Visual Ethics, Networked Selves with Shaka McGlotten // Postdigital Intimacies
Channel: Postdigital Intimacies
Date: 2021-06-21

“I’m gonna put a computational hex on you?”
Shaka McGlotten, Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY

An algorithm can function like a computational hex, a love potion (or something) for the digital age. While digital sexual labors have become commonplace over the last twenty years, algorithms are increasingly important to workers and the desiring alike. One magick leads to another--performers perform in videos released online. Those videos serve to expose performers to broad audiences, and that exposure leads in turn to the production of new, more independent media, including, among much else, NSFW Twitter and OnlyFans accounts. The algorithm is an instrument, or ingredient, for lusty seduction. During COVD-19, performers have had to extend their creative witching, as key income streams, tied to mainstream productions, as well as the escorting many workers engage in, have dried up. These are not the first plague years queers have faced, nor the first instance in which collective sexual inventiveness meets the moment.



Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies and Global Black Studies Programs. Their work stages encounters between black study, queer theory, media, and art. They have written and lectured widely on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with qtpoc lifeworlds. They are the author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality, published by SUNY Press in 2013. They are also the co-editor of two edited collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis) and Zombies and Sexuality (with Steve Jones). Their book Dragging: In the Drag of a Queer Life, forthcoming from Routledge, and their current project, Black Data, have been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation.