The evolution of attitudes towards certain LGBT identities has seen a change in these practices, but they have never entirely disappeared. As a result, queer people have had to identify creativeways to find and bond with like-minded others in a safe environment. Queer creativity has been crucial to challenging and reworking sexuality and leveraging technology to create a safe spacewithinwhich to do so. Queer communities have been pioneers in using digital technologies to connect with each other and create alternative ‘virtual intimacies’. The launch of geolocation dating apps, such as Grindr and Scruff, for gay men transformed the world’s dating scene into a gamified erotic terrain where bodies and identities are constructed through the interplay of the virtual and physical. In recent years, this has led to a reconfiguration of embodiment in such digital spaces, as geolocation dating apps – including those outside the context of queer digital spaces, such as Tinder – actively foreground embodiment and physical encounters, and adopt a hybrid approach which also focuses on physical encounters in material spaces. These experiences have become even more central in light of Covid, especially with alternative modes of touch and contact, where normal rules of time and space are altered. The pandemic has pushed us to think of touch beyond the common framings of physical closeness. Virtual spaces represent an attempt to fill the void of nothingness resulting from a touchless world. Virtual spaces can destabilise the body, and we must take into account the role of nonhuman entities, such as screens, colours, bandwidth, in a digital postCovid landscape. The intra-activity between humans and screens provides both challenges and alternatives to the power of touch to symbolise human interactions. Aesthetics play an important role in reframing contact and interaction from various qualities of touch – such as texture, shape, temperature and vibration – to those of sight (colour, shape, movement) and hearing (pitch, rhythm, harmony). It is no longer a multi-sensorial experience, rather one based purely on auditory and visual stimuli. Global Pride 2020 was held online due to Covid-19. But the lack of a physical geography opened the doors to queer people in countries where same-sex sexual activity is still criminalised. It was no longer possible to ignore racism and xenophobia in certain gay communities, and there was a push towards a return to Pride’s roots, away from the increasing corporatisation of the event. The art of drag was prominent, with under-represented artists such as drag kings, ‘bio-queens’ and trans drag performers granted more visibility. This is testament to the rich, creative and resilient textures of digital queer lives, where the creation of a virtual affective experience is done in imaginative ways. The queering and digitisation of interaction, touch and contact requires creativity, resilience and courage. A NEW FRONTIER Digital spaces have provided us with a much-needed sense of connection with other people. They also contributed to a sense of frustration at the end of online social interactions, when closing the laptop meant a return to a space that felt terribly empty. We started to put more effort and love into the production of digital content, and this created a sense of anticipation that, albeit different from physical encounters, made for a more interesting use of these digital spaces. We were attentive to how our emotions were vivid during these trying times and how that affected our interactions. Digital spaces provide solace, andwhile the return to physical interaction has beenwidelywelcomed, they show that we can enjoy touching experiences when we aremanymiles fromeach other. Dr Mohammed Cheded is an International Senior Teaching Associate in Management in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology. Dr Alexandros Skandalis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Marketing. This article is based on Touch and contact during COVID-19: Insights fromqueer digital spaces, by Dr Mohammed Cheded and Dr Alexandros Skandalis, published in Gender, Work & Organization. m.cheded@lancaster.ac.uk; a.skandalis@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 13 Until the spring of 2020, the majority of us will have taken physical contact for granted. The ability to shake hands at the start of a meeting, to hug loved ones, to attend concerts and sporting events as part of a crowd, to go on a date and engage in romantic encounters where touch was an essential prerequisite. Then came Covid-19. The pandemic saw a transformation of socialisation, as entertainment and community were digitised in a way never seen before. The pandemic has presented us all with a scenario where touch is heavily policed, prohibited or rejected. Alternative modes of touch and contact – beyond the physical – became commonplace. And leading the way, setting the example, was a community that has long occupied positions on the boundaries of social space, finding new ways to engage. For the queer community – in the LGBTQI+ sense of the word – digital platforms and technologies have long been widely considered as safe and protective environments. They have used these platforms to engage and socialise, to romance and entertain. When Covid arrived, digital pride events and queer parties took place as ‘safe’ alternatives to offline equivalents. These events enjoyed significant reach and participation, and continue a relationship between queerness and digital technologies that stretches back to long before the pandemic. The rest of society found itself following the queer community's long-standing example of connecting away fromwhat we had considered themainstream. These digital entertainment and engagement spaces have led us to question how the world is shaped and sensed during and beyond Covid. Our interactions with surfaces, objects and each other have been wholly transformed during the pandemic. In this bizarre real-life scenario, many of us started to view the outside world – now perceived as anything beyond the walls of our own homes – as impure; we became afraid or sceptical of contact and touch with anything outside. When there is a global pandemic, a virus that has claimed millions of lives and led to many more being hospitalised, everything and everyone holds suspicion that it can harbour an unseen infection. We are all the potential cause of harm or danger. ADAPTING TO A VIRTUALWORLD In order to adapt to this new social reality, we turned to our laptops and accessed a virtual ‘outside’ world. We have all become familiar with Zoom and Teams, both for work or for staying in touch with family and friends; we have indulged in binge watching, sparking huge subscription numbers for streaming services as we discovered new series or returned to comfort watch the familiar; and we have attended real-time digital events, from concerts to comedy gigs, quizzes to reunions, providing a sense of time and space shared together. In the live music industry, there was the rise of virtual, ‘risk-free’ concerts within imaginary settings such as digital games or virtual worlds, with artists transformed into avatars who invited audiences to engage with them in virtual reality. But can these new initiatives be seen as an authentic way of experiencing entertainment, and do they need certain affective and sensory qualities in order to be experienced? In the digital world, are there different ways to experience touch? It could be argued that the emotional atmosphere of online events is diminished due to the lack of bodily touch and contact. A significant part of socialisation lies in such contact and can be lost in translation as entertainment and community formation are digitised. FOLLOWING THE QUEER EXAMPLE An event description for a queer digital fetish party revealed the alternative possibilities of touch to us. Organised as part of a digital series for Pride 2020, which largely shifted online due to Covid, it said ‘the digital space is not an unknown territory for many LGBTQI+ people, as these were the spaces where many of us took the first steps in exploring our identities.’ For queer people, touch and contact have been historically policed, whether through legal restrictions or societal norms. A wide range of practices have been used to police their touch and contact, from criminalisation to medicalisation, abjection and mockery to social exclusion. Queer touch and contact have been constructed as something deviant and abject. 12 |
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