning of the concept shifts throughout Williams’s oeuvre. 37. Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 38. Katariina Kyrola, The Weight of Images: Affect, Body Image and Fat in the Media (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014).



The Spornosexual 79

39. Valerie Walkerdine and Luis Jimenez, Gender, Work and Community after De-Industrialisation: A  Psychosocial Approach to Affect (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 40. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’ in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–258. 41. Theresa Senft and Nancy Baym, ‘Selfies Introduction – What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon’, International Journal of Communication, 9 (2015): 1588–1606; Katrin Tiidenberg and Edgar Gomez Cruz, ‘Selfies, Image and the Re-Making of the Body’, Body and Society, 21:4 (2015): 77–102. 42. Bryan Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (London: Sage, 2008). 43. All participants have been anonymised. 44. Catherine Hakim, Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 45. This concept has been persuasively contested by a number of people. For example: J.E. Forsyth-Harris, ‘Book Review: Catherine Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital’, Sexualities, 16:1/2 (2013): 238–239; Adam Isiah Green, ‘Erotic Capital and the Power of Desirability: Why “Honey Money” Is a Bad Collective Strategy for Remedying Gender Inequality’, Sexualities, 16:1/2 (2013): 137–158; Chris Warhurst, ‘Extended Book Review: Catherine Hakim Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital’, Work, Employment and Society, 26:6 (2012): 1036–1038. Nevertheless I believe the term ‘erotic capital’ still has purchase in describing the cultivation of sexual desirability as a form of value creation. 46. Laura Harvey, Jessica Ringrose and Rosalind Gill, ‘Swagger, Ratings and Masculinity: Theorising the Circulation of Social and Cultural Value in Teenage Boys’ Digital Peer Networks’, Sociological Research Online, 18:4 (2013): 1–11. 47. Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Disaffected Consent: That Post-Democratic Feeling’, Soundings 60 (2015): 29–41. 48. Phil Cohen, ‘The Centre Will Not Hold: Changing Principles of Political Hope’, Soundings 60 (2015): 42–56. 49. Lawrence Grossberg, We All Want to Change the World: The Paradox of the US Left – A Polemic (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2015). 50. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004 [1980]). 51. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, ‘Introduction’ in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, eds. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–20.

Chapter 4

RuPaul’s Drag Race Body Transformation Tutorials: Drag Queens and Digital Capitalism

In the previous two chapters we looked at the emergence of two new digitally mediated male body practices that have emerged as responses to historical conditions created by post-2008 neoliberalism. In both cases I argued that men were making their bodies visible in ways historically associated with women, as a means of creating (limited) value in contexts where the means to create more enduring forms of value had been eroded for all, except global elites. In this chapter I look at another feminising digitally mediated male body practice that has gained unprecedented visibility within the post-2008 conjuncture: the YouTube body transformation tutorials presented by the drag queens who have competed on reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009– ) (RPDR). In these tutorials, the contestants draw on the generic conventions of mainstream, cis-gendered, hetero-feminine make-up tutorials in order to demonstrate the different techniques needed to create their drag queen ‘looks’ – the appearance of their drag characters. This chapter explores how this once-marginal body practice achieved the visibility that it had during the post-2008 moment by producing a version of drag culture designed to exploit digital capitalism’s sex/gender order. This is a culture in which digital media has helped facilitate the movement of once-marginalised expressions of sex and gender into the mainstream but only on the condition they advance neoliberalism’s ideological and material interests. RPDR presents a version of drag that does precisely this, repurposing drag’s subversive potential in the interests of neoliberalism. In so doing, the success of RPDR and its body project provides further evidence that after 2008, neoliberalism has a feminising axiomatic that can be read through the digital mediation of male body practices. 81

82

Chapter 4

RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE RPDR first aired in the US in 2009 on gay interest television channel Logo TV. Created by the production company World of Wonder, the show follows the reality competition format. In weekly, hour-long episodes drag queens compete in challenges in order to be crowned ‘America’s next drag superstar’. Since it first aired RPDR has achieved considerable commercial success as well as surprising mainstream cultural relevance. In 2017, the show has moved from Logo TV to its parent channel VH1, with its more mainstream audience, in part because of year-on-year ratings increases. Season 10 received an overall viewership of 723,000 in the US market, making it the most viewed season of RPDR.1 It has also received industry recognition. Between 2015 and 2018 it won nine Emmys out of a possible twenty-three nominations. It has spawned a successful cottage industry that includes spinoff TV shows (e.g. Untucked [2010–], Drag U [2010–2012]), relaunched RuPaul’s music career and created a multitude of other RPDR-related branding, content and merchandising opportunities. These include annual fan conventions in Los Angeles, New York and London, smartphone games and a World of Wonder smartphone app, as well as launching the multimedia careers of its contestants on a scale that was unimaginable for US drag queens in the years before RPDR. While drag has, since its very beginnings, had some presence in mainstream culture, the success of RPDR has given unprecedented visibility to a culture with distinctly subcultural origins. A significant factor in the show’s success has been the use of social media.2 Logo TV, World of Wonder, RDPR and RuPaul, as well as the other judges and contestants have multiple profiles across all the major social media platforms. This offers them both branding and promotional opportunities as well as opens up new revenue streams that are necessary for a reality television franchise to generate income within the economic and technological conditions of the neoliberal media landscape outlined in chapter 2. It also facilitates fan participation with members of the production team, including the show’s contestants, as well as with each other – RDPR regularly generates heated discussions on Reddit. In 2017 World of Wonder attempted to further capitalise on their social media content by launching the WOW Presents Plus streaming service, where new and old World of Wonder content can be streamed via subscription through either the service’s website or its app. All of this ensures a continuous flow of RPDR-related content when the show goes off air. One of the popular genres of RPDR-related online content is, what I am calling here, the body transformation tutorial. This tutorial riffs on the more mainstream make-up tutorial genre, in which mostly white, middleclass, conventionally beautiful, heteronormatively feminine, cis-gendered



RuPaul’s Drag Race 83

women have re-mediated the beauty pages of women’s magazines to produce audio-visual content that teaches make-up application techniques while simultaneously promoting the cosmetic brands that they use. The RPDR body transformation tutorials both pastiche and parody these more mainstream versions, either offering straightforward body modification tutorials or, in a style typical of drag performance, satirising both the techniques being demonstrated and the generic conventions being used to demonstrate them. While becoming a drag queen is a mode of feminine embodiment, and, therefore, these tutorials will demonstrate make-up techniques similar to the more mainstream versions, drag’s distinction from normative modes of femininity also means these tutorials necessarily teach body modification procedures specific to them. For instance, there are tutorials on tucking (the folding away of a penis between a man’s legs so as to become invisible in tight fitting clothes) and padding (the application of sculpted foam pads to the top of a drag queen’s legs to give them feminine curves). These tutorials are posted on World of Wonder’s YouTube channel ‘WOW Presents’, its streaming service ‘WOW Presents Plus’ or the drag queen’s own YouTube channels. They also appear on the YouTube channels of women’s magazine brands like Allure and Cosmopolitan, providing further evidence of the crossover appeal of RPDR and the mainstreaming of drag culture that it has evinced. The unprecedented mainstream popularity of a television show about drag queens thus offers a unique opportunity to consider the changed place of gender and the body during the post-2008 conjuncture. Why has this mode of gendered embodiment achieved such popularity during this conjuncture? When subcultures move from the margins to the mainstream, cultural power is gained while elements of their subcultural power are lost. What version of drag has made it to the mainstream, and what versions have remained at the margins and with what implications for contemporary understandings of gendered embodiment? What role does digital media play in all of this? And what does answering these questions help reveal about the changing power dynamics of the post-2008 conjuncture, in a more general sense? A focus on the RPDR body transformation tutorials is well placed to answer these particular questions. In demonstrating, narrating and mediating how these popular drag queens alter their bodies to achieve their gender transformations, these tutorials offer the most condensed and explicit articulation of RPDR’s ideologies of gendered embodiment – the most popular drag ideology of the post-2008 conjuncture. In this chapter I understand these tutorials as digitally mediated male body practices. This is potentially contentious given media debates that took place in 2018 over who gets cast in RPDR, with RuPaul claiming that he would not let a transitioning trans-woman compete on the show. He said, ‘You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you

84

Chapter 4

start changing your body . . . it takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing’.3 This caused a social media storm in which RuPaul was accused of transphobia, forcing him to issue an apology over Instagram, and eventually casting trans-woman Gia Gunn in RPDR All Stars 4 at the end of 2018. Historically both cis-gendered women have performed as drag queens (sometimes called ‘bio-queens’) as have trans-women with different understandings of what being trans* means to them. At its most basic, a drag queen is anyone, regardless of gendered or sexual embodiment and identity, who embodies an exaggerated version of femininity for the purposes of performance. To be clear, the claim of this chapter is not that ‘drag queening’ itself is a male body practice, but that the majority of the RPDR body transformation tutorials can be understood as digitally mediated male body practices. This is partially because the governing logic of RPDR, until 2018 at least, has been that the show claimed to bear witness to the gendered transformation of the male body, evidenced not only by RuPaul’s controversial comments but also by one of the show’s signature catchphrases, ‘Gentleman start your engines, and may the best woman win’. Mainly, however, I am approaching these tutorials as male body practices because the majority of them frame themselves as such. In most of the tutorials the tutor will explicitly identify as a man. This is not to endorse the trans-exclusionary logics of the show or any of its associated content, but instead to attempt to think through what the increased popularity of online content that narrates itself as a male body practice can reveal about contemporary logics of gendered embodiment, as well as shifts in the wider power dynamics of the post-2008 conjuncture. In this chapter I argue that RPDR and its body transformation tutorials have become as popular as they have because they successfully occupy a cultural space that did not exist before the post-2008 conjuncture. Prior to 2008, the gender arrangements of LGBT cultures under both Fordism and post-Fordism marginalised drag queens in various ways. The reconstitution of capital after the 2008 crisis – referred to variously as post-post-Fordism, platform and/ or digital capitalism, in which neoliberal capital utilised digital media to redouble its efforts as both a mode of capital accumulation and an ideological project – reconfigured this exclusionary sex/gender order. Facilitated by the technological affordances of social media, digital capitalism’s sex/gender order is characterised by a flattening of the homonormative/queer hierarchy of post-Fordism into a proliferation of expressions of gender and sexuality that are relatively equally exploitable by neoliberal capital. This intersects with an already-existing neoliberal media culture that includes, among other features, genres such as reality television and subjectivation strategies such as self-branding through aesthetic labour over social media.4 RPDR as a transmedia phenomenon occupies the cultural space opened up at this intersection.



RuPaul’s Drag Race 85

It does this by combining reality television and social media to create a monetisable audience for a once marginalised queer culture. In RPDR drag, a potentially subversive form of gendered embodiment, is recast as a neoliberal enterprise: organised around neoliberal narratives of self-authored transformation in which drag characters become self-brands through the performance of aesthetic labour that perpetuates post-feminist beauty norms. In typical drag style these norms are parodied but not, I conclude, in a fashion that ultimately resists digital capitalism. Rather, this once-gender-subversive, feminising male body practice paradoxically denaturalises neoliberal ideologies while advancing its material interests in a historically novel way. In order to make this argument this chapter is split into two sections. In the first section I use existing historical literature to trace the relationship that drag culture has had with different phases of capitalist development, specifically by looking at the way that gendered embodiment has been organised in non-heterosexual subcultures. I then theorise the reasons why the version of drag celebrated by RPDR became as successful as it did after 2008, by mapping what I argue to be the most significant conjunctural shifts that opened up the cultural space for RPDR to occupy. Historicising RPDR in this way is necessary to understand the historical significance of RPDR’s success as well as its precise relationship to digital capitalism. In the second section I outline how RPDR occupied this newly opened cultural space by analysing the body transformation tutorials. The body transformation tutorials are well placed to do this because, as already discussed, they offer the most explicit articulation of RPDR’s ideologies of gendered embodiment, and, therefore, their analysis can give a clear picture of the version of drag that had to be created to be successful in the post-2008 conjuncture. This is achieved through undertaking a discourse analysis of the tutorials that have been uploaded onto Logo TV’s and WOW Presents YouTube channels. The tutorials on Logo TV are more straightforwardly pedagogical, seemingly more intent on teaching the viewer how to create a particular look rather than entertaining them. The tutorials on WOW Presents are more in keeping with the production style that World of Wonder have been honing since they began in the 1990s – campy, risqué and irreverent; very little is taught by the tutorial’s end. At the time of writing (20 December 2018) there were a total of forty-eight tutorials across both channels, with a combined 35,187,670 views. In viewing the tutorials I paid close attention to how gendered embodiment and its transformation was represented verbally, performatively and aesthetically. I also tried to discern how the discourses of neoliberalism that I outlined in chapter 1 were present in them, looking at their relationship not only to capitalism but also to race and gender. In order to bring these discourses into sharper relief I contrasted them with how they appeared in both the hetero-feminine make-up tutorials and other non-RPDR modes of drag. What emerged was a contradictory picture,

86

Chapter 4

so the second section is further split into sub-sections that demonstrate the ways that the tutorials perpetuate neoliberalism, followed by sub-sections that discuss how they subvert it. The concluding part of this chapter considers these contradictory strands within the wider historical conditions that have produced them, enabling me to understand not only the particular way that neoliberalism is articulated within them but what their popularity might tell us about the gendering nature of post-2008 neoliberalism more generally. GENDER IN LESBIAN AND GAY CULTURE UNDER FORDISM Perhaps ironically, the material conditions that enabled lesbian and gay subcultures to emerge under Fordism actually served to marginalise drag as a practice of gendered embodiment. To fully understand this we must first outline the gender arrangements of lesbian and gay cultures under capitalism. The earliest scholarly account of capitalism’s relationship to lesbian and gay men is John D’Emilio’s classic ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, in which he argues lesbian and gay identities emerged because of industrial capitalism for reasons explained later.5 This essay set in motion a materialist line of inquiry into the origins and operations of contemporary LGBT cultures that will form the basis of this section. Scholars working from this approach argue that before industrial capitalism, economic production took place in households, so the model of the heterosexual procreative family was necessary to ensure survival within this economy.6 The rise of factory production and waged labour undermined the material basis for heterosexuality, causing, in the words of Peter Drucker, ‘the reification of sexual desire based on gender object choice’7 and the invention of heterosexuality and homosexuality as sexological and sociological categories among Western middle classes. Drucker argues that, conversely, a model of sexuality based on gender polarised notions of manhood and womanhood that existed among workingclass communities well into the twentieth century. In this culture, same-sex relationships would often imitate these heterosexual gender polarities. For example, lesbian relationships were often organised around the butch/femme dyad. Drag aesthetics emerge within the gender polarities of a same-sex culture mimicking working class heterosexualised norms: it was mostly performed in working class venues like vaudeville music halls. These gender arrangements began to transform within the contradictions of Fordism (1945–1973). The cross-class prosperity generated under the Fordist settlement (union-protected, secure, long-term, waged labour and welfare provision) further undermined the material necessity for procreative heterosexuality, more closely aligning working- and middle-class sexual



RuPaul’s Drag Race 87

cultures. The increased disposable income all this provides, coupled with the expansion of hedonistic consumer cultures, provided the conditions for gay male subcultures in particular to flourish in the 1950s and 1960s. These subcultures existed in consumer spaces such as urban bars and bathhouses and were further networked through the distribution of semi-pornographic materials in consumer magazines like Physique Pictorial.8 While the material basis for heterosexuality may have been eroded, its ideological necessity had not, and what Louis Althusser called the repressive status apparatuses – bar raids, entrapment of gay men having sex in public, medical pathologisation and so on – continued to be employed in an attempt to maintain what was clearly becoming a residual formation. It was the contradiction between material conditions that enabled a gay culture to thrive and the intensification of its often-brutal policing, which provided the stimulus for gay liberation politics after Stonewall in 1969: historical conditions existed in which a gay community was being consolidated and, therefore, had the means to protect itself from the still-repressive state.9 It is during this period that gender in metropolitan gay subcultures operated according to the logic of ‘relative homogeneity’10 largely because Fordism lessened the class distinctions within genders, if not between them. The gender polarity that structured many working class same-sex couplings in a previous period subsequently weakened, and polarised gender formations such as butch/femme, camp and rough trade were ‘squelched’11 out of lesbian and gay cultures. A clear visual representation of this new gender order is Peter Hujar’s iconic poster for the Gay Liberation Front in which all the men and women have the same androgynous hippy look – shoulder length hair, bell-bottomed trousers and unisex shirts and T-shirts. It is important to add that though the look may have been androgynous, the radical posturing of the GLF was decidedly macho, especially among many of its gay men,12 eventually developing into the macho presentations of gay male clone culture of the 1970s.13 Drag continued to exist within this context but, in keeping with the logics of this gender order, is increasingly viewed as an embarrassing throwback from a time best forgotten, reaching its historical nadir at the height of the gay liberation period, between 1969 and 1973, coinciding with the height of Fordism’s crisis of legitimation.14 Drag culture’s marginalisation by lesbian and gay cultures under Fordism has two different modes during this time: (i) drag queens attempt to participate in capitalism but mostly cannot; (ii) drag is used to critique all gender arrangements under Fordist capitalism. The first mode is best illustrated in Esther Newton’s classic Mother Camp, an ethnography of the US drag scene in the 1960s.15 In this book Newton describes drag queens as ‘professional performers. They receive a regular salary for a specialised service: entertaining audiences’16 and, therefore, as subjects attempting to participate in the

88

Chapter 4

capitalist economy. According to Newton, even a successful drag queen could not be a successful participant in American capitalism mostly because of the stigmatisation of doing the job in the gay bar scene. Wages were low, job opportunities were precarious, working conditions were terrible if not outright dangerous and there was no basic organisation among the drag queens as workers who viewed each other as competition as opposed to colleagues sharing common interests. Drag as a profession enjoyed none of the benefits conferred on workers under the Fordist settlement. An example of the second mode of drag that critiqued the gender arrangements of Fordist capitalism would be The Cockettes, who were a San Francisco – based drag troupe who were embedded in the city’s radical politics during the 1970s. The Cockettes ran themselves on an explicitly anticapitalist agenda albeit somewhat haphazardly. As much as possible they existed outside capitalist social and economic relations, stealing costumes, make-up and props and not charging for their shows.17 The more political members quoted Marxist-Leninist theory in their performances.18 A further example of drag as radical critique is the Radical Faeries – another West Coast collective who pursued drag as a queer ‘neo-pagan spiritual practice’, outside contemporary capitalist social relations.19 In a little-known article originally published in the French newspaper Liberation, Felix Guattari proposes an intriguing theorisation of drag under Fordist capitalism. Building on arguments he made with Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus, Guattari first outlines the organisation of gender and desire under Fordist capitalism, claiming that ‘the social body’ is polarised in masculinity. The feminine body, on the other hand, through its problematic transformation ‘into an object of lust’ under Fordism, paradoxically works against the territorialising pull of capital and towards the pull of desire. Therefore, for Guattari, anyone who has a close relationship to the feminine body, including drag queens, will work to undo capitalism. His evidence is French militant drag troupe The Mirabelles, who took a similar approach to their US counter-cultural counterparts.20 GENDER IN LGBT AND QUEER CULTURES UNDER POST-FORDISM The materialist scholarship on twentieth-century lesbian and gay culture goes onto argue that after Fordism’s crisis of legitimation (1967/8–1973), in which post-Fordism becomes the leading mode of capital accumulation and neoliberalism the hegemonic project which supports it, metropolitan lesbian and gay cultures change in ways that follow the logics of niche marketing so necessary for this phase of capitalism to function. In this period (1974/5– 2008) we see lesbian and gay cultures organise around two broad internally



RuPaul’s Drag Race 89

differentiated categories: ‘LGBT’ and ‘queer’.21 Though this process begins in the 1980s, in many ways these differences were fully consolidated during the 1990s, after the intense homophobia generated by the AIDS crisis began to subside in the metropolitan centres of the global north. Journalists in the media referred to this as the post-Gay moment, which Alan Sinfield analysed as the movement of some, mostly middle-class, white, gay men into the mainstream as targeted consumers, a move that offered a highly limited form of liberation to a very privileged subset of LGBT communities. Though not using the terms, Sinfield is very clearly talking about what has happened to gay men under neoliberal/post-Fordist capitalism – which incorporated this group into its dominant structures by addressing them as a niche consumer market.22 Lisa Duggan, naming neoliberalism explicitly, notes how the fortunes of this section of the community further ‘improve’ after 9/11 after which a ‘homonormative’ gay politics that focuses on inclusion into conservative institutions – the consumer economy, marriage, the family and the army – becomes not only hegemonic in LGBT culture but also acceptable to liberal US society.23 With regard to homonormative media cultures that emerge under post-Fordism, Eve Ng coins the term ‘gaystreaming’ to describe media content that appeals to some mainstream audiences in line with the homonormative overtures of contemporary US culture.24 The establishment of Logo TV is key to this moment. The television programme that received the most attention from media studies scholars interested in homonormativity and the media during this time was Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007). In this popular reality television show, five gay men ‘train’ a straight man on how to become a better neoliberal consumer. To do this, these scholars argued, the programme draws on the conventions of the archetypal neoliberal reality television sub-genre, makeover television (more on which follows below).25 The gender arrangements of this homonormative moment, perhaps unsurprisingly, conformed to the gender ideals of the heteronormative institutions into which some gay men and lesbians were being incorporated. Gender non-conformity remains relatively marginalised in these cultures and, in the early 1990s, becomes labelled as ‘queer’ by artists, activists and academics in a bid to operationalise the subversive potential of the term against the hetero and homonormativity of LGBT and mainstream cultures. Many contemporary types of gender non-conformity, including those marginalised by gay liberation politics, are celebrated in queer cultural representations such as butch dykes and gay serial killers in New Queer Cinema, precisely because they puncture a hole in homonormativity’s politics of respectability. Drag kings and queens take on particular salience during this moment because, as both Judith Butler26 and Judith/[Jack] Halberstam27 argue, they reveal the performative nature of all gender categories, subverting them

90

Chapter 4

from within. Of course, as queer cultural productions marginalised by homo- and heteronormative cultures, the majority of drag queens still could not successfully participate in the post-Fordist economy. Jose Esteban Munoz does point to a small boom in ‘commercial drag’ during the 1990s, citing films To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995) and The Birdcage (1996) and the mainstream success of RuPaul as examples.28 It is important to note that of these cultural productions only RuPaul performed as a drag queen before this boom. RuPaul, however, is the exception that proves the rule. Right through the post-Fordist period, drag is excluded from the cultures of capitalism. As a drag queen informant told Dana Berkowitz and Linda Liska Belgrace in their ethnography of Miami’s drag scene (published in 2010), though the stigmatisation may have lessened by this point ‘drag just don’t pay the bills’.29 RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE AND DIGITAL CAPITALISM (2008– ) The success of RPDR since 2009 suggests that drag culture’s relationship to capitalism has changed. In this section I outline the conjunctural shifts that have occurred that I argue have created the space for this change to take place. Though they do not begin in 2008, the recomposition of neoliberal capitalism that occurs as a result of the financial crisis that took place that year intensifies a series of processes that culminate in the conditions of possibility for RPDR’s success. As I argued in chapter 1, neoliberal capital’s response to its own spectacular failure was a redoubling of its efforts in ways that further eviscerated the material conditions for all but global elites to thrive. Under Obama the US did not quite follow the same austerity programme of the UK and elsewhere across Europe, but nor does the US have the same sort of wealth redistribution mechanisms to dismantle in the first place. Structural inequality remained steep in this context, perhaps best illustrated by the rise of Silicon Valley, possibly the largest concentration of wealth into the smallest number of hands since the so-called robber barons of the late nineteenth century.30 The digital is key here, not only to how capitalism is able to maintain its accumulatory capacities after 2008 but also to the shifts in both the contemporary mediascape and the LGBTQIA+ sex/gender order that provide RPDR’s conditions of possibility. The use of digital infrastructures to accumulate capital (the creation of platforms to harvest data out of previously unmonetisable human activity) has already been covered in chapter 1. The remainder of this section outlines how the digital infrastructure reconfigures post-Fordist arrangements of non-heterosexual and non-cis-gendered identities (a front in gender politics that sees increased contestation during this period) outlined in



