(INAPPROPRIATE) DIGITAL INTIMACIES

This session takes its title and ethos from Barbara Browning’s 2017 metafictional novel, The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body). The narrator/protagonist Barbara revels in seizing “inappropriate intimacies:” replying to junk email with heartfelt sincerity, spamming strangers with cover songs on ukulele, developing an intense relationship with a man online, of whose veracity she can never be sure. Browning’s character and this friend collaborate on dance videos, her hands moving to music and voicemail that he had created—“digital intimacies,” twice-over. The reader engages these through description and black and white screen-captures, but is also invited to view them on Vimeo. In this way, Browning redoubles her effort for radical forms of stranger intimacy online and the possibility of virtual touch, with gifts that disrupt logics of capital and heteronormative patriarchy, as well as the bounds between “reality” and “fiction.”

In the pandemic, causal and erotically-charged interactions with strangers IRL stuttered and shifted. More of social life occurs online, and it is likely to remain that way to some degree. This panel invites case studies and theoretical meditations that address the risky potential of “digital intimacies” with strangers, intentional or inadvertent, realized or imagined. Topics might include: dispersed forms of social practice, apps and sites like Tik Tok, OnlyFans, and Chatroulette, the roles of humor and play in addressing strangers, and embodied interactions through “virtual” technologies. Artists are invited to present their work. We encourage intersectional and/or global approaches, as well as non-traditional presentations.

Field of Study:
Media: Internet/Web-Based Media
Topics: Social Media
Topics: Social History
Topics: Queer/Gay
Media: New Media
 

Chair:

Francesca Balboni, University of Texas at Austin - fbalboni@utexas.edu