Digital Cruising

• 18th Mar 2010 5:15pm-6:00pm
  Room W623, Watts Building, University of Brighton
  

Cruising is an integral part of gay male subculture. It articulates both the historical invisibility of queer men in public life and the desire to overcome that invisibility through moments of mutual recognition, coded gazes, gestures and body language. Cruising might never be politically motivated, but its location within dominant cultures that privilege hetero-patriarchal modes of looking serves to position it as a political-charged act. In this paper, Dr Sharif Mowlabocus charts the development of gay male digital culture over the last ten years before examining how recent developments in mobile technologies are leading to the development of practices that he labels 'digital cruising'. Unlike 'online cruising' or gay sex websites, these practices are structured around physical environments, and a sense of place and of movement remains central to the digital cruising experience.

Drawing on interviews with research participants, ethnographic observation and textual analysis, he develops a reading of this evolving practice which recognises the spatial dimensions of digital cruising, and identifies the 'phatic' dimension of such this practice. Utilising de Souza e Silva's (2006) definition of 'hybrid space' and responding to Miller's (2008) criticism of 'phatic culture', Dr Mowlabocus argues that gay men are using mobile-locative technologies (in particular) to develop and extend notions of 'queer communion' and 'connected presence' for multiple reasons, and with multiple consequences.