RuPaul’s Drag Race 91

the previous section, as well as their relationship to non-digital media forms, specifically the reality television genres that RPDR operates within. The origins of digital capitalism’s sex/gender order can be traced back to the late 1990s and 2000s when the expressions of gender and sexuality that were marginalised as queer under post-Fordism could begin to consolidate themselves in the cultural spaces afforded by newly accessible networked media. Bryce J. Renninger31 has called these cultural spaces ‘networked counterpublics’, which combines the concept of ‘networked publics’,32 or ‘spaces constructed by networked technologies’ and ‘counterpublics’ – the alternative public spheres where queer subjects gather.33 These networked counter-publics include the chat rooms outlined by John Edward Campbell in one of queer digital media studies’ first interventions ‘Getting It on Online’.34 The anonymity of these spaces and their networked nature enabled groups of geographically dispersed queers who had been marginalised by homonormativity (and pervasive mainstream homophobia) to find like-minded folk and communicate with each other outside the offline urban spaces of 1990s’ queer culture. Almost immediately neoliberal capital attempted to monetise the digital infrastructures of these networked counter-publics by developing platforms that approached these newly formed online communities as potential subscribers, audiences for personalised adverts and/or data sets to harvest. Gay dating websites like Gaydar were exemplary in this regard.35 This process intensified after 2008 when technological innovations such as smartphones and their applications, social media platforms and 3G-/4G-enabled constant connectivity, as well as the improved ability to monetise big data sets, meant digital capitalism became the hegemonic mode of capital accumulation after the 2007/8 crisis. Combined with the increasing sophistication of social media platforms, these innovations exponentially expanded both the types and amounts of networked counter-publics that might materialise, providing the techno-material conditions for a range of hitherto-marginalised sex/gender expressions and identities to further consolidate themselves as communities and cultures, both online and offline. The relationship that trans* identified people have had with social media platform Tumblr is understood by digital media studies scholars as exemplary in this regard. Different scholars have focused on different affordances to explain this relationship – the comparative anonymity of Tumblr, the way its comment function disincentivises trolling – but its hashtagging system is the most significant affordance to the discussion at hand. Hashtagging serves a number of purposes in this context: (i) it aggregates content that was highly niche in a pre-digital age into a single, globally accessible digital space; (ii) it networks a previously dispersed audience in a way that enables them to instantly communicate with each other; (iii) the text-based nature of hashtags creates new ‘folksonomies’ – or systems of categorisation that have been mutually devised by these newly networked

92

Chapter 4

audiences against hegemonic taxonomies that marginalise or even pathologise them.36,37 The effect this has had on trans* folk is as follows: whereas before the widespread take-up of the Internet, trans* folk could lead to very isolated lives, only engaging with trans* representation in print periodicals, ‘zines or the occasional queer arthouse film;38 social media, at its post-2008 levels of sophistication, has given them constant access to trans* representation and communication with other trans* people, as well as the capacities to collectively invent new languages to self-describe, ultimately consolidating new trans* (sub-)cultures, communities and identities. Other interventions have described similar processes in relations to asexuality39 and Brooklyn-based drag queens40 – the implications of which are built on later. These social media affordances work for a whole range of other sex/gender expressions too, providing the techno-material basis for the proliferation of identities that used to be organised under the signs of ‘LGBT’ or ‘queer’ into the more capacious ‘LGBTQIA+’. It is during this historical moment that it became possible for the conservative news website MailOnline to generate a moral panic about a UK government survey that asked school children to pick between twenty-two different gender identities.41 This digitally enabled proliferation of sex/gender identities never quite escaped the post-Fordist LGBT/ queer hierarchy: gay men even become acceptable to the misogynist alt-right while trans* issues are the privileged flashpoint of sex/gender politics of this moment. Where there is a degree of equality between these different sex/ gender expressions is in their amenability to digital capitalism’s apparatuses of capture, not only as hashtag identities become ‘granular demographic data points’42 to monetise, but also in the representational media produced around them. A good example of the latter is digital platform them.us created by luxury publisher Conde Nast, who publish high-end glossy magazines such as Vogue and GQ. Them.us produces digital media content for queer audiences who were un-catered for by post-Fordist, homonormative media culture. For example, its media kit states that homeless queer youth, transwomen and, significantly for this discussion, drag makeovers are some if its ‘Editorial Pillars’43 – groups with little disposable income, so insignificant to a business model centred on affluent niche markets. They have, however, become meaningful under digital capitalism’s sex/gender order in ways just described, demonstrated by the fact that leading global publisher Conde Nast have centred them in the editorial approach of their new digital platform, further mainstreaming once-marginalised sex/gender expressions. Digital Capitalism and Neoliberal Makeover Media It is not only the techno-material infrastructures of digital capitalism that open up the space in the post-2008 conjuncture for RPDR’s success. Rather



RuPaul’s Drag Race 93

it is the way these infrastructures intersect with existing media formats and genres and the ideologies that prevail within them, namely different reality television formats (talent competitions and makeover television) and, in the case of the body transformation tutorials, online makeover tutorials. What is common to these different media genres is that in each case their content advances neoliberal norms. As the body transformation tutorials are the focus of this chapter, I will explain how neoliberalism is advanced in their most immediate predecessors – makeover television and online make-up tutorials. In makeover television, so-called lifestyle experts teach members of the public the skills to self-improve, mostly through aspects of their embodiment – fashion, fitness, make-up and diet. Every major scholarly intervention on makeover television has understood the genre as some sort of neoliberal technology of the self, both teaching and disciplining participants and viewers into neoliberal subjectivity. Precisely how this takes place differs in each intervention. For Alison Hearn the genre disciplines subjects to self-brand so as to best navigate the precarious working conditions of post-Fordist economies.44 For James Hay and Laurie Oullette these programmes teach viewers how to become the ideal, self-governing neoliberal citizen in the face of the weakening welfare state.45 Tania Lewis and Katherine Sender both understand the function of makeover television to encourage us to reflexively understand ourselves as individuals in the face of the loosening of more traditional communal ties.46 Ultimately what the literature argues is that makeover television, through both disciplinary and pedagogical means, equips its participants and viewers with the corporeal skills to become autonomous, individualised entrepreneurs of the self, in historical conditions in which we can no longer rely on the state or any other collectivity to help take care of us. They also all point out that the ideal subject that makeover television encourages us to aspire to be is, invariably, white, middle class, cis-gendered and very often female. This focus on consumption and the gendered body becomes even sharper in online make-up tutorials – digital capitalism’s version of the makeover genre. Much narrower in scope than makeover television, online make-up tutorials are exclusively concerned with aesthetic labour and how to use cosmetics to produce the appearance of heterosexual, mostly white, femininity, again, to make women more desirable as both sexual partners and (non-threatening) employees. Running between five and twenty minutes they contain none of the shaming narratives that make for compelling television and are, therefore, far more pedagogical than disciplinary. As with the makeover paradigm, the emerging scholarship on this highly successful digitally mediated phenomenon almost exclusively understands it as both a product and perpetuation of neoliberalism. Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that make-up tutorials promote post-feminist myths of individual empowerment

94

Chapter 4

through labouring on the body to make it appear in line with white, normative femininity.47 Elizabeth Nathanson makes a similar argument, adding these women are self-described entrepreneurs (as opposed to celebrities or reality television stars) and thus this online content often explicitly articulates neoliberal ideologies of entrepreneurialism.48 There is also a growing literature that looks at fashion and lifestyle blogs more generally, all pointing to how they reinforce gendered neoliberalism through virtues of ‘entrepreneurial femininity’,49 ‘postfeminist empowerment’50 and consumption as self-reflexive individualisation.51 All these scholars draw on both McRobbie and Gill’s influential work that looks at the central place beauty cultures have acquired in the construction of contemporary post-feminist femininity, and the neoliberal norms this relies on.52 What is curious to reflect on here is that while there is a proliferation of sex/gender identities through the techno-material infrastructures of digital capitalism, the most culturally and economically successful are those that conform to the neoliberal body, beauty and ideological norms that remain hegemonic in the post-2008 conjuncture. This is as much the case for the sex/gender expressions on Conde Nast’s them.us as it is for the almost hypernormative hetero-feminine beauty vloggers. This brings us to RPDR and its body transformation tutorials. It is within this context that its unprecedented success begins to makes sense, a context produced at the culmination of conjunctural shifts in which digital media has been central to the perpetuation of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project after the 2008 crisis. Within this context, drag as a once marginalised form of gendered embodiment, becomes one of a range of sex/gender expressions that can become both visible and valuable to digital capitalism as long as it conforms to the neoliberal norms that remain hegemonic after 2008. This is precisely what RPDR does both as a reality television show and through its associated social media strategies and online content. World of Wonder and Logo TV have exploited the space produced at the intersection of reality television as a necessarily transmedia phenomenon (see chapter 2); digital capitalism’s techno-material infrastructures and the new sex/gender order that proliferates through it; and the neoliberal beauty, body and ideological norms that intensify after the 2008 crisis. It does this by funnelling drag culture into a reality television format, supported by an elaborate network of digital platforms and content that produces promotional, branding and merchandising opportunities. Most significantly for the argument being made in this book, they use digital media to recast drag, a once marginalised, if not outright subversive male body practice, as a neoliberal enterprise. This has been the condition for success for any sort of sex/gender expression, marginal or not, under digital capitalism. Because this is crucial to the book’s overall argument the remainder of the chapter will demonstrate precisely how this happens.



RuPaul’s Drag Race 95

RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE: NEGOTIATING NEOLIBERALISM When has it ever been possible for drag to be a viable career? Who knew? – LaTrice Royale53

Recasting drag as a neoliberal enterprise is no straightforward exercise. Drag’s modus operandi is parody and this operates at both the level of a drag queen’s performance and her look. In the case of the RPDR body transformation tutorials, what this results in is an embodiment of neoliberalism that is always at risk of undoing the ideological work it performs. However, for the performance to create value under digital capitalism this risk must be contained, and for the most part it is, ultimately resulting in a negotiation of neoliberalism that reveals the absurdity of its ideological agenda while paradoxically furthering its material interests. This negotiation of neoliberalism is evident in a number of facets of the body transformation tutorials. Firstly these tutorials are fundamentally ‘transformation’ narratives with transformation conceived as individually authored and manifesting at the level of the body through the purchasing of consumer goods – the archetypal neoliberal transformation or makeover narrative. Moreover, the transformation narratives that occur unfold very much according to the logics of post-feminist beauty norms that have provided the basis for neoliberal aesthetic labour, meaning that they promote beauty aesthetics rooted in normative versions of cisgendered, white femininity. This is surprising, given not only the range of ethnic identities of the RPDR contestants but also the range of drag aesthetics available, even elsewhere on the World of Wonder YouTube channel (see the later discussion in this chapter for details). The aesthetics of these bodily transformations are narrated using entrepreneurial discourses of branding. The RPDR queens are not the first to act as entrepreneurs but I think it is safe to say that they are the first to describe their drag personas as brands first and foremost. However, unlike the online make-up tutorials whose generic conventions they rely on for their form, the performances of the drag tutors either exaggerate or outright mock the different neoliberal injunctions embedded within them but not quite enough to subvert them completely. In doing so these body transformation tutorials, as exemplary RPDR digital content, slide into the cultural space outlined in the first half of this chapter meaning that the RPDR drag queens have been able to achieve a degree of visibility hitherto unexperienced by any sort of US drag queen before them. Drag as Neoliberal Transformation Narrative Ideologies of individual transformation are at the heart of the neoliberal project: if a person is made to believe that they alone have the capacity to transform their life circumstances they will not make demands on the state to

96

Chapter 4

do so. For ideas like this to become hegemonic across society they cannot just be expounded by political ideologues; they have to infiltrate the culture too. As described earlier, make over television and online make-up tutorials have been some of the key ways this particular facet of neoliberalism’s ideological complex has instantiated itself in Anglo-American culture. The RPDR body transformation tutorials do this by not only drawing on the generic conventions of the online make-up tutorial but also taking them one step further: they do not simply teach you how to improve your appearance, they teach you how to achieve the far more dramatic transformation of changing the appearance of your gender. For example, the tutorials that appear on Logo TV’s YouTube channel begin with the tutor introducing themselves out of drag saying, ‘Hi, my name is Detox, and I am going to take you from this [footage of Detox in “boy drag”]54 to this [jump cut to footage of Detox in full drag]’.55 This provides an audio-visual equivalent to the before and after shot, so central to the visual grammar of neoliberal aesthetic labour. The remainder of the tutorial concerns themselves with the procedures that makes this transformation happen, frequently using make-up techniques that de-masculinise bodily features. One of the most dramatic gender transformation techniques demonstrated in these tutorials is ‘tucking’. This involves pushing testicles into cavities located in the groin, and then strapping the penis and the scrotum between the legs, so they are no longer visible when the queen wears tight fitting feminine clothes such as a bikini or a leotard. The intention of tucking is to give queens who have penises the appearance of a cis-gendered woman. Given that the most popular contemporary discourses hold gender to be one of the aspects of the human experience to be rooted in biology and, therefore, only transformable through medical intervention, these tutorials, which achieve this self-authored visual transformation, add ballast to the neoliberal logics of the makeover genre in which they are situated. (We might speculate that one reason that trans* bodies have become so visible in contemporary popular culture, after decades of activist struggle, is because they offer the same sort of spectacular transformative narratives that are so appealing under neoliberalism.) These logics are doubly reinforced by the styles of femininity that the majority of the men transform into in these tutorials, which is almost always a heightened form of glamorous, white, cis-gendered, heteronormative femininity. In the parlance of the show ‘fishiness’ is the dominant mode of drag in RPDR – with fishiness metonymically signifying cis-gendered womanhood through a re-appropriation of the misogynistic description of the alleged odour of female genitals. (Some have claimed the term perpetuates misogyny rather than subverts it.56) What fishiness means visually is a curvy feminine body achieved through padding, and a wig and make-up resembling an exaggerated version of the sorts of styles common to ‘glamour’ media – for



RuPaul’s Drag Race 97

example fashion media, Hollywood movies and pornography. It is rare for the contestant’s tutorials to deviate from this mode. The dominance of fishy drag across the tutorials is thrown into starker relief if we compare it to the wide variety of drag styles available to the queens even in their own milieu. Also hosted on the World of Wonder YouTube channel is the makeover show ‘Transformations with James St James’. James St James, the show’s host, first gained notoriety as a ‘club kid’ – a queer subculture that came to prominence in New York’s downtown nightlife scene in the early 1990s, primarily through the outrageous, frequently gender-bending outfits they wore at the club nights that they promoted. Drawing on this aesthetic legacy ‘Transformations . . .’ invites various US drag queens to make St James over in their own style. The RPDR contestants come on and make him over in the ‘fishy’ style just described. But there are countless more (at the time of writing there were 173 tutorials in total) that draw on a wide spectrum of aesthetics that have little interest in conventional notions of hetero-feminine beauty, even in exaggerated form. These include horror film, manga, punk rock, pyschedelia and New York club kid. As a brief example we can look at the episode featuring drag artist Hungry who refers to her style as ‘distorted drag’.57 Though there are elements of fishy drag discernible in the look she gives St James, they are minor notes of the transformation that more closely resembles a combination of a Rorschach test and a punk rock, Elizabethan jester. Hungry describes it as ‘a cute little school boy’ to which St James adds ‘. . . on Mars . . . on acid’. There is a huge variety of ways drag can visually transform gender, even in the discursive universe underpinning RPDR associated content. Yet the transformation tutorials of the RPDR queens rely on a very narrow aesthetic, the one we have come to associate with the aspirations of neoliberal aesthetic labour. This is compounded further if we look at the racial composition of these tutorials. Of the forty-eight tutorials uploaded onto the LOGO and World of Wonder YouTube channel 30 feature white queens, nine black, five East Asian and four LatinX. This is remarkable given not only the multi-ethnic nature of the queens who compete on the show, but also the fact the brand is built around an African-American celebrity. The non-white RPDR participants frequently comment on the racial dynamics of the show and its associated content. As just one example, in a cast interview promoting the launch of RPDR All Stars Season 4, contestant Naomi Smalls is asked if there is a formula to winning the show. She quips ‘blonde and white’ to which fellow contestant Monique Heart responds using one of her signature catchphrases ‘facts are facts’. RPDR has become successful, it seems, on the condition that it presents a version of a once subversive body practice that poses little threat to dominant arrangements of race and gender, in order that it remain competitive under digital capitalism.

98

Chapter 4

Drag as Branding The neoliberal elements of this transformation are even more pronounced in the discourses underpinning their narration. Both the discourse and the practice of branding saturate the tutorials. First and foremost branding is most noticeably present in the fact that almost all of the queens refer to themselves as brands as opposed to characters or personas, terms drag queens historically used to self-describe. For example, in LaTrice Royale’s make-up tutorial on Logo’s YouTube channel, she says: ‘I decided on this entrance look because I wanted to make sure that my hello to the world was really true to the LaTrice Royale brand: big hair and jewellery and stones and glitter’.58 Royale is perhaps one of the most entrepreneurial of the RPDR contestants, using her brand to launch business ventures beyond her own performances in LGBT venues across the globe. In 2015, she also set up her own business LaTrice Royale Inc. Talent and Management, a management agency for drag queens and other performers who work on the same circuit. She explicitly articulated her drag-as-business approach at a panel called the ‘Business of Drag’ at RuPaul’s Drag Con 2016 convention. When asked by an audience member if she would ever perform out of drag without being paid she responded, ‘I mean . . . you build a brand, if you give it away for free there’s no value, it cheapens everything . . . I want to act. I want to do movies and film. I want to be on the big screen. I want to expand beyond drag and still have LaTrice be a commodity. . . . So it is all a business’.59

This is clearly a significant departure not only from the explicitly anticapitalist drag like The Cockettes but also from the work-a-day drag queens from the ethnographies cited earlier. It is one thing to attempt to make a living out of drag performances, but quite another for a drag queen to describe herself primarily as a brand, a commodity and a business enterprise – a common mode of self-identification among the RPDR queens. For some of the queens, their expertise at transforming their bodies becomes their brand. For example, Trinity ‘the Tuck’ Taylor is so-called because her tuck so convincing, and inevitably this has led to a series of YouTube tucking tutorials.60 RPDR queens also develop lines of merchandise (e.g. T-shirts, jewellery, make-up lines) based on their brands that they will promote on their body transformations tutorials. For example, RPDR contestant William Belli has branded his own duct tape, which queens use for tucking among other things, and he and other queens promote it on their tutorials. They also use their tutorials to promote their own social media profiles and, of course, RPDR itself.



RuPaul’s Drag Race 99

Drag as Subversion of Neoliberalism Mimi Imfurst:  We’re living in a really unique time where drag is the most mainstream it’s ever become but it’s still not mainstream. Drag Race is not American Idol. Merle Ginsberg:  Thank fucking God MI:  It’s this weird double-edged sword. You want that access to mainstream success, but the minute you do you lose . . . there’s something about drag . . . it’s dangerous. Latrice Royale:  It’s a little dirty MI:  It’s satirical.61

In the previous section I have argued that the mainstream success of RPDR has come about precisely because it has successfully conformed to the neoliberal norms of the post-2008 conjuncture. It offers a particularly spectacular version of neoliberalism’s transformation narratives, in line with postfeminism’s raced and gendered beauty ideals, albeit in exaggerated form. It is also completely saturated by strategies and discourses of neoliberal (self-) branding. However, this is not the whole story. Just as RPDR contestant Mimi Imfurst argues in the previous quote, the show is not mainstream like American Idol. As a reality TV show based on drag culture it remains both ‘satirical’ and even ‘dirty’. In this section I look at how these aspects of RPDR are apparent in the body transformation tutorials and what this does to the relationship to neoliberalism established in the previous section. The extreme nature of drag aesthetics is widely understood to at least draw attention to, if not outright subvert, the assumed naturalness of the genres, ideas and aesthetics with which they engage. How is that dynamic at play here? The first way this dynamic can arguably be seen in the transformation tutorials is in the exaggerated nature of the looks that the tutors demonstrate. Though clearly drawing on the problematically raced and gendered glamour aesthetics associated with post-feminist beauty culture, it is possible to read the queen’s exaggerated versions as, at the very least, having fun with these aesthetics if not outright poking fun at them. This becomes particularly apparent when you contrast them with online make-up tutorials intended for cisgendered woman, which, though displaying the labour and constructedness of contemporary femininity, are predicated on the normative assumption that cis-gendered women should naturally want to engage in these labours. This is problematised in the RPDR tutorials, if only ever so slightly, by simple virtue of the fact that men are engaging in the labours associated with normative femininity. For example, in Katya Zamolodchikova’s eyelash tutorial for the WOW Presents YouTube channel she jokes ‘and there you have it thick, beautiful, full female lashes on your gross man face’.62 It is important not

100

Chapter 4

to make too much of this. Digital capitalism clearly remains untroubled by gender subversion as long as it dutifully facilitates flows of capital. Nevertheless, I would not want to lose sight of the queer potential of men engaging in the labours of normative femininity even when so much of this potential is demonstrably captured by capitalism. This queer potential is teased out further by the tutorials through their performance styles. Even in the more straightforward demonstration style of the Logo tutorial there is something inevitably camp and exaggerated about a drag queen demonstrating these make-up techniques, particularly in comparison to mainstream female beauty vloggers. This is even more apparent in the tutorials produced by World of Wonder that in keeping with their production style, push campiness to its limits. The clearest way that this comes through is in the jokes the queens deliver throughout the tutorials, and what the subject of these jokes are – the absurd injunctions of post-feminist media culture’s versions of desirable femininity. So for example, Katya ends her eyelash tutorial saying ‘you want something that says I’m a fun female flirty lady and I’m not afraid to make tough decisions’,63 satirising the post-feminist ideal of the hard-headed yet sexually available career woman.64 Across the tutorials a whole series of similar archetypes are skewered. In one of Alaska Thunderfuck’s tutorials she demonstrates how to produce a drag version of ‘an 80’s successful business woman, kind of mogul’ ending the tutorial saying, ‘I look so business. I’m all business . . . and some pleasure’65 characteristically elongating vowels in a way which makes it difficult to take what she says seriously. Needless to say the version of 1980s businesswoman she produces looks like a highly sexualised cartoon version of the classic post-feminist archetype from films like Working Girl (1988). In another make-up tutorial Alaska produces a ‘day-to-night’ make-up look in a similar performance style, satirising the beauty journalism rhetoric targeted to this imagined consumer demographic. The purpose of the satire in these tutorials is very clearly to mock the absurdity of these gendered types that neoliberal culture impels cis-gendered, hetero-feminine women to aspire to and that the original makeup tutorials present in a straightforwardly pedagogical style. These same tutorials parody the originals’ injunction to consume. Across most of the RPDR tutorials, even the more satirical ones, many will promote cosmetic brands in exactly the same way the originals do. However, in typical drag style, there are multiple occasions in which these promotional strategies are also satirised in ways that mark as ridiculous the cultures of consumption from which the original tutorials emerge. In Katya’s eyelash tutorial rather than promoting a particular cosmetic brand she jokes, ‘if you’re spending more than five dollars on mascara, you probably have something to prove and you need to work on that’,66 taking a swipe at neoliberal consumer aspirations. Similarly in Alaska’s Logo businesswoman tutorial she quips ‘I’ve



RuPaul’s Drag Race 101

been using a beauty blender since the dawn of creation. It’s called a sponge girl’. For various reasons drag make-up does not rely exclusively on expensive cosmetic brands: drag does not pay well so queens use cheaper products, but also US drag is mostly performed in nightclubs, so it has to use theatrical make-up so performers can be seen under spotlights by an audience in dark settings. These theatrical materials also appear in the tutorials instead of expensive consumer goods, something the tutors also have a sense of humour about. For example, ‘my really expensive high fashion red dog collar is actually duct tape’67 again, mocking the aspirations of contemporary consumption in typical drag style. Finally, neoliberalism becomes subverted further through the formal properties of the tutorials themselves. The videos that World of Wonder posts onto its YouTube channel are exercises in playful amateurism, in which the seams of their production are deliberately exposed. Content that would usually be edited out of more ‘professional’ make-up tutorials is deliberately included in the World of Wonder versions. Each video contains mistakes the queens make while presenting and their laughter at making the mistake. For example, all World of Wonder content ends with the presenter saying ‘Don’t forget to subscribe to WOW Presents’ encouraging viewers to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Yet in Kennedy Davenport’s ‘Luscious Lips’ tutorial she fluffs the line saying, ‘Don’t forget to prescribe [laughs] I’m going to say it again because it’s subscribe [laughs]’.68 In fact many of the WOW Presents videos begin with the queen cracking a joke or just laughing straight to camera. The effect of this is quite different to the breezily confident presentation styles of the more professional hetero-feminine tutorials, which, as Sophie Bishop has argued, masks a deeper sense of anxiety about struggling to live up to post-feminist beauty standards.69 The way the laughter, bloopers, and exposed seams are incorporated into the RPDR tutorials can be read as saying, ‘These beauty norms which we are exaggerating are absurd. No-one could possibly live up to them, but it can be fun to try and equally as fun to get it wrong’. This reaches its zenith in Delta Work’s ‘How to Make Up: Resting Bitch Face’.70 In this tutorial Delta appears fully made up and instead of demonstrating any make-up skills, does a campy performance teaching the viewers how best to make a ‘resting bitch face’ – a face that appears naturally bitchy. Work wittily narrates the tutorial in character as the sort of bitchy woman that populates different areas of post-feminist media culture.71 Again the parts where she falls out of character and laughs at her own performance are kept in, as is the laughter of the crew. This tutorial is very clearly not about the struggles of aesthetic labour – there is no aesthetic labour demonstrated at all. Instead it exposes the constructedness as well as the absurdity of the sorts of post-feminist archetypes hetero-feminine women are meant to aspire to when they engage in neoliberal aesthetic labour.

