Network media and queer communities: local and cosmopolitan
Aristea Fotopoulou
Forming alternative affective communities and understandings of space has been a central project for queer activism. As today most areas of our everyday lives have become digitally saturated, it is of interest to explore how queer visions and materialisations of counter social configurations emerge in the context of cosmopolitanism and global flows of information and capital. This paper examines the role of social media and network technologies in shaping queer political communities, in both spatial and temporal terms. Primarily, the paper aims to address how territories are produced through situated communicative practices, as understandings of belonging change. The chapter thus poses questions about the effects of mobility and global networked connectivity in the formation of queer political communities and identities. Secondly, it seeks to understand how queer political communities shape the development of networked media. To approach these two leading questions, I examine two intertwined, transient queer groups in Brighton in terms of their event organising; their communicative acts; their attitudes towards networking technologies; their critical sense of “the local” as a political site, and in terms of the distance/proximity of their relationships.
Based on online and offline ethnographic research, the paper argues that, as social media become integrated into everyday activist practices, they function as modes for creating cultural references and archives of a living, physically present and local political community.
The analysis identifies how preserving locality as the primary reference for the groups under scrutiny at all times comes in tension with their efforts to construct a queer cosmopolitan identity and their project of countering local LGBT politics. Social network technologies play a crucial role in mediating these tensions because they constitute a forum for connecting to a non-local community based on identity, and at the same time set this community apart as a distinct territory. Furthermore, it is suggested that digital media acquire a social life of their own, with a past, present and future, which is materially present and accounted for by the activists. Through this empirical exploration, the paper offers a way of thinking about the importance of locality and friendship for queer identity and community in networked environments. On a broader level, the paper, by looking at the practices of a local queer group, contributes to an understanding of the historically and socially situated ways in which networked technologies and politics interrelate.