102

Chapter 4

CONCLUSION There are clearly contradictions in the ways that the RPDR body transformation tutorials engage with the gendered body politics of neoliberalism. On the one hand, they contain multiple elements that perpetuate neoliberalism’s ideological agenda – the ideologies of transformation, post-feminist beauty ideals and discourse of branding. In fact I argue that it is precisely because these ideas suffuse the whole of RPDR’s transmedia output that it has achieved such mainstream success: in order to compete in digital capitalism’s sex/gender order it has to perpetuate the neoliberal ideal of self-authored, consumption-based, individual transformation as the agentic ideal, as long as that transformation does not in any way attempt to transform prevailing arrangements of race, gender or capital. At the same time, RPDR is still drag, and at its heart, drag as an art form, even at its most mainstream, is centrally concerned with mocking, subverting and parodying not only prevailing arrangements of gender but also the historical conditions in which those arrangements come to prevail. Important elements of the body transformation tutorials realise the queer potentialities of drag, mocking not only the generic conventions of online make-up tutorials but the modes of gendered embodiment they promote as well as the neoliberal culture in which they have become naturalised. Where does this leave us? In the final analysis, with all this contradiction and ambivalence, I remain unconvinced that the RPDR body transformation tutorials offer any serious critique of neoliberalism and its gendered modes of embodiment, that some of them so effectively mock. If they did it is difficult to see how they would have achieved their mainstream visibility. This failure to use drag to subvert gendered neoliberal embodiment is rendered starker in comparison to the explicitly anti-capitalist drag collectives outlined at the beginning of this chapter and which have a long line of antecedents who have a continued presence in queer nightlife spaces and across social media.72 This becomes especially clear if we view the tutorials within the wider material context in which they are made to circulate. This can be illuminated through interviews that Carl Schotmiller carried out with three Los Angeles based drag queens about their working conditions. One, Jasmine Masters, was a RPDR contestant and the other two aspired to be, aware of the difference it could make to their careers. What becomes clear across the interviews is that the working life of a RPDR contestant is very similar to the reality television celebrities discussed in chapter 2. Instead of substantial pay, the show offers a ‘platform’ for the queens to exploit. After they appear on the show, only a tiny handful manages to increase their booking fee by any noteworthy amount. Instead, what changes after they appear on the show is that international club promoters will pay for them to travel across the world to



RuPaul’s Drag Race 103

perform for a similar rate as they were paid before they competed on RPDR, increasing their global visibility but not necessarily the value they create as individual drag queens.73 As a result, and like most celebrities with a reality television background, they have to continuously self-brand across social media to maintain a presence in the attention economy. The body transformation tutorials can be understood as part of their self-branding strategies, used to maximise their exposure, receive much needed free cosmetics, and provide revenue for the company that posts the tutorial on their YouTube channel (as well as YouTube itself ). This can sometimes be the queens, who in acts of canny entrepreneurialism can open their own channels on social media platforms but most will not be able to compete with the more established and better resourced online brands such as World of Wonder and certainly not the mainstream women’s magazine brands like Cosmopolitan. So although some of the RPDR queens evidently enjoy mocking gendered neoliberalism, and they may even denaturalise it for their viewers, ultimately the elements that critique neoliberal ideology do not hinder the flows, and the inequities, of post-2008 digital capitalism. In fact they facilitate them. The lines of flight proffered by the subversive capacities of drag performances are captured by a form of neoliberal capitalism that not only is no longer threatened by gender subversion, but, in many ways, has become fuelled by it. One final aspect that is important to reflect on further here is the fact that of all the categories of gender non-conformity that proliferate under digital capitalism drag, and particularly RPDR drag queens, have become one of the most visible. By way of comparison drag kings have not acquired anywhere near the same sort of media visibility as their drag queen counterparts. The intersection with post-feminist/gendered neoliberal beauty cultures is crucial here. The visibility of the most successful RPDR drag queens is dependent upon the fact they exaggerate and/or mock a mode of gendered embodiment (normative hetero-femininity) that has long been valuable to capitalism. The masculinisation of the female body, though rendered visible under digital capitalism (e.g. trans* male body builders on mainstream men’s fitness magazine covers) remains significantly less so than the spectacular feminisation of the male body. This is yet another way that we can see the feminising axiomatic of post-2008 neoliberalism at play. If the ‘spornosexuals’ and the ‘celebrity male nude leak’ are evidence of how after 2008 cis-gendered male bodies become sexualised in ways historically associated with women, the success of RPDR provides evidence of how the literal feminising of male bodies can create value for capitalism like never before. However, unlike cis-gendered men, capitalism has never provided the conditions for drag queens to create enduring value for themselves not even with the increased visibility a handful experienced after 2008. So, although there is something to celebrate in the breaking down of the hetero- and homonormative sex/gender arrangements

104

Chapter 4

that have occurred under digital capitalism, the feminising axiomatic that organises its new hierarchies does little to materially improve the conditions of even its more privileged subjects. This is feminisation as the weakening of power under capital as discussed in the previous chapters that, in this case, happens to coincide with the literal feminisation of the male body in drag. This contrasts with the hyper-masculine embodiment of the spornosexuals and the celebrity nude leaks discussed in the previous two chapters. The overall effect, however, is the same: another previously low value male body practice has become valuable to neoliberal capitalism after 2008 through its intersection with digital media, but in a way that offers very little material return for the men whose bodies are being digitally mediated. NOTES 1. Dominic Patten and Bruce Haring, ‘ “RuPaul’s Drag Race” Hits AllTime Highs with Season 10 Ratings’, deadline.com, last modified 29 June 2018, https://deadline.com/2018/06/rupauls-drag-race-hits-all-time-highs-with-season-10ratings-1202419952/. 2. David Gudelunas, ‘Digital Extensions, Experiential Extensions and Hair Extensions: RuPaul’s Drag Race and the New Media Environment’ in RuPaul's Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture: The Boundaries of Reality TV, eds. Niall Brennan and David Gudelunas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 231–243. 3. Decca Aitkenhead, ‘RuPaul: “Drag Is a Big F-You to Male-Dominated Culture” ’, The Guardian, last modified 3 March 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/ tv-and-radio/2018/mar/03/rupaul-drag-race-big-f-you-to-male-dominated-culture. 4. Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds. Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 5. John D’Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’ in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharan Thompson (New Feminist Library Series, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 100–113. 6. Ibid. 7. Peter Drucker, ‘The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism’, Historical Materialism, 19:4 (2011): 9. 8. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 9. Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 10. Drucker, ‘The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism’, 10. 11. Ibid. 12. Floyd, The Reification of Desire.



RuPaul’s Drag Race 105

13. Martin P. Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 14. Floyd, The Reification of Desire. 15. Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 16. Ibid., 4. 17. David Weissman and Bill Weber, The Cockettes, DVD (London: Tartan Video, 2004). 18. For instance, the Cockettes-produced film Elevator Girls in Bondage tells the story of a radical Marxist drag queen trying to organise her elevator girl colleagues against their work-based exploitation. 19. Michael Lecker, ‘Welcome Home: Radical Faeries and Queer Worldmaking’ (PhD diss., George Mason University, 2015). 20. Felix Guattari, ‘I Have Even Met Happy Drag Queens’, in Felix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews, 1972–1977 (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2009), 225–228. 21. Floyd, The Reification of Desire. 22. Alan Sinfield, Gay and After (London: Serpents Tail, 1998). 23. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). 24. Eve Ng, ‘A “Post-Gay” Era? Media Gaystreaming, Homonormativity, and the Politics of LGBT Integration’, Communication, Culture & Critique, 6 (2013) 258–283. 25. Zizi Papacharissi and Jan Fernback, ‘The Aesthetic Power of the Fab 5: Discursive Themes of Homonormativity in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 32:4 (2008): 348–367; Katherine Sender, ‘Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Neoliberal Project’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23:2 (2006): 131–151. 26. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 175. 27. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 28. Jose Esteban Muñoz, ‘ “The White to Be Angry”: Vaginal Davis’s Terrorist Drag’, Social Text, 52/53 (1997): 85. 29. Dana Berkowitz and Linda Liska Belgrave, ‘‘She Works Hard for the Money’: Drag Queens and the Management of Their Contradictory Status of Celebrity and Marginality’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 39:2 (2010): 175. 30. Ben Little and Alison Winch, ‘ “Just Hanging Out with You in My Back Yard”: Mark Zuckerberg and Mediated Paternalism’, Open Cultural Studies, 1:1 (2018): 417–427. 31. Bryce J. Renninger, ‘ “Where I Can Be Myself . . . Where I Can Speak My Mind”: Networked Counterpublics in a Polymedia Environment’, New Media & Society, 17:9 (2015): 1513–1529. 32. danah boyd, ‘Social Network Sites as Networked Publics’, in A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 39–58.

106

Chapter 4

33. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 34. John Edward Campbell. Getting It on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004). 35. Sharif Mowlabocus, Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 36. Avery Dame, ‘Making a Name for Yourself: Tagging as Transgender Ontological Practice on Tumblr’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33:1 (2016): 23–37. 37. In his article on asexuality, Bryce J. Renninger argues that the Internet has allowed asexuals to develop spectrums of a/sexuality and a/romantic identities, including categories such as gray-sexual, demi-sexual, heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, aromantic and demi-romantic. See Renninger, ‘Where I Can Be Myself . . . Where I Can Speak My Mind’. 38. Andre Cavalcante, ‘ “I Did It All Online”: Transgender Identity and the Management of Everyday Life’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33:1 (2016): 109–122. 39. Renninger, ‘Where I Can Be Myself . . . Where I Can Speak My Mind’. 40. Jessa Lingel and Adam Golub, ‘In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn’s Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20 (2015): 536–553. 41. Damian Thompson, ‘Gender Madness: Trans-Girl. Demi Boy. Inter-Sex. Damian Thomspon Says a Government Survey Asking 13-Year-Olds to Pick from 25 Genders Is as Absurd as It Is Dangerous’, MailOnline, last modified 29 January 2016, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3422060/Gender-mad ness-Trans-girl-Demi-boy-Inter-sex-Government-survey-asking-13-year-old-s-pick25-genders-absurd-dangerous.html. ­ igital 42. Jean Burgess, Elija Cassidy, Stefanie Duguay and Ben Light, ‘Making D Cultures of Gender and Sexuality with Social Media’, Social Media + Society, ­October–December (2016): 1–4. 43. ‘We Are Them. And Them Is about All of Us’, last modified 11 December 2018, https://www.condenast.com/brands/them/. 44. Alison Hearn, ‘Insecure: Narratives and Economies of the Branded Self in Transformation Television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 22:4 (2008): 495–504. 45. Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, ‘Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen’, Continuum: Journal of Media  & Cultural Studies, 22:4 (2008): 471–484. 46. Tania Lewis, ‘‘He Needs to Face His Fears with These Five Queers!’ Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Makeover TV, and the Lifestyle Expert’, Television and New Media, 8:4 (2007): 285–311; Katherine Sender, The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 47. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Inna Arzumanova, ‘Creative Authorship: SelfActualising Individuals and the Self-Brand’, in Media Authorship, eds. Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner (London: Routledge, 2013), 163–179. 48. Elizabeth Nathanson, ‘Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the “New” Pleasures of Fashion’ in Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, eds. Yvonne Tasker and Dianne Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 136–160.



RuPaul’s Drag Race 107

49. Brooke Erin Duffy and Emily Hund, ‘ “Having It All” on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding among Fashion Bloggers’, Social Media + Society, July–December (2015): 1–11. 50. Banet-Weiser and Arzumanova, ‘Creative Authorship’. 51. Crystal Abidin and Joel Gwynne, ‘Entrepreneurial Selves, Feminine Corporeality and Lifestyle Blogging in Singapore’, Asian Journal of Social Science, 45 (2017): 385–408. 52. For example, Rosalind Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10: 2 (2007): 147–166; Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009). 53. ‘ “The Business of Drag” Feat. Latrice Royale and Mimi Imfurst at RuPaul’s DragCon2016!’, YouTube, last modified 2 November 2016, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=MFS45z_jvTw/. 54. A term used by the queens to describe dressing in men’s clothes. 55. ‘Drag Makeup Tutorial: Detox’s “80’s Business Woman” | RuPaul’s Drag Race | Logo’, YouTube, last modified 15 April 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KswERuWYOeQ&t=9s. 56. Jamie Tabberer, ‘Gay Men Like Me Need to Start Acknowledging Our Misogyny Problem’, Independent, last modified 27 July 2017, https://www.indepen dent.co.uk/voices/gay-men-lgbt-50th-anniversary-misogyny-rupaul-drag-race-fishyqueen-lesbians-a7862516.html. 57. ‘TRANSFORMATIONS: Hungry and James St. James’, YouTube, last modified 12 December 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXpyrURysY&list=PLhgFEi9aNUb0YV46x-Wbd3LveF5PmhhVO&index=9. 58. ‘Drag Makeup Tutorial: Latrice Royale’s Signature Look | RuPaul's Drag Race | Logo’, YouTube, last modified 2 October 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XucY5kyP4vs. 59. ‘ “The Business of Drag” Feat. Latrice Royale and Mimi Imfurst at RuPaul’s DragCon2016!’, YouTube, last modified 2 November 2016, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=MFS45z_jvTw. 60. For example, ‘Tucking Tips w/ Trinity Taylor’, YouTube, last modified 27 August 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXQvWhCm0Ps. 61. ‘ “The Business of Drag” Feat. Latrice Royale and Mimi Imfurst at RuPaul’s DragCon2016!’, YouTube, last modified 2 November 2016, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=MFS45z_jvTw. 62. ‘HOW TO MAKEUP: Katya Zamolodchikova – “Eyelashes” ’, YouTube, last modified 4 August 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJbbUwVUFQg. 63. Ibid. 64. Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 65. ‘Drag Makeup Tutorial: Alaska Thunderfuck 5000’s “Red for Filth” | RuPaul’s Drag Race | Logo’, YouTube, last modified 4 January 2016, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=UfmbhcDnOVc. 66. ‘HOW TO MAKEUP: Katya Zamolodchikova – “Eyelashes” ’, YouTube, last modified 4 August 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJbbUwVUFQg. 67. ‘Drag Makeup Tutorial’.

108

Chapter 4

68. ‘HOW TO MAKEUP: Kennedy Davenport – “Luscious Lips” ’, YouTube, last modified 18 August 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9jE8CFeIVc. 69. Sophie Bishop, ‘YouTubeanxiety: Affect and Anxiety Performance in UK Beauty Vlogging’ in Tony Sampson, Stephen Maddison and Darren Ellis, eds. Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018), 122–130. 70. ‘How to Make Up: Resting Bitch Face’, YouTube, last modified 4 October 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K98W_EkmB8U. 71. Alison Winch, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 72. Two prominent Anglo-American drag artists who explicitly attack capitalism in their performances are British performer David Hoyle (previously the Divine David) and Los Angeles–based Vaginal Crème Davis. Hoyle, strongly associated with alternative London queer club night Duckie (tagline: ‘purveyors of progressive working class entertainment’), has said in an interview ‘I would ban capitalism – the cruellest, most insulting system any so-called civilisation could choose to impose upon itself’, a sentiment he has reiterated throughout his consistently politically provocative performances (Franco Milazzo, ‘Interview: David Hoyle “Philosopher King of Cabaret” ’, londonist.com, last modified 5 August 2011, http://londonist. com/2011/08/interview-david-hoyle). His drag style is similarly provocative drawing on horror aesthetics that, when viewed a long side his performances, can be read as a comment on the horrifying experience of living under capitalist hetero-patriarchy. Jose Esteban Munoz influentially wrote about Los Angeles–based ‘drag terrorist’ Vaginal Crème Davis in terms of Davis’ critiques of homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy and sexism, but there have been prominent strains of anti-capitalism in her performances too (Jose Esteban Muñoz, ‘ “The White to Be Angry”: Vaginal Davis’s Terrorist Drag’). In a mock interview/performance with World of Wonder, Davis wears a T-shirt with the slogan ‘The revolution is my boyfriend’. She says irreverently ‘It’s all about keeping things radical honey. I’m not going shopping in Barney’s with a husband or a boyfriend. The revolution is my boyfriend!’, bringing anti-homonormative/comsumerist discourse to US drag. ‘Vaginal Davis – “The Revolution Is My Boyfriend” ’, YouTube, last modified 15 October 2010, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=t-lajmJATPg. 73. Carl Schotmiller, Reading RuPaul’s Drag Race: Queer Memory, Camp Capitalism, and RuPaul’s Drag Empire (PhD diss., UCLA, 2017).

Chapter 5

The Rise of Chemsex: Queering Collective Intimacy in Neoliberal London

On 3 November 2015, the British Medical Journal published an editorial entitled ‘What Is Chemsex and Why Does It Matter?’ It defined chemsex in the following way: ‘Chemsex’ is used in the United Kingdom to describe intentional sex under the influence of psychoactive drugs, mostly among men who have sex with men. It refers particularly to the use of mephedrone, γ-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), γ-butyrolactone (GBL), and crystallised methamphetamine. These drugs are often used in combination to facilitate sexual sessions lasting several hours or days with multiple sexual partners.1

The editorial reported that chemsex was on the rise and concluded by arguing, ‘addressing chemsex related morbidities should be a public health priority’. This editorial constitutes the height of what can arguably be seen as a moral panic on chemsex within the British media. This panic centred on the problems chemsex posed for gay and bisexual men and public health more generally and had a tendency to pathologise both the practice and the reasons why these men engaged in it. This chapter seeks to speak back to this panic discourse by interrogating why chemsex has emerged among gay and bisexual men, specifically in London, at the moment that it has – during the post-2008 conjuncture. (In 2011, reports of chemsex to the NHS reached a sufficiently high number that it began to develop treatment strategies for chemsex-related health problems.)2 This chapter, therefore, approaches chemsex ‘conjuncturally’; that is it makes sense of the rise of chemsex as a cultural practice as a response to the specific mix of social contradictions that constitute the historical conjuncture in which it has emerged. Drawing on a document analysis as well as interviews with fifteen gay and bisexual men who have practised chemsex, this chapter 109

110

Chapter 5

argues that chemsex is an embodied response to a range of material conditions which have been shaped by neoliberalism: a desire for an intimate mode of collectivity during a historical moment when collectivity itself is being superseded by competitive, entrepreneurial individualism as the privileged mode of being in the world.3 In so doing, it provides evidence for how the sexualised male body has been used to offer, if not outright resistance, then at least some sort of reprieve from the ravages that neoliberalism has wrought in the Anglo-American context after 2008. MAKING SENSE OF CHEMSEX Existing attempts to make sense of the rise of chemsex come from three main areas: cultural studies, the field of sexual health and the British media. Kane Race is the leading cultural studies scholar exploring the phenomenon.4 In his different interventions Race uses either Foucauldian or science and technology studies frameworks to de-pathologise chemsex (or party ‘n’ play in the Australian context) and to instead understand it as a practice that multiplies the body’s capacities for pleasure. While this chapter is very much informed by Race’s attempts to de-pathologise chemsex, it is also shaped by slightly different concerns in that it seeks to historicise the emergence of chemsex in a different time and place to Race’s Australian urban centres since the 2000s. In this regard this chapter is operating in a similar empirical context to the recent UK, based sexual health literature.5 Given the concerns of the field it is no surprise that all of these publications address the health problems that can arise when engaging in chemsex. The only piece of research in the field to extend beyond this concern is The Chemsex Study.6 The aim of this study is to give an empirical account of London’s chemsex culture so that different services can provide more informed care to their gay and bisexual clients. It does not attempt to theorise why this culture has emerged in the way that it has in the historical moment that it did. The discourse on chemsex produced in the British media and some of the other sexual health literature arguably amounts to a multi-faceted panic discourse – one in which elements of a moral panic,7 a sex panic8 and a techno panic9 have been condensed. This discourse pathologises chemsex as primarily self-destructive for the gay and bisexual men who practise it. For instance in an Attitude review of the feature film Chemsex: ‘The feral clips of real-time behaviour, sourced from within, tell a nightmarish story of everyday annihilation’ (emphasis added).10 It also connects chemsex to a rise in HIV transmission that occurred in London in 2015 – ‘a British Medical Journal report suggested that chemsex is leading to an increase in sexually transmitted infections, and particularly HIV’.11 This led Dr Richard Ma from the



The Rise of Chemsex 111

Royal College of GPs to refer to chemsex as ‘a public health time bomb’,12 raising the spectre of moral panic media representations of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.13 With regard to accounting for why chemsex has emerged as a distinct cultural phenomenon in the past few years, the panic discourse locates its origins in two places: (i) the individual biographies of gay and bisexual men who have been traumatised in various ways by homophobia and are subsequently unable to form enduring intimate relationships14 and (ii) the emergence of smartphone hook-up applications (hook-up apps) as a way for gay and bisexual men to negotiate sexual encounters and the wider availability of chemsex drugs.15 These explanations are inadequate for different reasons. With reference to the first claim: although there is a wide literature on the psycho-social dimensions of homophobia,16 there is little evidence to support the notion that gay and bisexual men are uniquely ill equipped to form enduring intimate relationships or that for those who are, their experiences of homophobia are the determining factor. Even if we did accept this claim – one implicitly constructed through a homonormative logic that privileges long-term relationships as a superior form of intimacy – it does not help us understand why chemsex emerged in London as a distinct sexual practice in the historical moment that it did. To do this it would need to account for what had changed about either homophobia or gay men’s capacities for intimacy in this historical period that chemsex had only emerged now (not before or after) as a plausible response. The media and medical discourses begin to explain this with reference to the second claim – the wider availability of hook-up apps and chemsex drugs. There are two problems with this explanation, one empirical and one theoretical. The empirical problem is that the most commonly consumed chemsex drugs in the UK (GHB/GBL and mephedrone) do not automatically produce sexual behaviour. Both have frequently been taken in non-sexual settings: GHB/GBL in gay nightclubs in the decade prior to the rise of chemsex17 and mephedrone among young people regardless of sexual orientation in non-sexual capacities.18 The theoretical problem is the technological determinism of this claim. Cultural studies has long argued against such accounts of the socio-cultural effects of new technologies19 – both the apps and the drugs in this context. From the conjunctural perspective being used here, all cultural phenomena (sexual or otherwise) emerge at the confluence of a multiplicity of factors – technology being the only one. This chapter is an attempt to map the most salient of these in relation to chemsex and in doing so not only attempts to account for the rise of chemsex but also uncovers conjunctural dynamics that analysing other cultural formations has yet to allow – namely the way practices of intimacy have been transformed during a particular moment in neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony.

112

Chapter 5

Much like neoliberalism, contemporary practices of gay and bisexual male intimacy are also defined by the contradiction between individualism and collectivity. As a number of sociologists have argued the dominant modes of intimacy practised in late modernity are those which are governed by notions of an individual actively pursuing romantic fulfilment and sexual satisfaction, untethered from the pre-modern imperative to reproduce the heterosexual family in order to survive in times of material scarcity.20 It was along these lines that lesbian and gay relationships gained their social and cultural legitimacy in liberal democratic societies – as individuals pursuing sexual satisfaction and romantic fulfilment in their private lives. The individualisation of intimacy intensifies under neoliberalism where, in different social settings, these practices have acquired a competitive and entrepreneurial orientation.21 Almost the opposite conception of gay male and bisexual intimacy underpins the radical gay politics of the 1970s onwards, which argued that gay liberation could be achieved only if intimacy (and all other areas of gay social life) was understood as a collective practice. Indeed, a variety of queer theorists22 have since mapped the many ways that collective forms of intimacy were practised, most notably in the public cruising cultures that Michael Warner has referred to as counter-publics. Chemsex, this chapter argues, can be understood as a conjuncturally specific manifestation of these long-standing historical tensions as they have intensified during neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony in the UK, specifically London, context. As Jeremy Gilbert has argued, this struggle has been defined precisely by the attempt to foreclose the possibility of any social group experiencing any form of collectivity whatsoever.23 As is evidenced later in this chapter, neoliberal approaches to both capital accumulation and migration have caused a variety of interrelated material changes within London since around 2008 whose result has been the foreclosure of the possibility of gay and bisexual male collectivity in particular. Chemsex, it can be argued, is an attempt to re-establish the potential for this in historical conditions that work against this very thing. What this means in concrete terms is the following: chemsex is a way for some, largely migrant, gay and bisexual men to experience a sense of collectivity not only in a city where the collective physical spaces they have historically gathered are closing down due to neoliberal approaches to town planning24 but also in a wider culture in which neoliberalism has been hegemonic and that in multiple ways alienates them from experiencing the possibility of collectivity at all. METHODS This argument is made by thinking conjuncturally about chemsex. Conjunctural analysis has been outlined in depth in chapter 1. What is necessary to



The Rise of Chemsex 113

add here is that while in the original scholarship on conjunctural analysis focused on economic, social, political, ideological, cultural and technological questions, more recent interventions, most notably from Lawrence Grossberg,25 have drawn on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to argue that in order to properly understand contemporary hegemonic struggles it is essential to also understand the affective dimensions of the conjuncture in which they are taking place. Given how affectively intense chemsex is as a cultural practice, this combination of Gramscian and Deleuzo-Guattarian perspectives is particularly useful if we want to understand not only the conjunctural shifts through which chemsex has emerged but also what an analysis of the rise of chemsex might reveal about what living in this historical conjuncture feels like more generally and the place this has in contemporary struggles for hegemony. In order to understand chemsex conjuncturally, I have used two methods of data collection for this chapter – one-on-one interviews and document analysis. The intention behind carrying out interviews was to map what actually constitutes chemsex encounters from the perspectives of the people who practice it. The interviews were, therefore, in depth and semi-structured and lasted between forty-five minutes and two hours. They took place between May and June 2016. Fifteen gay and bisexual men who have had chemsex at least once were interviewed. The stipulation on having had chemsex at least once was introduced in order to capture a variety of chemsex experiences beyond (but not discounting) the ‘addictive’ encounters so frequently represented in the media. The interviewees were recruited through a Grindr broadcast message. Grindr is the most widely used hook-up app used by gay and bisexual men in the UK. It is mostly used to organise sexual, and sometimes romantic, encounters. This broadcast message targeted users within a five-mile radius of Vauxhall in South West London because, as discussed later, it is around this area that chemsex is practised most frequently and so serves as an exemplary case study. The men interviewed were aged between twenty-four and fifty-one. All were asked how they self-identified in relation to commonly used demographic categories, in order to establish whether there was any relationship between these categories (class, ethnicity, national identity etc.) and chemsex practice. All the interviewees identified as male except one who identified as non-binary. Twelve identified as gay, one as ‘gay but a bit bi’, one as bisexual and one as queer. Seven identified as middle class, four as working class, two as middle class with a working class background and one working class in a middle-class profession. One answered, ‘I don’t have a class, I’m not British’. Eight were British. One was Irish, one Italian, one South African, one Slovakian; two were Spanish and one was British Oversees National (born in Hong Kong). In terms of ethnicity, ten identified as white, one as Irish, one

114

Chapter 5

as black/other, one as East Asian, one as Latino and one answered, ‘I guess Spanish. I’m definitely not Latin . . . Mediterranean . . . whatever’. Three were HIV positive and the rest were HIV negative at their last HIV test. Four were born in London. The majority had migrated to the capital as adults, from either within or outside of the UK.26 Of all these demographic categories this issue of migration, it is argued later in this chapter, was the most significant to the rise of chemsex. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and anonymised (pseudonyms are used for the interviewees throughout the chapter). The analysis of the transcripts was largely deductive. The Gramscian/Deleuzo-Guattarian framing of the research process meant that chemsex encounters were approached as ‘assemblages’, meaning the following three things had to be deduced from the interviews: (i) what practices constituted a typical chemsex encounter; (ii) the social relations produced while engaging in these practices; (iii) the affectivity generated as a result.27 Organising the interview questions around these three areas produced a variety of accounts of chemsex encounters. These different accounts were then analysed thematically. Two related themes emerged during this analysis. The first was how affectively contradictory chemsex experiences were – including both joyful and sad affects frequently at the same time. The second was how contradictory chemsex relationality was – oscillating between highly collective and highly individual social relations. The next step in the research process was to identify what conjunctural shifts would a cultural practice defined by these contradictions most usefully be interpreted within. This could only be partially achieved through the interviews – the interviewees, even as a collective, could not be expected to produce a comprehensive enough picture of the broader historical context in which they practised chemsex. Therefore, to supplement the interview data, I turned to a wide range of documents that would typically be expected to provide the empirical material necessary to reconstruct the aspects of the post 2008 conjuncture most relevant to the emergence of chemsex. Following the logics of conjunctural thinking this document search extended beyond factors most immediately present within the practice (e.g. the emergence of hook-up apps, the availability of chemsex drugs) and looked for material relating to every ‘plane’ of the conjuncture – from the economic, the social, the cultural, the political, the ideological as well as the affective. These documents included academic literature; reports from the UK government and nongovernmental organisations (relating to, for example, changes in migration patterns, property prices, demography of London’s gay community); as well as journalism from the British media, relating mainly to changes in the gay commercial scene and community that had yet to be represented by scholarly work. The following analysis comes from establishing connections between

The Rise of Chemsex 115



both sets of data – by thinking through how the specificity of chemsex practice revealed by the interviews might make sense within the conjunctural shifts revealed by the document analysis. Bearing these methodological considerations in mind, this chapter argues that the emergence of chemsex in London since around 2011 can most persuasively be made sense of as a response to a particular set of material changes that have been occurring during neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony and the impact these have had on the practices of intimacy available to gay and bisexual men to engage in. These changes include: (i) the privileging of autonomous competitive individualism, particularly over more collectively experienced forms of subjectivity, as the most desirable mode of being in the world; (ii) the deregulation of international flows of capital and the effect this has had on physical spaces that gay and bisexual men have historically gathered in London to engage in practices of intimacy; and (iii) the concomitant loosening of border controls so that both cheap and specialised labour can follow these international flows of capital. Based on the evidence here, the rise of chemsex can most plausibly be theorised as a way for gay and bisexual men to use chemsex drugs and hook-up apps to negotiate the various material effects of these different historical processes on the way they can be intimate with each other. As such, this chapter makes a unique contribution to the overall argument being made across the book. It shows how the sexualised male body can be used to mitigate the ways neoliberalism has made more of our lives precarious since it redoubled its efforts after 2008, becoming the basis of, if not counter-hegemonic resistance against neoliberalism then, at least some sort of attempted reprieve from it.

CHEMSEX AND COLLECTIVE INTIMACY Chemsex Encounters When asked to describe a typical chemsex session, interviewee Ben answered ‘they are all very different’. Indeed, a multiplicity of experiences (practices, social relations and affects) were described by the interviewees. In fact, even the use of the term ‘chemsex’ was contested as a way to describe these encounters. As interviewee Michael says, ‘I don’t know anyone that says chemsex. Chemsex sounds a bit more. . . . In the media they use that word’. The use of the term ‘chemsex’ has been retained here not only for clarity but also because all the other interviewees both recognised and used the term. Despite these differences and variations, certain experiences were described repeatedly throughout the interviews that give chemsex its specificity as a cultural practice.

116

Chapter 5

The majority of chemsex sessions described by the interviewees were organised through hook-up apps, Grindr being the app mentioned most frequently.28 The majority took place in a private residence somewhere in London and lasted between one night and four days. The consensus among the interviewees was that the term ‘chemsex’ designated groups of men ranging in size from around five to fifteen people, though some used the term in reference to two men having sex while using chemsex drugs. One interviewee described a session that approximately fifty people attended. The men attending were always (semi-) naked. The practice common to all the sessions described, irrespective of size, was the consumption of recreational drugs, with GHB/GBL and mephedrone being consumed far more frequently than crystallised methamphetamine. By far the most common effect of these drugs, taken alone or in combination, described in the interviews, was the lowering of inhibitions – ‘It makes you feel great. It makes you feel horny. It lowers your inhibitions’ (Matthew). The lowering of inhibitions had two effects in this context: (i) an intensified desire to engage in sexual activity – ‘it’s a huge intensity of sexual energy I think . . . sexually you feel on top of the world’ (Andrew); and (ii) an intensified desire to engage in various acts of intensely felt, collectively experienced, intimacy (evidence detailed later). Whether these acts were sexual or non-sexual in nature and whether the affective intensities generating in participating in them were joyful or sad (often both at the same time), chemsex’s specificity is precisely the way it assembles gay and bisexual men into an affectively charged collective – if only in relatively small numbers for short periods of time. Chemsex Relationality This assembling of gay and bisexual men into an affectively charged collective was explicitly articulated by many of the interviewees. For instance: It’s all to do with the drugs to be honest. Whenever you go you feel a certain way and you assume that everyone is on the same level as you. In a way, you’re enjoying a private club. You’re going to a club where you know everyone thinks the same as you think. Drugs loses all inhibitions [sic]. There are bad things of course, but at the moment, you don’t have to worry about anything because you’re going to be in an environment where you feel safe, and whatever you do, whatever you think, whatever you say you’ll be very much accepted. (Antonio)

Antonio is explicit in this quote about the sense of togetherness generated in chemsex encounters. He likens attending chemsex sessions to ‘enjoying a private club’ where ‘you don’t have worry about anything’ because ‘you assume that everyone is on the same level as you’. This sense of collectivity



The Rise of Chemsex 117

is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that sex was only one of many group activities that occurred during chemsex sessions, many of which were nonsexual in nature. Antonio estimated that the ratio of sexual to non-sexual activities was ‘70/30’, Daniel at ‘50/50’. Johann claimed to have gone to two parties ‘and no-one was having sex’. Dennis liked to go to chemsex sessions and not have sex, though he did say he would not be invited back, giving an indication of the importance of sex to chemsex culture even if individual sessions involved other activities. One of the key activities that took place was ‘a lot of deep emotional talk’ (Michael). Daniel explained that ‘some of our discussions got stupidly deep’. Lynn Jamieson’s ‘disclosive intimacy’29 could be usefully deployed here to make sense of the sorts of non-sexual intimacies generated within chemsex sessions. Interviewee Ben’s account of one chemsex session that he attended was quite rich in terms of non-sexual activities that could take place within them. I’ve been at parties before where all I’ve done is talk and dance. The mood just went that way for me. . . . One of my friends, we had been having sex for a couple of hours and then all of sudden I spotted this Kylie book. . . . I said ‘Oh my God, you like Kylie!’ and he was like [affects camp demeanour, sharp in take of breath] ‘she signed this!’ And then all of sudden we took some G and some meph and then it turned into watching YouTube Kylie videos. Instead of having sex we ended up dancing round his living room.

This quote points to not only the many other activities aside from sex that took place in the accounts of chemsex given by the interviewees – talking, dancing, discussing well-liked pop icons, browsing YouTube – but also the way that the joyful affect generated within them could bond the participants. The joy of chemsex is discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. Of these activities, digital media use appeared most prominently. A more frequently used form of digital media than YouTube was the browsing of Grindr or what Michael called ‘a Grindr break’. Broadly there were two different types of Grindr breaks: (i) the type where men would stop whatever it was that they were doing and collectively browse Grindr and (ii) the type where an individual would sit in the corner of a room and become absorbed by browsing Grindr for considerable periods of time. Interviewee Antonio describes the first: The idea of chemsex is not just to meet people where you are but also going online with other people. That’s your opportunity to chat to as many people as you want to . . . being in a situation and everyone thinking exactly the same as you’re thinking.

This quote was typical of other descriptions of the collective Grindr break and straightforwardly contradicts the panic discourse, demonstrating another

118

Chapter 5

way that moments of collectivity were achieved at chemsex encounters. The second type of Grindr break is described by interviewee Matthew: Drugs make you very opportunistic. . . . If you’re on that level where all you want to find is more you can find yourself sitting in the corner and tap, tap, tapping away. You can be doing it for hours. . . . It makes you very anti-social. That’s a combination of drugs and Grindr.

Here, Matthew describes this break as ‘anti-social’ drawing on the same discourses of non-intimacy as the media panic. However, what Matthew has not considered in this quote is that this apparently anti-social type of Grindr break is always happening at a chemsex session, surrounded by a group of men frequently engaged in collective activities and not, for example, completely alone in a bedroom. The contradiction between engaging in a highly individualising act in a highly collective setting is important in terms of the argument being advanced here. It might be argued that this act, so emblematic of the chemsex experience, can be interpreted as embodying the not quite achieved desire for experiences of collectivity within a wider set of historical conditions that work to constrain this very thing. Chemsex Affects The affectivity of chemsex described by the interviewees was even more contradictory than the social relations they outlined. Having said this, the one aspect of chemsex affectivity in which there was no contradiction was in the degree of intensity with which the interviewees claimed to experience it. Daniel’s description is typical: It’s different to normal sex in that it’s a lot more intense. . . . It’s complete release: a lowering of inhibitions. . . . It turns you into this feral creature – very primal.

However, whereas the degree of intensity that was experienced was relatively uniform, as the ambivalence in the language Daniel uses suggests (feral, primal), its nature varied from encounter to encounter. Some interviewees described experiences of intense joy: Sex can become so passionate. You nearly want to rip someone’s skin off that’s how passionate it can be. You just can’t get close enough. That’s how intense it can be. (Ben)

We can also turn to the previous section for evidence of joyfully experienced chemsex encounters beyond Ben’s passionate sex. There is also Ben’s



The Rise of Chemsex 119

description of dancing to YouTube videos, Antonio’s uninhibited sense of acceptance or the joys of Daniel and Michael’s disclosive intimacy. However, some interviewees had a more joyless experience of chemsex’s feral intensity. Robert said, ‘I don’t know if I enjoyed it. It was just animalistic sex’. Dennis felt shame about regularly consuming recreational drugs. The following quote from Matthew summarises the sad affects sometimes produced by consuming GHB/GBL and crystallised methamphetamine, commonly described by other interviewees too: First of all there’s G. You take too much and you temporarily comatose yourself. If you take too much G and you’re with other people it’s OK. If you’re by yourself it’s actually very, very dangerous. If you take too much G you’re normally monging out all over the floor, you’re generally naked . . . you’re twatted.30 You’re absolutely twatted; monged and twatted. You make a complete fool of yourself. Tina is known for making one paranoid. Edgy, sketchy . . . Turns people into quite unpleasant people if you take too much. I think the key here is to know your limits.

It is important to say here that, in line with Race’s findings in the Australian context,31 the men involved in these parties in London had developed elaborate regimes of care to ensure people did not ‘mong out’ in ‘very dangerous ways’. Several of the interviewees said that many of the sessions they attended had highly codified rules about drug taking including drawing up what interviewee Dennis called a ‘nightmap’ – a printed excel spreadsheet that noted participants’ names, the time at which they had taken chemsex drugs (particularly GHB/GBL) and the dose they had consumed. Nevertheless, these sad affects are a contributing thread to the experiential fabric of chemsex encounters, as are the ‘come-downs’ associated with chemsex drugs, described by a majority of interviewees. There were also more serious long-term sad affects associated with chemsex. Four of the fifteen men that were interviewed had sought help from mental or sexual health professionals because of their problematic engagements with chemsex. One interviewee described ‘psychotic episodes’ after participating in a series of different chemsex sessions that lasted a week in total. One sought dramatic changes in his life because his engagement with chemsex had become too much of a problem, migrating to China to remove himself from London’s chemsex culture. Another interviewee regularly attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings for his chemsex ‘addiction’. Looking at the sum of the interviews, what appeared to characterise the interviewees’ descriptions of the affective dimensions of their chemsex experiences was just how contradictory they were. Many of the interviewees

120

Chapter 5

described experiencing these contradictory affects at the same time. For example: Can you describe the atmosphere of a chemsex session? I have a tendency of after being awake for so long of being paranoid. That’s obviously an uncomfortable atmosphere but an atmosphere that’s created in my head. Specifically, it’s quite exciting and sexually charged and energetic but then eventually the atmosphere sort of changes a bit. (Daniel)

The affective contradictions of chemsex described by the interviewees are significant for the argument being made here in relation to the differences between the interviewees’ accounts of the affects they experienced during chemsex compared to the account given in the panic discourse. This discourse focuses almost exclusively on chemsex’s sad affects. While sad affects of varying duration and intensity were clearly produced within the chemsex encounters described by the interviewees, it would be partial and distorting to conclude that these were more significant than the other affects described, like reducing, for example, British pub culture to alcoholism and pub fights. One of the interviewees reflected on this aspect of the panic discourse saying of the Vice film Chemsex: ‘It shows the seedier side of it, not the fun side’. THINKING CONJUNCTURALLY ABOUT CHEMSEX Having established the affective contradictions of chemsex, the remainder of this chapter will be concerned with the material conditions that provide the context for their emergence. This section begins by providing an account of what I see as being the most relevant conjunctural shifts to the rise of chemsex and ends by theorising the relationship between practice and context. Vauxhall in the Great Recession As has already been mentioned, reports of chemsex first emerged in sufficient numbers to warrant an official NHS response in 2011, though there is evidence to suggest that it was being practised in London a little earlier than this.32 Temporally, this puts the emergence of chemsex within the post2008 period, or the period sometimes referred to as the Great Recession. In spatial terms, although there is evidence that chemsex has been practised in different parts of the UK, by far the greatest concentration of chemsex activity would appear to be taking place in London, specifically in the boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham.33 One of the main reasons for this is



The Rise of Chemsex 121

that these boroughs contain the highest population of gay and bisexual men in London in part because they contain one of the densest concentrations of the city’s gay nightlife – the bars, clubs and sex-on-premises venues of Vauxhall. This part of London has been transformed by a range of different material processes during the Great Recession whose interrelations, it is argued here, provide the context for the rise of chemsex. The first of these processes operates on a relatively micro-scale: the emergence of chemsex drugs and their replacement of other recreational drugs that have historically been consumed on Vauxhall gay scene during this period. The next two material processes have global dimensions and have been at the heart of the neoliberal project since the late 1970s: the intensification of flows of inequitably distributed global capital and the related increase in flows of global migration. Connected to the last two is the rise of certain networked mobile technologies that have been used in particular ways by gay and bisexual migrants to navigate the material changes these wider flows have precipitated. Each of these have come together in a way that have transformed the types of intimacies practicable by the gay and bisexual men living in this area. Specifically, gay and bisexual male migrants feel alienated when they move to a part of the city whose gay collective spaces have been closing as a result of neoliberal approaches to town planning. Chemsex, organised through hook-up apps and fuelled by cheap recreational drugs, which foster an intense sense of togetherness, becomes a way of mitigating the alienation experienced moving into this city so transformed by neoliberalism. Flows of Recreational Drugs One of the things that has made Vauxhall distinct within the ecology of London’s gay nightlife in the twenty-first century has been the higher consumption of recreational drugs taken on its dance floors, much more so than either the Soho or East London gay scenes. In the 2000s ecstasy, cocaine and MDMA were the most widely consumed recreational drugs in Vauxhall.34 Ketamine and, what are now understood to be chemsex drugs, crystal methamphetamine and GHB/GBL were also being consumed in this period but in notably less quantities.35 This shifts in the 2010s, partly because the quality of ecstasy, cocaine and MDMA lessens and partly because GHB/GBL and mephedrone are cheaper and relatively easier to purchase.36 In 2009 mephedrone (legal in the UK until April 2010) ‘emerges from near obscurity’ to become one of the most popular recreational drugs on Vauxhall’s gay scene37 and among young people in Britain more generally.38 The use of crystal methamphetamine, not as cheap or easy to purchase, does not noticeably increase in this period and, according to the public health research (and corroborated by the interviews here), is the least frequently consumed of the chemsex drugs in

122

Chapter 5

the UK.39 The comparatively reasonable cost of mephedrone and GHB/GBL, especially during a moment of recession, and the affects they generate in the particular historical conditions in which they are being consumed (outlined earlier) are what connects them to the other flows which produce the context in which chemsex has emerged. Flows of Capital One of the other great causes of Vauxhall’s post-2008 transformation are the increased flows of global capital into the area and the inequitable spatial transformations that these have caused in relation to its gay scene. Vauxhall’s proximity to both the River Thames and the centre of London have made what has historically been an economically depressed area ripe for the sort of gentrification that has intensified across London during the period under discussion. Large amounts of global capital have flowed into the area largely through property development and facilitated by neoliberal local and national governments. For example, by 2020 there are plans for thirteen developments of luxury flats to be built in Vauxhall, many around fifty stories high, with a studio flat-priced at around £630,000,40 indicating the sort of inflated property prices that are becoming the norm across all three boroughs (and the city more widely). These sorts of luxury developments, coupled with the fact that the American Embassy has moved from its historic central London location to Vauxhall, has meant Lambeth council is actively trying to make Vauxhall more attractive to luxury investment. One of the effects of this has been the dwindling of the hedonistic gay cultural spaces that gave Vauxhall its identity in the previous decade41 – through either the now-unaffordable rents or the changed attitude of the council towards the gay nightclubs, who at first encouraged them to rent out Vauxhall’s railway arches but who would now prefer for them to be handed over to more respectable businesses.42 For example, Crash, Area and the Hoist, key Vauxhall nightlife spaces, have recently closed, and luxury private members’ club Soho House has opened up a restaurant in a railway arch next door their old sites. Interviewee Juan, a resident of the area, reflected on what the gentrification of Vauxhall meant for its commercial gay scene: Vauxhall is dead, gone. . . . London has changed so much.

When did you see it change? 2 years . . . I used to go to Bar Code and take pills and have a bit of ketamine and go home and be happy. . . . It was more about being there. Then something happened. They started closing. . . . Something happened. Call it gentrification. I don’t know what happened. . . . When gay companies can’t afford rent that’s



The Rise of Chemsex 123

through the roof and then that place will go to Wagamama or Wahaca.43 In a way I get it. You don’t want people going to work, to MI644 or the American Embassy, and have the walking dead leaving Fire at 6 o’clock in the morning when they have been partying for 2 days. No it’s not pretty. I get that.

These closures are part of a wider trend in London where LGBTQI night life spaces have been closing during this period – reducing in number by 58 per cent between 2006 and 2017.45 Some of this is reminiscent of the accounts given by queer writers of the effects of Mayor Giuliani’s so-called cleaningup of New York at the end of the 1990s where queer cultural spaces (sexual and otherwise) in Lower Manhattan were either closed down or moved to other parts of the city.46 The result in Lower Manhattan, as it has also been in Vauxhall and other parts of London, is the diminishing of the sort of gay collective space where differentially socially located gay and bisexual men have historically gathered to socialise, dance and initiate or engage in sexual encounters. Two of my interviewees talked about the rise of chemsex in relation to Vauxhall nightclubs closing. Though in the previous quote Juan is aware of the effect of gentrification on Vauxhall’s gay scene, in this quote he is tentative about the precise relationship it has to chemsex: The whole thing with the scene . . . what’s first the chicken or the egg. . . . I don’t know whether it was because there weren’t places to go, people started to go home or people started to go home then there weren’t places to go. . . . Definitely something changed. Places are closing down and nothing is replacing them. London used to be, I think it still is – I used to go to [nightclub] Beyond all the time and the energy there just used to be amazing. I don’t know if it still is. . . . For whatever reason people now prefer to be in someone’s house and carry on the party there.

So these parties have replaced the culture of going out in Vauxhall? Yeah . . . I suppose. Now because there are fewer places or because the music is not as good, or whatever reason then yeah people prefer going home. Or it could also be that people are so high on G that everyone is so horny they think lets go home now. I’m not sure.

Similarly Matthew sees a connection but does not precisely theorise what it might be: London’s nightlife ground to a halt with sex parties. There’s not a lot going on any more. I used to be a clubbing person. And then sex parties started happening. Chemsex started. Instead of going to a party meeting them and then going to a party afterwards, people, I think . . . people stopped going out clubbing and just went straight to the parties.

124

Chapter 5

Understood in the light of the broader material processes that have been brought to bear on Vauxhall since around 2008, it is in quotes like these that we see the rise of chemsex beginning to make sense – as a way for gay and bisexual men to commune with each other in private accommodation, when there is much less publicly available space to do so. Flows of Migration This desire to commune with others within the shifting spatial conditions of neoliberal London is arguably exacerbated by the great flows of migration that have been so essential to the organisation of different bodies in space under neoliberalism. Lambeth, where Vauxhall is located, has a particularly high migrant population. In 2011, 38 per cent were born outside the UK and between 22 and 24 per cent of the overall population move in and out of the borough each year.47 There are no specific figures for gay or bisexual migration to and from Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham. Nor are figures kept for migration to these boroughs from within the rest of the UK. (Only four of the interviewees were born in London.) There is evidence that shows that migration comes from across the global class structure48 – with the more affluent buying and renting the newly built luxury properties in the boroughs and others (especially from Latin America) becoming downwardly mobile when they move into them for different reasons.49 There is significant literature on the disorientating effects of migration generally and complementary work on these effects on gay and bisexual men, in particular.50 There is also an emerging body of literature that explores the ways that different gay and bisexual male migrants have used networked technologies to manage their alienating migrant experiences not only to remain in touch with their home culture51 but also to acculturate to the environments to which they have moved.52 Interestingly, in the context of chemsex, Shield found that migrants use gay dating platforms in particular against their intended purpose (to hook up) and instead swap information about, for example, housing in ways that ‘help potential immigrants worldwide build social networks to assist with international migration and adaptation processes abroad’.53 Combining aspects of McPhail and Fisher with Shield’s findings, some of my interviewees talked about how they used hook-up apps to find or organise chemsex encounters in direct response to the alienation they experienced on migrating to London. This quote from Johann who migrated to London from Slovakia via Cardiff is typical: I was really depressed living in London when I moved. I thought it was just me but then I was talking to guys and they felt the same thing. You don’t have friends, you don’t have family, you’re living in a big city, you do your



The Rise of Chemsex 125

job Monday to Friday and you have the weekend to yourself and you don’t know what to do . . . I was looking for company . . . I was feeling really lonely. I couldn’t make friends in clubs and bars . . . I couldn’t make friends on gay apps. Many of my friends now are guys that I met at those parties. It’s just easy when you go to parties. Even if it wasn’t sex.

In Johann’s quote we begin to see why chemsex sessions become appealing to a cohort of people who have historically relied on bars and clubs to establish both strong and weak communal bonds when they move to a new city with a large gay community and commercial scene – adding qualitative insight to survey data which found that migrants across Europe were more likely to engage in chemsex than non-migrants.54 Gay and bisexual men in Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham, significant numbers of whom are migrants, and who are seeking connection used to be able to find them in Vauxhall’s nightlife. But as these collective spaces are slowly shut or become prohibitively expensive to enjoy, this desire to commune is, by necessity, moving into private accommodation. For some gay and bisexual men, the dancefloor and the darkroom are being replaced by the chemsex session, which has no prohibitive entry fee, no over-priced alcoholic drinks and no kicking-out time.55 It is as the desire for collectivity within the specific conditions of neoliberal London that the rise of chemsex can most usefully be interpreted and not in the pathologised biographies of ‘vulnerable’ gay men, where the great neoliberal flows of capital crash into the great flows of migration and the forms of intimacy that are potentiated and constrained therein.

QUEERING COLLECTIVITY IN NEOLIBERAL TIMES This desire for collectivity in historical conditions that work to prohibit this is, Jeremy Gilbert has argued, one of the defining aspects of neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony: ‘[Neoliberalism’s] mechanisms and processes of individualisation and privatisation ultimately work against the formation of any form of potent collectivity whatsoever’.56 In his book Common Ground Gilbert sets out a relational ontology in which collectivity – specifically ‘feeling together’ – is the basis for all effective political action; hence ‘collectivity’ itself is becoming the explicit target of various neoliberal agents in their struggle for hegemony. Gilbert’s work is concerned with the political field, but his ideas can be usefully adapted to consider questions of intimacy. As discussed, the prohibition of the formation of a potent collectivity has been a significant effect of the shifting spatiality of Vauxhall’s gay scene since 2008. What the contradictions of chemsex culture, outlined earlier, arguably demonstrate is precisely the desire for gay and bisexual men to feel together

126

Chapter 5

in material conditions that have been organised through neoliberalising norms that work against this very thing. Sometimes the consumption of chemsex drugs, and the assembling of bodies into groups, successfully achieves Gilbert’s ‘feeling together’. The interviews show that it is this and not necessarily the sexual activity that is significant about chemsex. In Antonio’s words mentioned earlier, ‘Whenever you go you feel a certain way and you assume everyone is on the same level as you . . . you’re going to be in an environment where you feel safe, and whatever you do, whatever you think, whatever you say you’ll be very much accepted’. Sometimes chemsex encounters do not produce this sense of feeling together quite as successfully, for example, the lone individual obsessively scrolling through a digital device. Though, as argued earlier, the fact these men choose to do this in the corner of a room filled with group activity goes some way in demonstrating that even when neoliberal ideals are being so fully embodied in typical chemsex activity, they cannot entirely separate bodies from this desire to feel together. It also becomes possible to interpret the contradictory affective intensities present in chemsex encounters as displaying a similar dynamic, demonstrating the force of this desire to feel together. Using a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective to think through the relationship between chemsex’s affectivity and the context in which it takes place, we can argue that it is because the desire to ‘feel together’ becomes so strong within material arrangements organised through neoliberal norms that this desire burns so intensely within the chemsex encounter. Conversely we could say that because neoliberalism has been so successful at diminishing the cultural spaces where potent collectivities can endure, the ‘lines of flight’ generated within the chemsex encounter – the transformative capacities of its joyful affects – can so easily mutate into ‘lines of death’ – the psychosis, addiction or, to a lesser a degree, the strangeness or discomfort that frequently mingle with its more joyful affects. Theorising chemsex’s affectively charged collective intimacies within material conditions shaped by neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony is an alternative interpretation of the rise of chemsex in London in recent years to those advanced across the existing literature. This interpretation is however supported by the interviews. Two of my interviewees connected the rise of chemsex to historical processes that are widely understood to be responses to neoliberalism’s individualising and privatising tendencies: It makes you really loved up and connected and really horny. So it’s this perfect storm of ‘why not?’ On top of that because the gay community is so. . . . I mean look at the whole Brexit thing for example, which just symbolizes that we are not tolerant of each other, we all just want to be separate . . . as a gay community, we’re not completely included, because we’re constantly getting it from all sides. We’re not accepted. We’re not included so let’s numb the pain for a night.



The Rise of Chemsex 127

What does chemsex do in that situation? OK, I think, even within the gay community we’re not very unified, and chemsex lubricates it so we feel connected to somebody and that’s what we want, don’t we? We all want to a bit of connection. That’s why we’re here as human beings. Sex is in some way the ultimate connection and chems make it much more intense. It really isn’t . . . because you’re high . . . what we all want is human connection but building proper human connection takes time. It takes these little moments of connection with people until you build a relationship of any kind. With chems you streamline that process. You don’t need those little moments. You have that intense connection that takes a year or years to build up immediately and that makes it OK. You have that connection. (Daniel) I think in the wider population there’s more focus on the individual. . . . I’d probably draw comparisons with what’s happening with the far right at the moment and Donald Trump, populist campaigns . . . Brexit. I think people are looking for places where they fit in. And there’s less of a gay culture now. There’s more equality so there’s less of a reason to go to a gay bar. They can go to a straight bar and not hide who they are in public. So they don’t go to the gay villages, or Soho.

How do the chill-outs fit into that? They give you a sense of belonging. You find yourself in a situation where you suddenly love everyone and everyone loves you and you tell each other everything, you tell each other your secrets. You have this enormous rush of drugs and the rush of sex and everything. . . . It’s intoxicating. (Michael)

Here both Daniel and Michael describe a culture lacking in connection and a sense of belonging. Both attempt to link this culture of diminished collectivity to wider geo-political events, particularly Brexit, but also to Trump and the rise of political populism (they were both interviewed in June 2016). These are phenomena widely interpreted as responses to historical processes generated by the hegemony of neoliberalism, although whether they indicate its end, its intensification or another of its crises remains up for debate. Daniel and Michael each give a different account of the way these processes have affected gay and bisexual men in particular. Daniel argues that it has generated increased homophobia, while Michael argues precisely the opposite and that this has coincided with an increase in equality for gay and bisexual men. Either way both agree that what chemsex does in this wider historical context is provide ‘instant . . . intense connection’ and an ‘intoxicating . . . sense of belonging’. CONCLUSION Different social groups have been consuming recreational drugs in sexual settings for millennia.57 Nevertheless, this research suggests that chemsex has its specificities that give it a distinctiveness as a cultural practice: (i) the

128

Chapter 5

types of drugs taken, (ii) the use of hook-up apps to organise them, (iii) the spatial and temporal specificities of its emergence and (iv) the particular contradictions of the relationalities and affects it produces. Given these specificities it then becomes meaningful to think through chemsex in relation to the conjuncture in which it has emerged. This conjunctural approach has served a double purpose: (i) to complicate the dominant account of its emergence in the UK’s media and medical discourses and counteract the problematic implications of these discourses and (ii) to illuminate aspects of the present conjuncture that an analysis of other cultural practices might not. Intimacy has been thus far under-theorised by scholars who engage in conjunctural analysis. The organisation of different forms of intimate relations – how they are constructed, which are and are not legitimate, the affective intensities of their practice – reveals as much about a historical moment as the social, economic and political relations that these moments produce. What this analysis of chemsex has shown is both the life-sustaining and life-deforming ways that practices of intimacy have been constrained and potentiated during neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony in the UK, specifically the London context. If this is the function of chemsex during this particular historical moment – providing intense connection for groups of gay and bisexual men, when the material conditions for this to flourish have been diminished for everyone – what might be its political consequences? It might be a stretch to argue that chemsex is a counter-hegemonic practice, one that constitutes resistance to the hegemony of neoliberalism in contemporary British culture. There was no evidence in the interviews that gay and bisexual men were consciously developing this practice in any explicit political sense. Nevertheless, the previous quotes do show that chemsex, at least in part, reminded gay and bisexual men of the joys of collectively feeling together in ways that demonstrate that the hegemony of neoliberalism is not quite as totalising as some accounts might suggest, and that the sexualised male body can be used against the interests of neoliberalism. It is the cultivation of the joys of this, what might be called, queer sense of collectivity and its articulation to other practices that generate similar affects and relationalities, both within and outside gay culture, where resistance to neoliberalism might be effectively constructed. This line of thought is developed further in the next, concluding chapter, which reflects on the role that digitally mediated, sexualised modes of gendered embodiment might play in bringing about a post-neoliberal future.

NOTES 1. Hannah McCall, Naomi Adams, David Mason and Jamie Willis, ‘What Is Chemsex and Why Does It Matter? It Needs to Become a Public Health Priority’, The British Medical Journal, 351 (2015): 1–2.



The Rise of Chemsex 129

2. Emily Hargrave, ‘Cultural Competency for Clinicians: Chemsex and Coinfection’, Future Virology, 10:4 (2015): 347–349; David Stuart, ‘Sexualised Drug Use by MSM: Background, Current Status and Response’, HIV Nursing, 13 (2013): 6–10; David Stuart and Johannes Weymann, ‘Chemsex and Care-Planning: One Year in Practice’, HIV Nursing, 5 (2015): 24–28. 3. Jeremy Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (London: Pluto Press, 2013). 4. Kane Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Kane Race, ‘ “Party and Play”: Online Hook-Up Devices and the Emergence of PNP Practices among Gay Men’, Sexualities, 18:3 (2015): 253–275; Kane Race et al., ‘The Future of Drugs: Recreational Drug Use and Sexual Health among Gay and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men’, Sexual Health (December 2016), A–I; Kane Race, The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV (London: Routledge, 2017). 5. V. L. Gillbart et al., ‘Sex, Drugs and Smart Phone Applications: Findings from Semistructured Interviews with Men Who Have Sex with Men Diagnosed with Shigella Flexneri 3a in England And Wales’, Sexually Transmitted Infections, 91:8 (2015): 598–602; Hargrave, ‘Cultural Competency for Clinicians’; Joe Phillips, ‘Examining the Impact on HIV and Hepatitis C Co-Infection in the Era of “Chemsex” ’, HIV Nursing, 15 (2015): 8–11; Stuart, ‘Sexualised Drug Use by MSM’; Stuart and Weymann, ‘Chemsex and Care-Planning’. 6. Adam Bourne et al., The Chemsex Study: Drug Use in Sexual Settings among Gay & Bisexual Men in Lambeth, Southwark & Lewisham (London: Sigma Research, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2014). 7. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1972). 8. Gayle Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex’ in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge 1984): 3–44. 9. Kirsten Drotner, ‘Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity’, Paedagogica Historica, 35:3 (1999): 593–619. 10. Paul Flynn, ‘Chemsex Film Review’, Attitude, 264 (2015): 78. 11. Rebecca Nicholson, ‘Welcome to Chemsex Week’, Vice.com, last modified November 30, 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/welcome-to-chemsexweek-992. 12. Zoe Cormier, ‘Chemsex: How Dangerous Is It?’ The Guardian, last modified 9 November, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/nov/05/ chemsex-how-dangerous-is-it. 13. Dion Kagan ‘ “Re-Crisis”: Barebacking, Sex Panic and the Logic of Epidemic’, Sexualities, 18:7 (2015): 817–837; Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media (London: Comedia, 1987). 14. David Stuart quoted in Patrick Cash, ‘Patrick Cash on Gay Sex and Drugs’, Attitude, 164 (2015): 72; David Stuart quoted in Flynn, ‘Chemsex Film Review’. 15. Dominic Davies quoted in Patrick Cash, ‘What’s behind the Rise of Chemsex?’ Vice.com, last modified 30 November 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/ whats-behind-the-rise-of-chemsex-902; David Stuart quoted in Cash, ‘Patrick Cash on Gay Sex and Drugs’, 72.

130

Chapter 5

16. For a discussion see Christele Fraisses and Jaime Barrientos, ‘The Concept of Homophobia: A Psychosocial Perspective’, Sexologies, 25:3 (2016): 133–140. 17. Marco Borria, Substance Abuse and Sexual Risk between Men in London: A Critical Exploration of Social Practices and Health Concerns (PhD diss., Brunel University, 2013); Bourne et al., The Chemsex Study. 18. Ioanna Vardakou, Constantinos Pistos and Chara Spiliopoulou, ‘Drugs for Youth via Internet and the Example of Mephedrone’, Toxicology Letters, 201:3 (2011): 191–195. 19. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 1990). 20. Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). 21. Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Rachel O’Neill, Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Medford: Polity, 2018); Alison Winch, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 22. Lauren Berlant, ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’, Critical Inquiry, 24:2 (1998): 281–288; Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry 24:2 (1998): 547–566; Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999); Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 23. Gilbert, Common Ground. 24. Ben Campkin and Laura Marshall, LGBTQ+ Cultural Infrastructure in London: Night Venues, 2006 – Present (London: UCL Urban Laboratory, 2017). 25. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 26. The only gap in the sample comes in the form of an absence of South American men. According to the interviews, South American gay and bisexual men were a notable presence at chemsex parties. This is probably related to the fact that South Americans constitute such a large percentage of the migrant population of Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham; see Cathy McLlwaine, Juan Camilo Cock and Brian Linneker, No Longer Invisible: The Latin American Community in London (London: Trust for London, 2011). This absence is one that repeats itself across sexual health research in the UK. Recent research suggests this might be because much of the South American population in this borough have poor English-speaking skills and are not so easily targeted by the methods deployed here; different approach to sample construction, in further research, is required to fill this gap; Lucila Granada and Ivana Paccoud, Latin Americans: A Case for Better Access to Sexual Health Services (London: Trust for London, 2014). 27. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004 [1980]); Jessica Ringrose, ‘Beyond Discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalysis



The Rise of Chemsex 131

to Explore Affective Assemblages, Heterosexually Striated Space, and Lines of Flight Online and at School’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43:6 (2011): 598–618. 28. One interviewee talked about a distinctive chemsex culture in London’s gay saunas, and two talked about meeting other men at nightclubs and having chemsex with them at the end of the night. 29. Lynn Jamieson, Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 30. The words ‘monged’ and ‘twatted’ are British slang terms that are both used to refer to the experience of consuming alcohol or recreational drugs to the point where a person begins to lose control over what they are doing. 31. Kane Race, ‘Chemsex Review: Gay Sex and Drugs Demand More Careful Attention’, The Conversation, last modified 7 December 2015, https://theconversation .com/chemsex-review-gay-sex-and-drug-use-demand-more-careful-forms-ofattention-51586. 32. Borria, Substance Abuse and Sexual Risk Between Men in London. 33. Bourne et al., The Chemsex Study. 34. Ibid. 35. Graham Bolding et al., ‘Use of Crystal Methamphetamine Among Gay Men in London’, Addiction, 101:11 (2006): 1622–1630; Ford Hickson et al., ‘Illicit Drug Use among Men Who Have Sex with Men in England and Wales’, Addiction Research and Theory, 18:1 (2010): 14–22. 36. Bourne et al., The Chemsex Study. 37. Fiona Measham et al. ‘The Rise in Legal Highs: Prevalence and Patterns in the Use of Illegal Drugs and First- and Second-Generation ‘Legal Highs’ in South London Gay Dance Clubs’, Journal of Substance Use, 16:4 (2011): 263–272. 38. Vardakou et al., ‘Drugs for Youth Via Internet and the Example of Mephedrone’. 39. Bourne et al., The Chemsex Study; Ford Hickson et al. State of Play: findings from the England Gay Men’s Sex Survey 2014 (London: Sigma Research, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2014). 40. Edward Docx, ‘Vauxhall’s Next for the Hipster Cavaliers’, Spectator Life, last modified 15 December 2015, https://life.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/ vauxhalls-next-for-the-hipster-cavaliers/. 41. Johan Andersson, ‘Vauxhall’s Post-industrial Pleasure Gardens: “Death Wish” and Hedonism in 21st-Century London’, Urban Studies, 48:1 (2011): 85–100. 42. Adam Bychawski, ‘Britain’s Railways Created the Country’s Biggest Clubs and Gentrification Shut Them Down’, Thump, last modified 6 November 2014, https:// thump.vice.com/en_us/article/how-railways-created-the-uk-biggest-nightclubs-andgentrification-closed-them-bagleys-studios-kings-cross-cable-crash-vauxhall. 43. Large British restaurant chains. 44. The British government’s foreign intelligence agency, which is based in Vauxhall. 45. Campkin and Marshall, LGBTQ+ Cultural Infrastructure in London. 46. Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue; Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal.

132

Chapter 5

47. Lambeth Council, State of the Borough 2014, https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/ elections-and-council/about-lambeth/state-of-the-borough. 48. Ibid. 49. McLlwaine et al., No Longer Invisible. 50. Bob Cant, Invented Identities?: Lesbians and Gays Talk about Migration (London: Cassell, 1997); Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment’ in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, eds. Claudia Castada et al. (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 115–135; Andrew Gorman-Murray, ‘Intimate Mobilities: Emotional Embodiment and Queer Migration’, Social & Cultural Geography, 10:4 (2009): 441–460; Eithne Luibheid, ‘Queer/ Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship’, GLQ: A  Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14:2–3 (2008): 169–190. 51. Alexander Dhoest, ‘Feeling (Dis)Connected: Diasporic LGBTQS and Digital Media’, International Journal of E-Politics, 7:3 (2016): 35–48. 52. Ruth McPhail and Ron Fisher, ‘Lesbian and Gay Expatriates Use of Social Media to Aid Acculturation’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 49 (2015): 294–307. 53. Andrew D. J. Shield, ‘New in Town: Gay Immigrants and Geosocial Media’ in LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe, eds. Alexander Dhoest et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 252. 54. The EMIS Network, EMIS 2010: The European Men-Who-Have-Sex-withMen Internet Survey. Findings from 38 Countries (Stockholm: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2013). 55. Something else that has diminished with the closure of these spaces is the onsite paramedics and recovery rooms that were made available for people having bad, if not potentially fatal, reactions to the drugs that they had consumed at these nightclubs (Marco Borria, Substance Abuse and Sexual Risk between Men in London). It is safe to speculate that the disappearance of these has had a significant impact on the number of chemsex-related morbidities now that these drugs are being consumed in private accommodation, away from this rapid response attention. 56. Gilbert, Common Ground, 47. 57. Race et al., ‘The Future of Drugs’.

Chapter 6

Conclusion: Bodies in Common

Neoliberalism has not been good for men. It has been worse for women and, in terms of gender, even worse for working class women, women of colour, female migrants, trans* folk and differently abled women. The fact that it has not been good for men should not suddenly make the failures of neoliberalism matter, or matter more to those of us interested in its undoing. What it should do is demonstrate that neoliberalism as a hegemonic project has been bad for everyone except global elites, even social groups who were comparatively well served by capitalist hetero-patriarchy before 2008, including that recently incorporated category – cis-gendered, homonormative, white, gay men. The increased sexualisation of male bodies through digital media is but one piece of evidence for this, albeit a significant one that has been overlooked in the various literatures on neoliberalism, digital cultures and gendered embodiment. It can be seen in the way male celebrities can accrue (limited) value through the leaking of nude images using digital technologies. It can be seen in the way some men post sexualised images of their gym-fit bodies on their social media profiles in order to feel valuable. It can also be seen in the mainstreaming of a certain version of drag queen culture in RuPaul’s Drag Race – a transmedia phenomenon that explained itself, at least until 2018, as a mode of male body transformation, and one that privileges the sexualising, white, slender beauty norms of post-feminist/gendered neoliberal visual cultures. It can even be seen in the way some gay and bisexual men engage in chemsex, using smartphone hook-up applications to create affectively intense collective encounters as a way of negotiating neoliberalism’s assault on their historical collective modes of being. Taken together this has led me to argue that neoliberalism has a feminising axiomatic: one that works to make more of our lives resemble women’s under-capitalist hetero-patriarchy, both through the 133

134

Chapter 6

precarious conditions we live and work in and in the way that more of us are encouraged to sexualise our bodies as compensation. Where does this leave us? In this concluding chapter I consider what place digitally mediated, sexualised modes of gendered embodiment might play in post-neoliberal politics. This is, of course, a big question, and to fully answer it would require another book. What I do in this chapter is discuss existing political projects that, while not dealing with this question directly, can help formulate ways of addressing it. As discussed here, just as neoliberalism redoubled its efforts after the 2008 crisis so did a number of other hegemonic struggles on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. In this chapter, I draw on left-oriented theoretical concepts that have emerged during this hegemonic struggle, particularly notions of the common/commons/ commoning (depending on the theorist) that, with their emphasis on mutually working for the collective good, could productively replace the destructive neoliberal ethic of competitive individualism as an overarching principle for the organisation of social life. These concepts have been applied to both digital technologies in the idea of the ‘digital commons’ and the body in what might be called the corporeal commons. In what follows I draw on a range of modes of gendered embodiment and not only male embodiment as case studies to help think through what a post-neoliberal politics might look like. If it is not clear already – the way that bodies have been gendered (and raced and classed etc.) under capitalist modernity is a problem in and of itself. The digitally mediated male body may have been this book’s way into understanding the hegemonic operations of neoliberalism after the 2008 financial crisis, but it cannot be a way into a future beyond neoliberalism. That is not to say that gender, or indeed the sexualised and gendered body, will not have a place in post-neoliberal politics. At the end of this chapter I consider exactly what this might be. THE POST-2016 CONJUNCTURE? I cannot consider the place of digitally mediated modes of sexualised embodiment in post-neoliberal politics without first outlining the ways that the redoubling of neoliberalism in the Anglo-American context after 2008 has shifted since 2016 – the year that the UK voted (by a narrow margin) to leave the EU, and Donald Trump was voted in as president of the US. What these historical events represent in relation to the hegemony of neoliberalism is debatable. It is a significant contradiction that Donald Trump, whose pre-presidential celebrity was based on being the most famous entrepreneur in the US, won the 2016 presidential election on an anti-free trade and anti-freedom of movement platform. At the very least we can say that



Conclusion: Bodies in Common 135

neoliberalism’s hegemony has been threatened by the emergence of the first significant counter-hegemonic projects since the neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s. On the left we have seen the emergence of grassroots groups like Occupy as well as the re-emergence of democratic socialism as a significant political force in the guise of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and the influx of progressive congresswomen of colour such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2018 US mid-terms. On the right we see the alt-right that supported Donald Trump and has been sympathetic to UKIP, the Leave campaign and the Tory right who have tried to rebrand themselves within this new political landscape (e.g. Boris Johnson). Neoliberalism may have redoubled its efforts after the 2008 crisis but so did alternative political projects with fluctuating degrees of success. In these hegemonic struggles we can at least say that 2016 represents a turning point. Once again the male body has been a site where this struggle for hegemony can be read. If neoliberal politics has been represented by the slick, glossy GQ cover ready masculinities of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, David Cameron and Emmanuel Macron, then these counterhegemonic projects have populated visual culture with a range of alternative masculinities, some of which intensify the metrosexual tendencies of neoliberal masculinity and some of which significantly depart from them. Little and Winch have detected an extension of these neoliberal masculinities in the form of the high-profile ‘digital patriarchs’ who run Silicon Valley (e.g. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg) and whose attempts at constructing images of their liberal masculinity work to mask the profoundly unequal structures of the companies they own and platforms they provide.1 There are also the masculinities of the new populisms, both left and right, which depart from neoliberal masculinity. The dishevelled embodiment of figures such as Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Steve Bannon has been read as a sign of both their political authenticity and their fundamental inability to lead. Masculinity was essential to the success of the Bannon/Trump project coming in two distinct forms. The first was the digitally consolidated misogynistic masculinities of the alt-right such as the ‘incel’ movement and men’s right groups on 4chan’s online discussion boards. The second came in the shape of alt-right blogger Milo Yiannopolous who, through his embodiment, articulated the physical tropes of gay subcultural category, the ‘twink’,2 with fascism. At the same time other queer masculinities have acquired increased cultural salience since 2016. One of these is the figure of the transmasculine body builder, such as Aydian Dowling, who, in a historically unprecedented way, has appeared on mainstream magazine covers, mostly targeted at gay men, such as Gay Times and Attitude. Of course, the fact that the mainstream visibility of transmasculinity has been dependent on the neoliberal spornosexual aesthetics discussed in chapter 3 is important and should give us pause for thought. Another form of spornosexual aesthetics

136

Chapter 6

that has emerged during the crisis of neoliberalism is their articulation to progressive political projects. One example is actor and activist Kendrick Sampson, whose celebrity is dependent on a regular role in US television series Insecure (2016–), and who frequently posts sexualised images of his gym-fit body on his Instagram profile captioned with comments and hashtags advocating for anti-racist politics connected to the Black Lives Matter movement. Though clearly a departure from the neoliberal aphorisms usually associated with spornosexual media content, it is difficult not to see an attempt at neoliberal self-branding also taking place alongside some sophisticated anti-racist political statements. DELEUZE, GUATTARI AND THE COMMONS If these modes of masculine embodiment represent some of the counterhegemonic tendencies that have emerged during neoliberalism’s post-2008 unravelling, which elements do we need to keep hold of and which do we need to discard to ensure neoliberalism unravels towards a more progressive future, and not the dystopia that has been so frequently conjured in the age of Brexit and Trump? Before I answer this question let me state explicitly what has been implicit within the book and explain what I think a more progressive future means. If neoliberalism has intensified the arrangements of capitalist modernity whereby people are organised into exploitable populations based on arbitrarily defined bodily differences (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, class, able-bodiness) that have unequal access to the capacity to reproduce life, then a progressive post-neoliberal future would deterritorialise these arbitrarily distributed differences so that we all have the capacity to reproduce life on equal terms. If the neoliberal present, or more accurately its crisis, is the starting point, then the politics needed to get us to this future, I would argue, should look to neoliberalism’s pre-history – the 1960s new left critique of welfare state capitalism and state communism that preceded the moment of neoliberal hegemony. These politics should struggle for all bodies on equal terms: egalitarian, democratic, socialist, feminist, queer and anti-racist. Following the tradition of British cultural studies that this book is written in these politics should not follow the vanguardist tendencies of some elements of the New Left but should instead be avowedly popular, involving all the people involved in that future. However, unlike the tradition of British cultural studies, the remainder of this chapter will not take a Gramscian approach to thinking through what place the digitally mediated sexualised body might have in post-neoliberal politics. Instead it is going to tease out a similarly future-oriented theoretical tendency that has been latent within this book and draw on the co-authored work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.3



Conclusion: Bodies in Common 137

The reason for turning to Deleuze and Guattari is because their work understands both bodies and desire to be absolutely central to the operations of capitalist modernity as well as to the politics that should contribute to its undoing. It is important to say in the context of a discussion of sexualised gendered embodiment that Deleuze and Guattari do not use the common sense understanding of the terms ‘bodies’ and ‘desire’. They use the term ‘body’ to refer to both the material nature of all ontological phenomena and the machinic nature of their functioning – much like the various biological systems that give life to organic bodies. Similarly, Deleuzo-Guattarian desire is delibidinised and can more usefully be understood not as sexual desire but as force of existence or what Baruch Spinoza, a key influence on the philosophers, termed conatus.4 In these terms desire is the a priori capacity that all bodies have to strive to preserve their force of existence. That is not to say that the sexual human body cannot play a part in a Deleuzo-Guattarian politics. Though at times Deleuze and Guattari, particularly Deleuze, seem at pains to bend away from the sexual body in their work, they do touch on its politically transformative potential in A Thousand Plateaus. In the chapter ‘November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?’,5 they answer this question through recourse, to masochism, tantra and Taoist sexual practices. Indeed, in an important intervention, philosopher Frida Beckman makes a convincing case for re-libidinising Deleuzo-Guattarian desire, arguing that sexual pleasure, properly managed, can meaningfully contribute to a politics informed by their thinking.6 The benefit of using a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach in gesturing towards a post-neoliberal body politics in a book about sexualised modes of gendered embodiment is that it transforms the way these modes of embodiment have been understood under capitalist modernity as possible sources of value creation that rely on the subordination of the subjects to whom these bodies belong. Instead, it conceives of sexualised and gendered bodies, not in terms of value but instead in terms of desire and, therefore, fundamental to the effort to preserve our force of existence, which capitalist modernity diminishes through attempting to extract value from everything including our sexualised and gendered bodies. To spell this out: the central concern of Deleuze and Guattari’s co-authored work is the mechanisms by which desire is organised under-capitalist modernity. For Deleuze and Guattari all ontological phenomena should be understood as constantly rearranging agencements, variously interpreted as assemblages or arrangements of bodies. These assemblages are defined both by how their constitutive bodies are internally arranged and by how they are connected to other assemblages. These internal and external arrangements define how desire flows through these assemblages and whether they multiply or diminish their own force of existence. At any given moment these shifting assemblages will acquire a certain stasis or consistency that endures

138

Chapter 6

for a particular period of time before rearranging to achieve a different sort of consistency. This rearrangement can occur either through the conscious reorganisation of the bodies that constitute an assemblage or if the desire that flows through an assemblage surges or diminishes beyond or beneath the threshold required to maintain its consistency. According to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism (the capitalist machine) constrains the ways that desire flows through the assemblages that constitute the social field. It does this through an axiomatic that decodes all flows of desire into monetary value. This capitalist axiomatic knows no limits, and this potentially leads to a situation where capitalism’s voraciousness could even undo itself. To stop this from happening, capitalism’s decoding capacities have to be oedipalised: contained by the (re-)productive, heterosexual, nuclear family. The effect of this is the constraint of the flow of desire in the social field and the creation of individualised subjects whose sense of subjectivity is dependent on their place within the nuclear family unit. This oedipal organisation of the social field leads to a productive, yet, immiserated capitalist workforce whose capacity to increase its own force of existence is fundamentally blocked by the capitalist machine and the oedipal arrangements that support it. A Deleuzo-Guattarian politics, therefore, is anti-oedipal, anti-individualist and anti-capitalist. It seeks to de-oedipalise the flows of desire contained within the nuclear family and that support individualisation so that all bodies can be arranged into collective assemblages that result in the mutual increase of their force of existence. These arrangements can be brought about either through bodies consciously rearranging themselves into collective assemblages or through surges and dissipations of flows of desire. This politics, therefore, can be understood as having three central axes: modes of organisation, bodies and desire. In the remainder of this section, I will turn to existing political projects that address these axes in separate yet overlapping ways, each of which speaks directly to the problems of the post-2008 conjuncture addressed in this book, and each of which can help think through the place of the digitally mediated sexualised body in post-neoliberal politics. BODIES IN COMMON In terms of thinking through post-neoliberal modes of organisation, or bodies consciously rearranging themselves into collective assemblages, I will turn to the recent resurgence in interest in the notion of the ‘commons’ as a contemporary political project that seeks to replace the privatising, individualising and value-extracting capacities of neoliberal capitalism in all areas of social



Conclusion: Bodies in Common 139

life. The term ‘commons’ originates in the common lands that were available to pre-capitalist communities to tend to in their collective interest, mostly in Europe but also globally.7 During the emergence of capitalist modernity (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), these common lands were systematically ‘enclosed’ by the capitalist classes, meaning they were taken out of the community’s collective control so these classes could extract value from them in their own interests and against that of the community. The term ‘commons’ has been recently revived in anti-capitalist politics to refer to ‘value practices that are alternative to that of capital and that are interlinked by commons networks. By and large, the commons imply a plurality of people (a community) sharing resources and governing them and their own relations and (re)production processes through horizontal doing in common, commoning’.8 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri recast, what they call, the common in DeleuzoGuattarian terms, arguing that it is precisely this mode of social, political, cultural, technological and economic organisation that will best augment the force of existence of all the bodies involved in it: Our free and equal access to the common, through which we together produce new and greater forms of the common, our liberation from the subordination of identities through monstrous processes of self-transformation, our autonomous control of the circuits of the production of social subjectivity, and in general our construction of common practices through which singularities compose the multitude are limitless cycles of our increasing power and joy.9

Against neoliberal ‘processes of self-transformation’ the common/commons/ commoning is a mode of organisation that, because it involves everyone working in the common good will, increases all of our (the multitude’s) force of existence. How, then, might it be applied to the domain addressed in this book – digitally mediated, sexualised modes of gendered embodiment? Hardt and Negri are among a number of thinkers who have addressed this question but as separate domains: first, as the digital commons and second as what might be called the corporeal commons. I will take each in turn. The Digital Commons The digital commons is a project that has been argued for since the inception of the Internet. Those who advocate for it point to how the networked infrastructure of the Internet can allow for exactly the sorts of horizontal, decentralised and egalitarian communication so necessary to the wider project of commoning. Indeed prior to the Internet’s capture by digital capitalism, digital commoning was successfully practised in a range of different projects, such as Free/Open Source software, all of which concerned themselves with

140

Chapter 6

using networked technologies to collectively produce widely available free digital products. The hegemony of digital capitalism, from at least 2008, has transformed the terrain upon which projects of the digital commons have had to operate. Their emphasis after this period has been on how we supersede digital capitalism as the cutting edge of neoliberal capital accumulation in the post-2008 conjuncture. Strategies include putting social media platforms like YouTube into public ownership;10 ‘platform cooperativism’, which, largely concerned with labour relations, would involving workers, consumers and management in the ownership and governance of the Internet on equal terms;11 and ‘full automation’ which would maximise digital technologies capacities to automate all areas of work and totally free us from alienated forms of labour.12 What will shortly become clear from the discussion of the corporeal commons in the next section is that the creation of the digital commons is absolutely vital if the digitally mediated, sexualised body is to be successfully put to use in post-neoliberal politics. Too often the digitally mediated body practices that come closest to realising a post-neoliberal future are thwarted by both neoliberalism and digital capitalism’s apparatuses of capture. The Corporeal Commons The corporeal commons is not a project as such. However, that the human body can provide the basis for practices of commoning has been a concern for cultural studies scholars in two ways that are important for the discussion at hand. The first comes in the form of the emergent work on Acid Communism, or in response to the specificities of the British context, Acid Corbynism – that is Acid Communism brought about through the social movements and ideas that have supported the rise of Jeremy Corbyn as a political force. ‘Acid’ is a vernacular term for the hallucinogenic drug LSD that was central to 1960s hippy culture. In hippy philosophy acid was understood to expand human consciousness in a way that could alleviate the deadening constraints of the Fordist everyday. This philosophy went on to inform a whole range of counter-cultural productions based on the premise that spontaneous improvisation had the capacity to reveal the interconnectedness of everything in the cosmos. Acid Communism/Corbynism revives this philosophy by boiling it down to its core components – cooperation, collaboration and e­ xperimentation – and arguing that these should replace contemporary neoliberal values.13 The preferred means of achieving this is ‘deliberately expanding consciousness through resolutely materialist means’,14 with materialist here referring to the body. So one of Acid Corbynism’s advocates only half-jokingly espouses ‘yoga and discos for all’15 as key Acid Corbynist political praxes. Indeed, across this literature the cooperation, collaboration and experimentation of



Conclusion: Bodies in Common 141

post–Acid House British dance music culture and the corporeal being in common generated on its dance floors is a held up as a model for thinking about how Acid Communism/Corbynism could be bought about not only in popular culture but in areas such as health, housing and education too. Acid Communism/Corbynism is a good starting point for thinking through the place of the body in post-neoliberal politics. However, questions of gender and sex are slightly effaced in this project – the former through its universalist address and the latter because of its fidelity to the DeleuzoGuattarian notion of delibidinised desire. To understand what role the sexed and gendered body might play in these politics, we can turn to existing projects interested in the sexual commons. In chapter 5, I have already touched on the notion of the sexual commons without naming it as such. The idea that using counter-public space for collective sexual encounters that are liberating/ transgressive has been an important part of the sexual politics of both gay liberation and queer politics since the 1960s. Italian radical Mario Mieli offered one of the first theorisations of why this might be in his pamphlet Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique.16 Though identifying with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s of which Deleuze and Guattari were a part, Mieli’s major theoretical resource is Herbert Marcuse who was similarly interested in the relationship between desire (understood as Freudian libido) and the organisation of society under capitalism. In this pamphlet Mieli argued that only ‘transexual’ – pansexual in today’s language – experimentation would end capitalism and create communism, or a society-in-common. He based this argument on the Marcusean idea that capitalist society functioned through the sublimation of the polymorphous perverse, pleasure principle (a pre-Oedipal libidinal force unconstrained by categories of sex and gender) into the performance principle – the human capacity to perform alienated labour. Only when the pleasure principle was desublimated, and de-oedipalised, through transsexual sexual experimentation and allowed to flood the social field, would we be able to achieve ‘the creation of true intersubjective reciprocity’17 that would provide the psychic infrastructure for communism. Though Mieli does not quite use these terms, what he is advocating for here is for de-oedipal sexual experimentation to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of a society-in-common. More Deleuzo-Guattarian in orientation, Hardt and Negri explicitly name gay cruising as a de-oedipal sexual practice that can help think through the building of the common. In a passage in Commonwealth they refer to Guattari’s interest in how gay cruising appeared in the cultural productions of Jean Genet, David Wojnarwoicz and Samuel Delaney, arguing that against the odepialisation of desire that makes a capitalist society possible, gay cruising instead provides ‘an antidote to the corruptions of love and the family [oedipalisation], opening love up to the encounter of singularities’.18 To explain

142

Chapter 6

what this means they use A Thousand Plateaus’ famous discussion of the wasp and the orchid. Despite belonging to different biological kingdoms, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the sexual organs of wasps and orchids fit together in a way that produces a sexual, yet non-(re)productive, assemblage.19 Hardt and Negri argue this is politically significant by contrasting the non-reproductive wasp/orchid assemblage to the way liberal economists like Adam Smith used the depiction of vice-less yet productive worker bees in Bernard Mandeville’s satire Fable of the Bees to demonstrate the efficiency of capitalism. They write: In the encounter of singularities of their love, a new assemblage is created, marked by the continual metamorphosis of each singularity in the common. Wasp-orchid love, in other words, is a model of the production of subjectivity that animates the biopolitical economy. Let’s have done with worker bees, then, and focus on the singularities and becomings of wasp-orchid love!20

In this quote they distinguish between the oedipalised, reproductive love of worker bees that produces the joyless capitalist workforce with the deoedipalised wasp-orchid love evident in gay cruising culture, where love has no (re-)productive ends beyond the continual metamorphosis of singularities in their being in common. In their different ways, both Mieli and Hardt and Negri make persuasive cases for the sexual body being one basis for the bringing about of the commons. However, something neither of them has fully considered is the place of gender in these practices. In Hardt and Negri’s case it is significant that it is gay men who are involved in cruising culture. As men their relationship to both public space and promiscuity is different from women’s who are policed through violence and shaming in relation to both, respectively. That is not to say that wasp/orchid love across different sexed and gendered bodies, or Mieli’s call for a ‘transexual’ sexual revolution, is not desirable as either a means to bring about or a goal within a post-neoliberal future. It is just that a sex-based political praxis in the service of this future would need to more fully account for gender difference under hetero-patriarchy than any of these theorists currently have. Sex, drugs and dance music, tied to wider counter-hegemonic struggles, as articulating the principle of bodies being in common is a good place to start in terms of thinking through post-neoliberal body politics. However, they only partially address the problematic of this book – digitally mediated modes of sexualised, gendered embodiment. How could the ideas set out in the various scholarships on the commons be applied in this domain? What would a progressive counter-hegemonic struggle against neoliberalism look like here? How might we use digital media to formulate a body politics that promotes



Conclusion: Bodies in Common 143

joyful encounters between all sorts of bodies, that interrupts flows of capital or blocks its apparatuses of capture and that has the potential to engage as many bodies as possible in its political project? I have already touched on this question at different points in this book, but in each case the practices I discussed have never been able to fully bring about the post-neoliberal future precisely because they have been operating in conditions where both neoliberalism and digital capitalism remain hegemonic. For instance, chemsex does not fully achieve a post-neoliberal body politics because the affectively intense moments of being in common are so frustrated by the continued neoliberal assault on queer collective life. In chapter 4, I explained one of the reasons that RuPaul’s Drag Race has achieved the mainstream success that it has was because of the collective reformulation of LGBT politics that was enabled by social media platforms, such as Tumblr, after 2008. By networking otherwise geographically dispersed sex and gender minorities and allowing them to co-produce and share online content around highly specific hashtags, these groups were given the techno-material conditions to consolidate cultures and identities otherwise marginalised by homonormativity, such as trans*, intersex and asexual: hence the use of the acronym LGBTQIA+. That this has happened within the economic conditions of digital capitalism has been problematic in terms of post-neoliberal body politics. In 2018 Tumblr’s new owners Verizon decided to ban the sharing of sexually explicit content on the platform so it could more profitably sell advertising on it.21 The sharing of sexually explicit content was crucial to the consolidation of these minority sex and gender cultures and identities and so Verizon’s decision to stop this in an attempt to increase profitably has stymied its capacities to play a part in the transformation of hetero-patriarchy. More optimistic about the counter-hegemonic potentials for the digital and its place in body politics is Jessica Ringrose’s work, touched on in chapter 1, on young feminists who use a variety of digital tools to collectively organise against the ways female bodies are sexualised in the visual cultures of gendered neoliberalism and the patriarchal everyday.22 However, something else we need to consider here is the way that all activity that occurs on social media contributes to the capital accumulation of digital capitalism, including anti-capitalist, queer and feminist organising. Perversely, digital capitalism is actually strengthened by the digital political projects that struggle against it. This provides the strongest evidence for the argument that the digital commons is vital if we want to think about how digitally mediated sexualised modes of gendered embodiment would contribute to a post-neoliberal future. Struggling against neoliberalism within the conditions of digital capitalism has meant this future could only ever be partially realised, if realised at all. All of these formations – the digital commons, Acid Communism/Corbynism, gay cruising culture, chemsex, LGBTQIA+ community formation

144

Chapter 6

on Tumblr and online feminist organising – offer something to the imagining of what the place of the digitally mediated sexualised gendered body might play in the actualising of a post-neoliberal future. In what remains of this chapter I will not add a new practice to this list. Instead I will suggest a new axiomatic that might organise what these politics might look like. If one of neoliberalism’s organising principles is its feminising axiomatic that works across all bodies regardless of gender (except those of neoliberal elites) so that more and more of us experience the world like women have and continue to under capitalist hetero-patriarchy, then I would like to propose Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-girl as a counter-axiomatic to replace this. A COUNTER-AXIOMATIC: BECOMING-GIRL In A Thousand Plateau’s chapter ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, BecomingAnimal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . .’,23 Deleuze and Guattari, who usually think in highly abstract terms, gesture towards the concrete, body-based, hierarchies of power that underpin capitalist modernity. Occupying the top of the hierarchy is ‘the standard upon which the majority is based: white, male, adult, “rational” etc., in short, the European, the subject of enunciation’.24 The word ‘standard’ is important here. Throughout this chapter, they are not interested in actual persons, but hierarchical locations that differently embodied persons might occupy. For Deleuze and Guattari ‘European Man’ represents a location of absolute ‘molarity’ within capitalist modernity. The term ‘molar’ refers to assemblages whose rigid organisation constrains the production of that assemblage’s force of existence. In this chapter, Deleuze and Guattari are interested in how molar assemblages can be de-sedimented: or how the molar can be transformed into the ‘molecular’ so desire can flow freely through the social field. In A Thousand Plateaus, they develop a range of concepts that refer to different aspects of this process – for example deterritorialisation, decoding, lines of flight – but in this chapter they focus on the notion of ‘becoming’. The term ‘becoming’ does not mean when one assemblage becomes another assemblage. Instead what it refers to is the deterritorialisation of an assemblage in the direction of another assemblage so that it, in this in-between state, it is organised in a more molecular fashion. There are a number of becomings that can deterritorialise different aspects of the category of European Man: becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-cellular. However, it is becoming-woman and becoming-girl that are the most important: ‘All becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all other becomings’.25 Again, becomingwoman does not literally mean that if we all became women the problems of capitalist modernity would be resolved. Understanding certain sexed bodies



Conclusion: Bodies in Common 145

as ‘women’ is also a molar position for Deleuze and Guattari. Rather, they argue that the first step in undoing capitalist modernity, is to deterritorialise its molar assemblages in the direction of the subordinated subject position of woman. In doing so they acknowledge the pivotal place that (hetero-) patriarchy has in the organisation of opedial capitalism. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari go further than this and argue that becoming-girl, or deterritorialising the social field towards the even more subordinated subject position of girl achieves this more thoroughly. The ultimate goal for Deleuze and Guattari is becoming-imperceptible – the absolute deterritorialisation of all of capitalist modernity’s power structures so that all bodies become ‘dissolved into the molecular flux of the world’,26 becoming completely imperceptible to power in any way. I take becoming-imperceptible to be a utopian ideal to strive for as opposed to an achievable basis for a post-neoliberal future. A Thousand Plateaus is too full of concepts describing how power reproduces itself (e.g. faciality, stratification, black holes) to ever think that becomingimperceptible could exist outside of aesthetic experimentation. It nevertheless provides an important direction to move in and one that can only be achieved, according to Deleuze and Guattari, through becoming-woman/becoming-girl. What does this mean for the discussion at hand? What would replacing neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic with the counter-axiomatic of becominggirl look like? And what role might the digitally mediated, sexualised body play? If neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic reinforces the power structures of capitalist modernity so that more of our lives are resembling women’s under hetero-patriarchy, then becoming-girl is a counter-axiomatic that seeks to deterritorialise these molar arrangements so that the body is no longer the basis upon which different categories of person were created so as to inequitably regulate access to the means of reproducing life. Here I understand becoming-girl more expansively than simply referring to gender and instead as an axiomatic that would organise the processes that would deterritorialise all body-based differences: gender, sexuality, race, class and able-bodiedness. Unlike the commoning projects discussed in this chapter, the axiomatic of becoming-girl places these differences front and centre, a necessary and hitherto overlooked strategic move, considering their intensification has been one of neoliberalism’s primary effects. As a counter-axiomatic, becoming-girl is still a commoning project because its goal is to populate the social field with assemblages of bodies-in-common, whose organisation, unmarked by differences in power, enables the limitless multiplication of molecular desire. Just as the digitally mediated sexualised body has been a vector for neoliberalism’s feminising axiomatic after 2008, it too can be a vector in the struggle to become girl. Wrested from digital capitalism’s apparatuses of capture, networked, digital technologies can provide the sort of communicative infrastructure (decentralised, horizontal and egalitarian) needed to populate

146

Chapter 6

the social field with bodies-in-common. Similarly, de-oepidalised sex is one practice that can provide the modes of organisation and produce the affective intensities necessary to molecularise neoliberalism’s molar assemblages (the singularities of wasp-orchid love). Bringing the two together in collaborative, cooperative and experimental ways, can be one front of many in a wider counter-hegemonic struggle that, organised through the axiomatic of becoming-girl, can bring about a post-neoliberal future in which all bodies, no longer marked by differences in power, have equal capacity to limitlessly multiply their force of existence in all areas of social life. This depends on a completely different conception of the digitally-mediated, sexualised body to that which has been outlined in the first three case studies of this book, all of which involved its visualisation in accordance with narrowly defined aesthetic norms, precisely so that it can create value for neoliberal capitalism. The sexualised body in these terms is understood not by the value its visualisation creates, but instead through its capacities to enter into mutually empowering assemblages with other bodies via digital media so that they become-imperceptible to digital capitalism’s apparatuses of capture. In terms of praxis, this might be chemsex safely practised in spaces-in-common. This might be LGBTQIA* or feminist politics organised through some form of digital commons. Whatever these praxes are, and whatever role digital media and sexualised bodies might play in them, unless capitalist modernity’s body-based differences, which have intensified under neoliberalism, are placed front and centre within them, a society-in-common has no chance of becoming our post-neoliberal future. NOTES 1. Ben Little and Alison Winch, The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 2. A youthful-looking gay man. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004 [1980]). 4. Baruch Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 [1677]). 5. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 165–184. 6. Frida Beckman, Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 7. Massimo De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism (London: Zed Books, 2017), British Library Digital Collections; Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). 8. De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia, 44.9. 9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 383.



Conclusion: Bodies in Common 147

10. Christian Fuchs, ‘Socialising Anti-Social Social Media’ in Anti-Social Media: The Impact on Journalism and Society, eds. John Mair et al. (Bury St. Edmunds: Arima Publishing, 2018), 58–63. 11. Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016). 12. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2016). 13. Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Psychedelic Socialism’, openDemocracy, last modified 22 September 2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/psychedelic-socialism/. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Mario Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique (London: Pluto Press, 2018), British Library Digital Collection. 17. Ibid., 746.4. 18. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 187. 19. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11. 20. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 188. 21. Hanna Kozlowska, ‘Tumblr Is Banning Porn and Other Adult Content’, Quartz, last modified 3 December 2018, https://qz.com/1482821/tumblr-is-banningporn-and-other-adult-content/?fbclid=IwAR3jp5ey6pBjeHkS7zuK2En4AgOLnBPS DvMY1wJDtovZiqH0f6XFCDv7MyA. 22. Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller, Digital Feminist Activism Girls and Women Fight Back against Rape Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 23. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 256–341. 24. Ibid., 322. 25. Ibid., 306. 26. Hannah Stark, Feminist Theory after Deleuze (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 37.

Bibliography

Abidin, Crystal and Joel Gwynne. ‘Entrepreneurial Selves, Feminine Corporeality and Lifestyle Blogging in Singapore’, Asian Journal of Social Science, 45 (2017): 385–408. Adkins, Lisa. ‘Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor after the Financial Crisis’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 111:4 (2012): 621–664. Aitkenhead, Decca. ‘RuPaul: “Drag Is a Big F-You to Male-Dominated Culture” ’, The Guardian, last modified 3 March 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/ tv-and-radio/2018/mar/03/rupaul-drag-race-big-f-you-to-male-dominated-culture Andersson, Johan. ‘Vauxhall’s Post-Industrial Pleasure Gardens: “Death Wish” and Hedonism in 21st-Century London’, Urban Studies, 48:1 (2011): 85–100. Attwood, Feona, ed. Porn.Com: Making Sense of Online Pornography. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Attwood, Feona, Clare Bale and Meg Barker. The Sexualisation Report (Milton Keynes: Open University, 2013). Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic TM: Politics and Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Banet-Weiser, Sarah and Inna Arzumanova. ‘Creative Authorship: Self-Actualising Individuals and the Self-Brand’ in Media Authorship, edited by Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner (London: Routledge, 2013): 163–179. Banet-Weiser, Sarah and Jack Braitch. ‘The Con in Confidence: Pick Up Artists, Honor Terrorism and the Failure of Neoliberalism’, pre-publication version. Barcan, Ruth. Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Beck, Ulrich and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim. The Normal Chaos of Love. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Beckman, Frida. Between Desire and Pleasure: A  Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Berkowitz, Dana and Linda Liska Belgrave, ‘ “She Works Hard for the Money”: Drag Queens and the Management of Their Contradictory Status of Celebrity and Marginality’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 39:2 (2010): 159–186. 149

150

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Berlant, Lauren. ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’, Critical Inquiry, 24:2 (1998): 281–288. Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry 24:2 (1998): 547–566. Bishop, Sophie. ‘YouTubeanxiety: Affect and Anxiety performance in UK Beauty Vlogging’ in Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, edited by Tony Sampson, Stephen Maddison and Darren Ellis, 122–130. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018. Bolding, G., Hart, G., Sherr, L. and Elford, J. ‘Use of Crystal Methamphetamine among Gay Men in London’, Addiction, 101:11 (2006): 1622–1630. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2007. Bonner-Thompson, Carl. ‘ “The Meat Market”: Production and Regulation of Masculinities on the Grindr Grid in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK’, Gender, Place & Culture, 11 (2017): 1611–1625. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Borria, Marco. Substance Abuse and Sexual Risk between Men in London: A Critical Exploration of Social Practices and Health Concerns. PhD diss., Brunel University, 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood, 1986. Bourne, A., Reid, D., Hickson, F., Torres Rueda, S. and Weatherburn, P. The Chemsex Study: Drug Use in Sexual Settings among Gay & Bisexual Men in Lambeth, Southwark & Lewisham. London: Sigma Research, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2014. boyd, danah. ‘Social Network Sites as Networked Publics’ in A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, edited by Zizi Papacharissi, 39–58. New York: Routledge, 2011. Brammall, Rebecca, Jeremy Gilbert and James Meadway, ‘What Is Austerity?’ New Formations, 87 (2016): 119–140. Brook, Stephen. ‘Men’s Magazines and Women’s Glossies Share the Pain of Recession’. The Guardian, last modified 13 August 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/ media/2009/aug/13/magazine-abcs-mens-womens. Burgess, Jean, Elija Cassidy, Stefanie Duguay and Ben Light. ‘Making Digital Cultures of Gender and Sexuality with Social Media’, Social Media + Society, ­October–December (2016): 1–4. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge, 2011. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1999. Bychawski, Adam. ‘Britain’s Railways Created the Country’s Biggest Clubs and Gentrification Shut Them Down’, Thump, last modified 6 November 2014, https://thump. vice.com/en_us/article/how-railways-created-the-uk-biggest-nightclubs-andgentrification-closed-them-bagleys-studios-kings-cross-cable-crash-vauxhall.



Bibliography 151

Campbell, Beatrix. ‘After Neoliberalism: The Need for a Gender Revolution’, Soundings, 56 (2014): 10–26. Campbell, John Edward. Getting It on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity. London: Routledge, 2004. Campkin, Ben and Laura Marshall. LGBTQ+ Cultural Infrastructure in London: Night Venues, 2006 – Present. London: UCL Urban Laboratory, 2017. Cant, Bob. Invented Identities?: Lesbians and Gays Talk about Migration. London: Cassell, 1997. Cash, Patrick. ‘Patrick Cash on Gay Sex and Drugs’, Attitude, 164, 2015. Cash, Patrick. ‘What’s behind the Rise of Chemsex?’, Vice.com, last modified 30 November 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/whats-behind-the-riseof-chemsex-902. Cavalcante, Andre. ‘ “I Did It All Online”: Transgender Identity and the Management of Everyday Life’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33:1 (2016): 109–122. Chapman, Rowena and Jonathan Rutherford, eds., Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988. Chilvers, Simon. ‘Why the Penis Is Having a Moment in Men’s Fashion’, The Guardian, 11 May 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/apr/30/ why-the-penis-is-having-a-moment-in-mens-fashion. Cohen, Phil. ‘The Centre Will Not Hold: Changing Principles of Political Hope’, Soundings 60 (2015): 42–56. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1972. Coleman, Rebecca. ‘Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity Mood’, New Formations, 87 (2016): 83–101. Cornwall, Andrea. ‘Introduction: Masculinities under Neoliberalism’ in Masculinities under Neoliberalism, edited by Andrea Cornwall, Frank G. Karioris and Nancy Lindisfarne, London: Zed Books, 2016. Couldry, Nick and Jo Littler. ‘Work, Power and Performance: Analysing the “Reality” Game of the Apprentice’, Cultural Sociology, 5:2 (2011): 263–279. Curnutt, Hugh. ‘Durable Participants: A Generational Approach to Reality TV’s “Ordinary” Labor Pool’, Media, Culture & Society, 33:7 (2011): 1061–1076. Curtis, Nick. ‘Mansformation: How Matthew Lewis, Calvin Harris and Chris Pratt Went from Geek to God’, The Evening Standard, last modified 28 May 2015, http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/mansformation-how-matthewlewis-calvin-harris-and-chris-pratt-went-from-geek-to-god-10281840.html. Dame, Avery. ‘Making a Name for Yourself: Tagging as Transgender Ontological Practice on Tumblr’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33:1 (2016): 23–37. Davison, Sally and George Shire. ‘Race, Migration and Neoliberalism’, Soundings, 59 (2014): 81–95. Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. De Angelis, Massimo. Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. London: Zed Books, 2017, British Library Digital Collections.

152

Bibliography

Deery, June. ‘Mapping Commercialisation in Reality Television’ in A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Oullette, 11–28. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2014. Delaney, Samuel. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004 [1980]. D’Emilio, John. ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’ in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharan Thompson, 100–113. New Feminist Library Series. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983. Dhoest, Alexander. ‘Feeling (Dis)Connected: Diasporic LGBTQS and Digital Media’, International Journal of E-Politics, 7:3 (2016): 35–48. Docx, Edward. ‘Vauxhall’s Next for the Hipster Cavaliers’ Spectator Life, last modified 15 December 2015, https://life.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/vauxhalls-next-forthe-hipster-cavaliers/. Drotner, Kirsten. ‘Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity’ Paedagogica Historica 35:3 (1999): 593–619. Drucker, Peter. ‘The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism’, Historical Materialism, 19:4 (2011): 3–32. Duffy, Brooke Erin and Emily Hund. ‘ “Having It All” on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding among Fashion Bloggers’, Social Media + Society, July–December (2015): 1–11. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Dyer, Richard. ‘Don’t Look Now’, Screen, 23:3–4 (1982): 61–73. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI Publishing, 1979. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge, 1997. Elias, Ana Sofia and Rosalind Gill, ‘Beauty Surveillance: The Digital Self-Monitoring Cultures of Neoliberalism’. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21:1 (2018): 59–77. Elias, Ana Sofia, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff. Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Ellcessor, Elizabeth. ‘Tweeting @feliciaday: Online Social Media, Convergence, and Subcultural Stardom’, Cinema Journal, 51:2 (2012): 46–66. Farber, Rebecca. ‘ “Transing” Fitness and Remapping Transgender Male Masculinity in Online Message Boards’, Journal of Gender Studies, 26:3 (2017): 254–268. Featherstone, Mike. ‘The Body in Consumer Culture’, Theory, Culture and Society, 1:2 (1982): 18–33. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. Floyd, Kevin. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Flynn, Paul. ‘Chemsex Film Review’, Attitude, 264 (2015): 78. Forkert, Kirsten. Austerity as Public Mood: Social Anxieties and Social Struggles. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017.



Bibliography 153

Forsyth-Harris, J. E. ‘Book Review: Catherine Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital’, Sexualities, 16:1/2 (2013): 238–239. Fortier, Anne-Marie. ‘Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment’ in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, edited by Claudia Castada et al., 115–135. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Fotopoulou, Aristea and Kate O’Riordan. ‘Training to Self-Care: Fitness Tracking, Biopedagogy and the Healthy Consumer, Health Sociology Review, 26:1 (2016): 54–68. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Fraisses, Christele and Jaime Barrientos. ‘The Concept of Homophobia: A Psychosocial Perspective’, Sexologies, 25:3 (2016): 133–140. Fuchs, Christian. ‘Günther Anders’ Undiscovered Critical Theory of Technology in the Age of Big Data Capitalism’, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 15:2 (2017): 582–611. Fuchs, Christian. ‘Socialising Anti-Social Social Media’ in Anti-Social Media: The Impact on Journalism and Society, edited by John Mair et al., 58–63. Bury St. Edmunds: Arima Publishing, 2018. Gandini, Alessandro. ‘Labour Process Theory and the Gig Economy’, Human Relations (2018), doi: 10.1177/0018726718790002. Gerbaudo, Paulo. The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2018. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity, 1992. Gilbert, Jeremy. Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism. London: Pluto Press, 2013. Gilbert, Jeremy. ‘Disaffected Consent: That Post-Democratic Feeling’, Soundings, 60 (2015): 29–41. Gilbert, Jeremy. ‘Psychedelic Socialism’, openDemocracy, last modified 22 September 2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/psychedelic-socialism/ Gilbert, Jeremy, Andy Goffey and Robin Murray, ‘Post-Post-Fordism in the Era of Platforms’, New Formations, 84 (2014/2015): 184–208. Gill, Rosalind. ‘Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:2 (2007): 147–166. Gill, Rosalind and Christina Scharff, ‘Introduction’ in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, edited by Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, 1–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Gillbart, V. L. et al. ‘Sex, Drugs and Smart Phone Applications: Findings from Semistructured Interviews with Men Who Have Sex with Men Diagnosed with Shigella Flexneri 3a in England and Wales’. Sexually Transmitted Infections, 91:8 (2015): 598–602. Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. London: Routledge, 1991. Ging, Debbie. ‘Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere’, Men and Masculinities (2017), last modified 10 May 2017, https://doi. org/10.1177/1097184X17706401.

154

Bibliography

Gorman-Murray, Andrew. ‘Intimate Mobilities: Emotional Embodiment and Queer Migration’, Social & Cultural Geography, 10:4 (2009): 441–460. Gramsci, Antonio. Antonio Gramsci: Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995. Granada, Lucila and Ivana Paccoud. Latin Americans: A Case for Better Access to Sexual Health Services. London: Trust for London, 2014. Green, Adam Isiah. ‘Erotic Capital and the Power of Desirability: Why “Honey Money” Is a Bad Collective Strategy for Remedying Gender Inequality’, Sexualities 16:1/2 (2013): 137–158. Greenwood, Carl. ‘Watch Dappy Reveal He Leaked HIS OWN Naked Photo as Publicity Stunt to Get Single to Number One’, Irish Mirror, last modified 6 January 2014, https://www.irishmirror.ie/showbiz/celebrity-news/ dappy-leaked-naked-picture-celebrity-2992567. Greig, Alan. ‘Anxious States and Directions for Masculinities Work with Men’ in Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities, edited by Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström and Alan Greig, 219–235. London: Zed Books, 2011. Grossberg, Lawrence. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Grossberg, Lawrence. We All Want to Change the World: The Paradox of the US Left – A Polemic. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2015. Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Guattari, Felix. ‘I Have Even Met Happy Drag Queens’ in Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews, 1972–1977, edited by Felix Guattari, 225–228. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2009. Gudelunas, David. ‘Digital Extensions, Experiential Extensions and Hair Extensions: RuPaul’s Drag Race and the New Media Environment’ in RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture: The Boundaries of Reality TV, edited by Niall Brennan and David Gudelunas, 231–243. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Guthman, Julie and Melanie DuPuis. ‘Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (2006): 427–448. Hakim, Catherine. Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hall, Stuart. ‘The Neo-Liberal Revolution’, Cultural Studies, 25:6 (2011): 705–728. Hall, Stuart and Doreen Massey. ‘Interpreting the Crisis’, Soundings, 44 (2010): 8–22. Hall, S., Roberts, B., Clarke, J., Jefferson, T. and Critcher, C. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State, and Law and Order. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978. Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.



Bibliography 155

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hargrave, Emily. ‘Cultural Competency for Clinicians: Chemsex and Coinfection’, Future Virology, 10:4 (2015): 347–349. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Harvey, Laura, Jessica Ringrose and Rosalind Gill. ‘Swagger, Ratings and Masculinity: Theorising the Circulation of Social and Cultural Value in Teenage Boys’ Digital Peer Networks’. Sociological Research Online, 18:4 (2013): 1–11. Hay, James, Lawrence Grossberg and Ellen Wartella, eds. The Audience and Its Landscape. Oxford: Westview Press, 1996. Hearn, Alison. ‘Insecure: Narratives and Economies of the Branded Self in Transformation Television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 22:4 (2008): 495–504. Hearn, Alison. ‘Producing “Reality” Branded Content, Branded Selves, Precarious Futures’ in A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Oullette, 437–456. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2014. Hearn, Alison. ‘Verified: Self-Presentation, Identity Management, and Selfhood in the Age of Big Data’, Popular Communication, 15:2 (2017): 62–77. Hickson, Ford et al. ‘Illicit Drug Use among Men Who Have Sex with Men in England and Wales’, Addiction Research and Theory, 18:1 (2010): 14–22. Hickson, Ford et al. State of Play: Findings from the England Gay Men’s Sex Survey 2014. London: Sigma Research, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2014. Hill Collins, Patricia. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Hitchen, Esther. ‘Living and Feeling the Austere’, New Formations, 87 (2016): 102–118. Holmes, Su and Sean Redmond. ‘Fame Body: Introduction’ in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, edited by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, 121–128. London: Routledge, 2006. Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Jamieson, Lynn. Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Kagan, Dion. ‘ “Re-Crisis”: Barebacking, Sex Panic and the Logic of Epidemic’, Sexualities, 18:7 (2015): 817–837. Kavka, Misha. ‘Reality TV and the Gendered Politics of Flaunting’ in Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television, edited by Brenda Weber, 54–75. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Kibby, Marjorie and Brigid Costello. ‘Displaying the Phallus: Masculinity and the Performance of Sexuality on the Internet’, Men and Masculinities, 1:4 (1999): 352–364.

156

Bibliography

Knee, Adam. ‘Celebrity Skins: The Illicit Textuality of the Celebrity Nude Magazine’ in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, edited by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, 161–176. London: Routledge, 2006. Kozlowska, Hanna. ‘Tumblr Is Banning Porn and Other Adult Content’, Quartz, last modified 3 December 2018, https://qz.com/1482821/tumblr-is-banning-porn-andother-adult-content/?fbclid=IwAR3jp5ey6pBjeHkS7zuK2En4AgOLnBPSDvMY1 wJDtovZiqH0f6XFCDv7MyA Kyrola, Katariina. The Weight of Images: Affect, Body Image and Fat in the Media. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. Lawson, Caitlin E. ‘Pixels, Porn, and Private Selves: Intimacy and Authenticity in the Celebrity Nude Photo Hack’, Celebrity Studies, 6:4 (2015): 607–609. Lecker, Michael. ‘Welcome Home: Radical Faeries and Queer Worldmaking’. PhD diss., George Mason University, 2015. Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Levine, Martin P. Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Lewis, Tania. ‘ “He Needs to Face His Fears with These Five Queers!” Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Makeover TV, and the Lifestyle Expert’, Television and New Media, 8:4 (2007): 285–311. Lingel, Jessa and Adam Golub. ‘In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn’s Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication’, Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 20 (2015): 536–553. Little, Ben. ‘A Growing Discontent: Class and Generation Under Neoliberalism’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 56 (2014): 27–40. Little, Ben and Alison Winch. ‘ “Just Hanging Out with You in My Back Yard”: Mark Zuckerberg and Mediated Paternalism’, Open Cultural Studies, 1:1 (2018): 417–427. Little, Ben and Alison Winch. The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism. London: Routledge, forthcoming. Littler, Jo. ‘Making Fame Ordinary: Intimacy, Reflexivity and “Keeping It Real” ’, Mediactive, 2 (2004): 8–25. Lorey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso, 2015. Luibheid, Eithne. ‘Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14:2–3 (2008): 169–190. Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self: A  Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Maddison, Stephen. ‘Beyond the Entrepreneurial Voyeur?: Sex, Porn and Cultural Politics’. New Formations, 80 (2013): 102–118. Maddison, Stephen. ‘Is the Rectum Still a Grave? Anal Sex, Pornography, and Transgression’ in Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, edited by Ted Gournelos and David J. Gunkel, 86–100. London: Continuum, 2012. Maddison, Stephen. ‘ “The Second Sexual Revolution”: Big Pharma, Porn and the Biopolitical Penis’, Topia, 22 (2009): 35–53.



Bibliography 157

Marshall, P. D. ‘New Media-New Self: The Changing Power of Celebrity’ in The Celebrity Culture Reader, edited by P. D. Marshall, 634–644. London: Routledge, 2006. Martin, Clive. ‘How Sad Young Douchebags Took Over Modern Britain’, Vice. com, last modified 13 March 2014, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/kwpb43/ anatomy-of-a-new-modern-douchebag. Marwick, Alice and danah boyd. ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience’, New Media and Society, 13:1 (2010): 114–133. Marx, Karl. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 594–617. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. Mayhew, Freddy. ‘Men’s Lifestyle Magazine ABCs: Men’s Fitness Is Biggest Circulation Loser as GQ and Shortlist Hold Firm’, Press Gazette, last modified 19 February 2018, https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/mens-lifestyle-magazine-abcsmens-fitness-is-biggest-circulation-loser-as-gq-and-shortlist-hold-firm/. McCall, Hannah, Naomi Adams, David Mason and Jamie Willis, ‘What Is Chemsex and Why Does It Matter? It Needs to Become a Public Health Priority’, The British Medical Journal, 351 (2015): 1–2. McLlwaine, Cathy, Juan Camilo Cock and Brian Linneker. No Longer Invisible: The Latin American Community in London. London: Trust for London, 2011. McPhail, Ruth and Ron Fisher. ‘Lesbian and Gay Expatriates Use of Social Media to Aid Acculturation’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 49 (2015): 294–307. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage, 2009. McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: from ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. McRobbie, Angela. ‘Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the PostFordist Regime’, New Formations, 70 (2011): 60–76. Measham, Fiona et al. ‘The Rise in Legal Highs: Prevalence and Patterns in the Use of Illegal Drugs and First- and Second-Generation “Legal Highs” in South London Gay Dance Clubs’, Journal of Substance Use, 16:4 (2011): 263–272. Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller. Digital Feminist Activism Girls and Women Fight Back against Rape Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1994. Merriman, Rebecca. ‘Orlando Bloom NAKED Pictures Revealed in All Their Glory – Now Choose the Censored or Uncensored Version’, Daily Mirror, last modified 4 August 2016, https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ orlando-bloom-naked-pictures-revealed-8563109. Merz, Theo. ‘Quiz: Are You a Spornosexual?’ The Daily Telegraph, last modified 17 July 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/10891810/Quiz-Are-youa-spornosexual.html.

158

Bibliography

Merz, Theo. ‘It’s Not Easy Being a Spornosexual Man’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 9 July 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/fashion-and-style/10954824/ Its-not-easy-being-a-spornosexual-man.html. Mieli, Mario. Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique. London: Pluto Press, 2018. British Library Digital Collection. Miller, Toby. Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Moore, Suzanne. ‘The Decay of Women Is Obsessively Charted. Now Men Are Finding Out How It Feels’, The Guardian, last modified 30 July 2014, http://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/30/decay-women-men-finding-out. Morini, Cristina. ‘The Feminization of Labour in Cognitive Capitalism’, Feminist Review, 87 (2007): 40–59. Mort, Frank. Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain. London: Routledge, 1996. Mowlabocus, Sharif. Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age. London: Routledge, 2016. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 833–844. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Muñoz, Jose Esteban. ‘ “The White to Be Angry”: Vaginal Davis’s Terrorist Drag’, Social Text, 52/53 (1997): 80–103. Muntean, Nick and Anne Helen Petersen. ‘Celebrity Twitter: Strategies of Intrusion and Disclosure in the Age of Technoculture’, M/c Journal, 12:5 (2009), http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/194/. Murray, Susan and Laurie Oullette. ‘Introduction’ in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, edited by Susan Murray and Laurie Oullette, 1–22. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Nathanson, Elizabeth. ‘Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the ‘New’ Pleasures of Fashion’, in Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Dianne Negra, 136–160. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Nava, Mica. Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism. London: Sage, 1992. Neale, Steve. ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, Screen, 24:6 (1983): 2–17. Negra, Diane and Yvonne Tasker, eds. Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Ng, Eve. ‘A “Post-Gay” Era? Media Gaystreaming, Homonormativity, and the Politics of LGBT Integration’, Communication, Culture & Critique, 6 (2013): 258–283. Nicholson, Rebecca. ‘Welcome to Chemsex Week’, Vice.com, last modified 30 November 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/welcome-to-chemsex-week-992. Nixon, Sean. Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption. London: UCL Press, 1996.



Bibliography 159

Olesker, Max. ‘The Rise and Rise of the Spornosexual’, last modified 12 January 2015, https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/news/a7588/the-rise-and-rise-of-thespornosexual. O’Neill, Rachel. Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. Medford: Polity, 2018. Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. London: Arrow, 1989. Ouellette, Laurie and James Hay. ‘Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen’, Continuum: Journal of Media  & Cultural Studies, 22:4 (2008): 471–484. Paasonen, Susanna. Carnal Resonance Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Papacharissi, Zizi and Jan Fernback. ‘The Aesthetic Power of the Fab 5: Discursive Themes of Homonormativity in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 32:4 (2008): 348–367. Patten, Dominic and Bruce Haring. ‘ “RuPaul’s Drag Race” Hits All-Time Highs with Season 10 Ratings’, deadline.com, last modified 29 June 2018, https:// deadline.com/2018/06/rupauls-drag-race-hits-all-time-highs-with-season-10-rat ings-1202419952/. Peacock, Louise. ‘If This Is What Spornosexual Means, Then God Help Us All’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 17 July 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/ womens-life/10894876/Spornosexuality-If-this-is-what-spornosexual-means-thengod-help-us-all.html. Phillips, Joe. ‘Examining the Impact on HIV and Hepatitis C Co-Infection in the Era of “Chemsex” ’, HIV Nursing, 15 (2015): 8–11. Puar, J., Berlant, L., Butler, J., Cvejić, B., Lorey, I. and Vujanović, A. ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar and Ana Vujanović’, TDR: The Drama Review, 56:4 (2012): 163–177. Race, Kane. ‘Chemsex Review: Gay Sex and Drugs Demand More Careful Attention’, The Conversation, last modified 7 December 2015, https://theconversation.com/chem sex-review-gay-sex-and-drug-use-demand-more-careful-forms-of-attention-51586. Race, Kane. The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV. London: Routledge, 2017. Race, Kane. ‘ “Party and Play”: Online Hook-Up Devices and the Emergence of PNP Practices among Gay Men’. Sexualities, 18:3 (2015): 253–275. Race, Kane. Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Race, Kane et al., ‘The Future of Drugs: Recreational Drug Use and Sexual Health among Gay and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men’, Sexual Health (December 2016): A–I. Raphael, Chad. ‘The Political-Economic Origins of Reali-TV’ in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, edited by Susan Murray and Laurie Oullette, 123–140. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Redmond, Sean. ‘Intimate Fame Everywhere’ in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, edited by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, 27–44. London: Routledge, 2006.

160

Bibliography

Renninger, Bryce J. ‘ “Where I Can Be Myself . . . Where I Can Speak My Mind”: Networked Counterpublics in a Polymedia Environment’, New Media & Society, 17:9 (2015): 1513–1529. Ringrose, Jessica. ‘Beyond Discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalysis to Explore Affective Assemblages, Heterosexually Striated Space, and Lines of Flight Online and at School’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43:6 (2011): 598–618. Ringrose, Jessica and Emilie Lawrence. ‘Remixing Misandry, Manspreading, and Dick Pics: Networked Feminist Humour on Tumblr’, Feminist Media Studies, 18:4 (2018): 686–704. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion, 2001. Rose, Nikolas. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ross, Andrew. ‘Reality Television and the Political Economy of Amateurism’ in A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Oullette, 29–39. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2014. Rottenberg, Catherine. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Rubin, Gayle. ‘Thinking Sex’ in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin, 3–44. New York: Routledge 1984. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 1978. Sastre, Alexandra. ‘Hottentot in the Age of Reality TV: Sexuality, Race, and Kim Kardashian’s Visible Body’, Celebrity Studies, 5:1–2 (2014): 123–137. Scholz, Trebor. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016. Schotmiller, Carl. Reading RuPaul’s Drag Race: Queer Memory, Camp Capitalism, and RuPaul’s Drag Empire. PhD diss., UCLA, 2017. Sender, Katherine. ‘Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Neoliberal Project’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23:2 (2006): 131–151. Sender, Katherine. The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Senft, Theresa and Nancy Baym, ‘Selfies Introduction – What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon’, International Journal of Communication, 9 (2015): 1588–1606. Shield, Andrew D. J. ‘New in Town: Gay Immigrants and Geosocial Media’ in LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe, edited by Alexander Dhoest et al., 244– 261. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Shields Dobson, Amy. ‘Performative Shamelessness on Young Women’s Social Network Sites: Shielding the Self and Resisting Gender Melancholia’, Feminism & Psychology 24:1 (2014): 97–114. Simpson, Mark. Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity. London: Cassell, 1994.



Bibliography 161

Simpson, Mark. ‘The Metrosexual Is Dead. Long Live the “Spornosexual” ’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 10 June 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/ fashion-and-style/10881682/The-metrosexual-is-dead.-Long-live-the-spornosex ual.html. Sinfield, Alan. Gay and After. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998. Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1997. Skeggs, Beverley and Helen Wood. Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value. London: Routledge, 2012. Smithers, Rebecca. ‘E-Cigarettes and Sports Nutrition Products Lead Grocery Sales Boost’, The Guardian, last modified 30 December 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/ business/2014/dec/30/e-cigarettes-sports-nutrition-supermarkets-sales-rise-uk. Spinoza, Baruch. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 [1677]. Sport England, Active People Survey, 2013–2014. UK Data Service, 2016. Srnieck, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. London: Verso, 2016. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Stanley, Tim. ‘ “Spornosexuality”: An Evolutionary Step Backwards for Men’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 12 June 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/ thinking-man/10895389/Spornosexuality-an-evolutionary-step-backwards-formen.html. Stark, Hannah. Feminist Theory after Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Stephens, Elizabeth. ‘The Spectacularized Penis: Contemporary Representations of the Phallic Male Body’, Men and Masculinities, 10:1 (2007): 85–98. Stuart, David. ‘Sexualised Drug Use by MSM: Background, Current Status and Response’, HIV Nursing, 13 (2013): 6–10. Stuart, David Stuart and Johannes Weymann. ‘Chemsex and Care-Planning: One Year in Practice’, HIV Nursing, 5 (2015): 24–28. Sweney, Mark. ‘UK Consumer Magazines Lost Nearly 1m Print Sales in First Half of 2014 – ABC’, The Guardian, last modified 14 August 2014, http://www.theguard ian.com/media/2014/aug/14/uk-consumer-magazines-print-sales-2014. Tabberer, Jamie. ‘Gay Men Like Me Need to Start Acknowledging Our Misogyny Problem’, Independent, last modified 27 July 2017, https://www.independent. co.uk/voices/gay-men-lgbt-50th-anniversary-misogyny-rupaul-drag-race-fishyqueen-lesbians-a7862516.html. Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993. Terranova, Tizianna. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press, 2004. The EMIS Network, EMIS 2010: The European Men-Who-Have-Sex-with-Men Internet Survey. Findings from 38 Countries. Stockholm: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2013.

162

Bibliography

Thomas, Sarah. ‘Celebrity in the “Twitterverse”: History, Authenticity and the Multiplicity of Stardom Situating the “Newness” of Twitter’, Celebrity Studies, 5:3 (2014): 242–255. Thompson, Damian. ‘Gender Madness: Trans-Girl. Demi Boy. Inter-Sex. Damian Thomspon Says a Government Survey Asking 13-Year-Olds to Pick from 25 Genders Is as Absurd as It Is Dangerous’, MailOnline, last modified 29 January 2016, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3422060/Gender-madness-Transgirl-Demi-boy-Inter-sex-Government-survey-asking-13-year-old-s-pick-25-gen ders-absurd-dangerous.html. Tiidenberg, Katrin and Edgar Gomez Cruz. ‘Selfies, Image and the Re-Making of the Body’, Body and Society, 21:4 (2015): 77–102. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Turner, Bryan. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. London: Sage, 2008. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. Vardakou, Ioanna Constantinos Pistos and Chara Spiliopoulou. ‘Drugs for Youth Via Internet and the Example of Mephedrone’, Toxicology Letters, 201:3 (2011): 191–195. Walkerdine, Valerie and Luis Jimenez. Gender, Work and Community after DeIndustrialisation: A  Psychosocial Approach to Affect. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Warhurst, Chris. ‘Extended Book Review: Catherine Hakim Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital’, Work, Employment and Society, 26:6 (2012): 1036–1038. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: The Free Press, 1999. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Watney, Simon. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media. London: Comedia, 1987. Waugh, Thomas. ‘Men’s Pornography: Gay Vs. Straight’, Jump Cut, 30 (March 1985): 30–35. Waugh, Thomas. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Weissman, David and Bill Weber. The Cockettes, DVD. London: Tartan Video, 2004. Williams, Raymond. ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review, 82 (1973): 1–16. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge, 1990. Williamson, Milly. Celebrity: Capitalism and the Making of Fame. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Wilson, Julie A. and Emily Chivers Yochim. Mothering through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Winch, Alison. Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.



Bibliography 163

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: Vintage, 1991. Wood, Helen. ‘The Politics of Hyperbole on Geordie Shore: Class, Gender, Youth and Excess’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20:1 (2017): 39–55. Woods, Faye. ‘Classed Femininity, Performativity and Camp in British Structured Reality Programming’, Television and New Media, 15:3 (2014): 197–214. Wotherspoon, Jenny. ‘Meet the New Breed of Chest-Waxing, Hair-Straightening, Weight-Lifting Spornosexuals’, The Daily Telegraph, last modified 30 December 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10954865/Meet-the-newbreed-of-chest-waxing-hair-straightening-weight-lifting-spornosexuals.html. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Index

Acid Communism/Corbynism, 140 – 41, 143 addiction, 74 – 75, 113, 119, 126 aesthetic labour, xviii, 16 – 17, 84 – 85, 93, 95 – 97, 101 affects: joyful, 25, 27, 72 – 73, 75, 114, 116 – 19, 126, 142; negative, 14, 68, 71; sad, 73, 114, 116, 119 – 20 AIDS crisis, 8,  60, 89, 110 – 11 alienation, 3, 74, 112, 121, 124, 140 – 41 alt-right, 17, 19, 92, 135 assemblages, 65, 71, 75, 114, 137 – 38, 142, 144 – 46 attention economy, 25, 45, 48 – 49, 103 Attitude, xiv, 110, 135 austerity, xvii, 13 – 17, 20, 22, 25, 58, 60 – 63 authenticity, 26, 38, 41, 43, 45, 63, 135 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 21, 63, 93 Beadle, Gaz, 37, 46 beauty: norms of, 21, 26, 65, 85, 94 – 95, 97, 99 – 102, 133; politics of, 7, 16 becoming-girl, 144 – 46 Belli, William, 98 Berlant, Lauren, 14, 16, 25, 50, 58, 62, 64, 74 – 76 Bieber, Justin, 24, 34, 45, 49 – 50 Bloom, Orlando, 24, 34, 40, 45, 49 – 50

body politics, 21 – 22, 102; post-neoliberal, 137, 142 – 43 body practices, digitally mediated, xiv, xvi – xviii, 2 – 3, 9 – 10, 12 – 13, 15, 17 – 18, 20 – 22, 24, 26, 76, 81, 83 – 84, 140 body transformation tutorials, xiv, 81 – 104. See also make-up tutorials body-work: female, 7; male, 58 – 60, 64 – 69, 71 – 75, 103 Brexit, xvii – xviii, 126 – 27, 136 Brown, Chris, 24, 33 – 35, 37, 43, 46 Callahan, Sam, 43 – 44 capital: economic, xviii, 3, 10, 17 – 20, 39, 50 – 52, 61 – 62, 66, 70, 112, 115, 121 – 22, 125; erotic, 69 – 70; human, 7, 9, 14, 26; social, 69 – 70; spornosexual, 70 – 71, 75 capitalism, xviii, 1 – 4, 13, 15, 17 – 19, 26, 35, 46, 50, 52, 61, 85 – 90, 100, 103 – 4, 133 – 34, 136 – 46; and drag culture, 88, 90 – 91, 98, 102 – 4; and LGBT cultures, 86 – 90. See also digital capitalism celebrity labour, 46, 48 – 50, 102 – 3 celebrity male nude leaks, xiv, xvii, 2, 24, 33 – 53, 103 – 4, 133; and 165

166

Index

post-Fordism, 51 – 53; and reality television, 46 – 49 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), University of Birmingham, xvi, 2, 3 – 5, 24 chems, xiv, 2, 26, 111, 115 – 16, 119, 121 – 22 chemsex, xiv, xvii, 2, 11, 26 – 27, 109 – 28, 133, 143, 146; emergence of, 110 – 12, 120 – 21; pathologisation of, 110 – 11; relationality of, 114 – 18 Cockettes, The, 88, 98 collectivity, 110, 112, 114 – 18, 121, 123, 125 – 28, 133 commons, 27, 134, 138 – 44; corporeal, 27, 134, 140 – 44, 146; digital, 27, 134, 139 – 40, 143; sexual, 125 – 27, 141 conjunctural analysis, xvi – xvii, 2, 3 – 5, 23 – 24, 112 – 13, 128 conjuncture, post-2008, 12 – 15, 19, 23, 39, 49, 51, 62 – 63, 83, 94, 99, 109, 128, 138, 140 Corbyn, Jeremy, xvii, 135, 140. See also Acid Communism/Corbynism Cosmopolitan, 83, 103 counter-hegemonic struggle, xviii, 24, 27, 115, 128, 135 – 36, 142 – 43, 146 cruel optimism, 14, 16, 25, 58, 62, 71, 74 – 76 cultural studies, xvi – xvii, 3, 7 – 9, 13 – 14, 23 – 24, 36, 51, 58, 65, 110 – 11, 136, 140 culture: celebrity, xiv, 34 – 37; consumer, 60, 62, 87, 100 – 101; digital, xvii – xviii, 65, 133; drag, xiv, 2, 25, 82 – 83, 133; LGBT, 8, 59, 84, 86 – 92, 112; neoliberal, 10 – 11, 23, 100, 102 Dappy, 34 Davenport, Kennedy, 101 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 75, 88, 113 – 14, 126, 136 – 39, 141 – 42, 144 – 45

desire, xiv – xv, 36, 86, 88, 144 – 45; and capitalism, 88, 137 – 38, 141; objects of, 36 – 37 dick pics, xv, 42, 44, 46. See also celebrity male nude leaks; sexting digital capitalism, 18 – 20, 26, 39, 51, 63, 81, 85, 90 – 95, 140, 143, 145 digital media, xiv, xviii, 1, 3, 18 – 19, 26, 40 – 41, 83, 94, 104, 117; contribution to neoliberalism, 51; differences to print media, 40 – 41 digital mediation of sexualised body, xvii – xviii, 1 – 3, 9 – 10, 17, 23, 25 – 27, 41, 133 – 34, 140, 145 – 46 drag, 25 – 26, 81 – 104, 133; fishy, 96 – 97; as gendered embodiment, 26, 84, 86; mainstreaming of, 82 – 83; marginalisation of, 87 – 89; as neoliberal enterprise, 84 – 85, 95 – 97, 103; and self-branding, 98, 102 – 3; as subversion of neoliberalism, 88 – 94, 99 – 102, 108 Dyer, Richard, 8, 35, 42 embodiment: digital, 20, 23 – 24; female, 21, 83, 143; gendered, 21, 23, 26, 63, 76, 83 – 85, 103, 128, 133 – 34, 137, 142; male, xiv – xvii, 2, 18, 25 erotic spectatorship, xiv, 7 Esquire, 47, 57 Facebook, 19, 57, 67, 69. See also social media female body: beautifying, 16; celebrity, 39; commercial value of, 46; masculinisation of, 103; nude, 34; representation of, 7, 60; sexualisation of, 143 feminisation, 17, 23, 44, 51 – 52; of labour, 3; of male body, 103 – 4 feminism, xiii, xv, xviii, 5, 7 – 8, 15 – 16, 21, 23, 60, 94 – 95, 99 – 103, 133, 136, 143, 146



Index 167

femininity, xiv, 7, 17, 42, 51, 83 – 84, 93 – 96, 99 – 101, 103 financial crisis, 2007/2008, xvii, 2, 12 – 13, 19, 51, 61, 63, 90,  134 folksonomies, 91 – 92 food consumption, as body-work, 8 Foucault, Michel, 9; Foucauldian approach, 8 – 13, 24, 76, 110 Gaydar, 22, 91. See also hook-up apps gentrification, 26, 122 – 23 Geordie Shore, 37 – 39, 46 – 47 Giddens, Anthony, 6, 59, 61 gig economy, 19 – 20, 51 Gilbert, Jeremy, 73, 112, 125 – 26 Gill, Rosalind, 16, 22 – 23, 51, 75, 94 GQ, 47, 59, 92, 135 Gramsci, Antonio, 3 – 4; Gramscian approach, 9 – 12, 24, 113 – 14, 136 Grindr, 22, 113, 116 – 18. See also hook-up apps group sex encounters, xiv, 26. See also chemsex Grossberg, Lawrence, 4 – 5, 74, 113 Guattari, Félix, 88, 113 – 14, 126, 136 – 38, 141 – 42, 144 – 45 gym attendance, 58 – 59, 65 – 68 gym selfies, xiv, xvii, 2, 133, 136. See also healthies Hall, Stuart, xvi, 2, 9, 10 – 11, 24 Hardt, Michael, 18 – 20, 139, 141 – 42 Harvey, David, 10, 22 hashtags, 59, 91 – 92, 136, 143 healthies, 59 Hearn, Alison, 21, 24, 37 – 38, 50 – 51, 63, 93 Hilton, Paris, 35, 45 Hollywood, 7 – 8, 35 – 37, 49, 59, 97 homophobia, xv, 89, 91, 111, 127 hook-up apps, xiv, 2, 22, 26, 91, 111, 113, 115 – 16, 121, 124, 133. See also Gaydar; Grindr

Imfurst, Mimi, 99 individualism, competitive, 13, 110, 112, 115, 134 inequality, structural, xvii, 10, 13, 61, 90 inhibitions, lowering, 116, 118 Instagram, 48, 59, 68 – 70, 74, 84, 136. See also social media intimacy, 26, 36, 39, 40 – 44, 47; and chemsex, 109 – 28, 133; feminising effect of, 42 Kardashian, Kim, 35, 44 – 46, 49 labour: celebrity, 46, 48 – 50, 102 – 3; distinction from leisure, 60 – 61, 66 – 68, 73; feminisation of, 3, 45, 51; forms of, 17, 50 – 51, 140; relations, 38 – 39, 51, 140 Logo TV, 82, 85, 89, 94, 96, 98 Love Island, 37, 47 Made in Chelsea, 37, 47, 50 makeover television, 16, 89, 93, 96 make-up tutorials, 85, 93 – 94, 96, 99 – 102. See also body transformation tutorials male body: celebrity, 39, 40, 45; commercial value of, 104; commodification of, 52, 59; desirable, xv, 44; feminisation of, 39, 85; nude, 34 – 36, 40, 45, 52; queer, 21; representation of, xiii – xiv, 7 – 8, 22, 42 – 43, 50, 60, 103 – 4; sexualisation of, xiii, xvii – xviii, 1, 3, 7 – 8, 27, 110, 115, 128, 133 masculinity, 7, 17, 42 – 43, 47, 51, 57, 88, 135; alternative, 8, 135; anxious, 15 – 16; cis-gendered, 25, 34, 60; heterosexual, 34, 42; neoliberal, 15, 135; queer, 135 – 36. See also transmasculinity Men’s Health, 47, 59 mental health, 70, 72 – 73, 119

168

Index

migration, 112, 114, 121, 124 – 25 mind-body distinction, 5 – 6 modernity, 5 – 7, 21, 59 – 60, 112, 136 – 37, 139, 144 – 45; and the body, 5 – 8, 27, 134, 146 monetisation, of human activity, 19 – 20, 85, 90 – 92 multi-user dimensions (MUDs), 20, 22 Negri, Antonio, 18 – 20, 139, 141 – 42 neoliberalism, 1, 3, 8 – 12, 23, 143; and austerity, 15 – 17, 60 – 61; failures of, xvii – xviii, 2, 12 – 13, 23, 25, 90, 133; feminising axiomatic of, 2 – 3, 17 – 18, 23, 25, 39, 52, 76, 81, 103 – 4, 133 – 34, 144 – 45; Foucauldian approach, 8 – 10, 11 – 12, 13, 24, 76; and gay pornography, 22; gendering of, 16, 23, 26, 51 – 52, 86; as hegemonic project, xvii – xviii, 2, 9 – 11, 14 – 15, 17 – 18, 60, 133; Marxist approach, 8, 10; resistance to, 58, 76 Norcross, Kirk, 37, 46 nudity, celebrity, 34 – 37; gendered logic of, 37; visibility of, 35 – 36 nudity, female, 24, 34, 36, 46 nudity, male, 24, 34 – 36 padding, 83, 96 paparazzi, 34, 41, 45 patriarchy, xv – xvi, 8, 15, 17, 21, 23, 37, 42, 51 – 52, 76, 133, 135, 142 – 45 penis, as symbol of social power, 36 – 37; celebrity, 24; commodification of, 1; presidential, 37, 56; verbal representation of, 37; visibility of, 24, 36 – 37, 40, 42, 52. See also celebrity male nude leaks; dick pics politics, post-neoliberal, 27, 128, 134, 136 – 38, 140 – 46 populism, 4, 127, 135 pornography, xiii, 22, 37, 42, 97 post-Fordism, 50 – 51, 63, 84, 88 – 90 power, xvii, 5 – 6, 10, 27, 37, 60 – 61, 75, 83 – 84, 144 – 46

precarity, 2 – 3, 13 – 15, 38, 48 – 51, 61 – 63, 71, 88, 93, 115, 134 quantified self movement (QS), 20 – 21 Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, 89 Race, Kane, 110, 119 Reagan, Ronald, 6, 10, 12 reality television, 37 – 39, 45, 46 – 49, 58, 93 – 94, 99; and class, 46 – 47, 49 – 50; and self-branding, 63, 102 – 3 recreational drugs. See chems Ringrose, Jessica, 21 – 22, 143 Royale, LaTrice, 98 RuPaul, 82 – 84 RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR), xiv, xvii, 25 – 26, 81 – 104, 133, 143 Sampson, Kendrick, 136 Scharff, Christina, 16 – 17, 23, 51, 75 self-branding, 21, 24, 38, 50, 63, 68, 84, 102 – 3, 136 selfies, 21, 34, 59, 68 – 70, 133. See also gym selfies sexting, 33, 41, 43 sexual identities, multiplicity of, 26, 84, 143 sexualisation, xiii – xiv; of children, xiii; of female bodies, xiii, 2 – 3; of male bodies, xiii – xviii, 1 – 3, 7 – 8, 133 Simpson, Mark, 25, 57 Skype, 34, 41, 43 Snapchat, 34, 41. See also social  media social media, 21, 85, 143; image sharing on, 58 – 59, 64, 66 – 68, 133; and self-branding, 63, 98; strategy, 69. See also Facebook; Instagram; Snapchat; Twitter; Tumblr spornosexuals, 11, 25, 57 – 76, 103 – 4, 135 – 36 Sport England, 58 – 59 structure of feeling, 64, 74 Tasker, Yvonne, 8, 15, 42 Taylor, Trinity ‘the Tuck’, 98 Thatcher, Margaret, 4, 6, 10, 12



Index 169

The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE), 46, 47, 48, 58 Thunderfuck, Alaska, 100 – 101 trans* identified people, 22, 83 – 84, 91 – 92, 96, 143 transmasculinity, 135 – 36 Trump, Donald, 17, 48, 127, 134 – 36 tucking, 83, 96 Tumblr, xiv, 26, 34, 41, 44, 91, 143 – 44. See also social media Twitter, xiv, 34, 40. See also social media value creation, xviii, 3, 17, 24 – 25, 36, 39, 48, 58, 60, 63, 75 – 76, 137; via body-work, 58, 63, 75 – 76, 81; in celebrity culture, 36, 39; via

celebrity male nude leaks, 44 – 50; and drag, 95 – 98; via social media, 69 – 71, 82 Waugh, Thomas, xiii, xv Weiner, Anthony, 52, 56 Williams, Raymond, xvi, 3 – 4, 11, 14, 64 Wood, Helen, 38 – 39 Work, Delta, 101 World of Wonder, 82 – 83, 85, 94 – 101, 103 YouTube, 83, 85, 95 – 101, 103, 117, 119, 140 Zamolodchikova, Katya, 99 – 100