The creation of digital representations of the self are perhaps most profoundly felt, and most politically useful to a minority group who continue to remain invisible until they choose to risk violence, humiliation and rejection by identifying themselves as sexually dissident. However such identifications are heavily influenced by pornography and the problematic politics inherent in such discourse. If the representation of homosexuality has made 'life bearable for countless millions of gay men' ... it is playing an increasingly central role in defining - and policing - understandings of what it means to be a gay man in Britain today.In referring to 'cybercarnality' as "a means of recognising the specific forms of knowledge within the formation of gay subjectivity online", Mowlabocus considers the profiling inherent in social network services such as Gaydar.
The chapter argues that
Gaydar allows men to represent themselves via the medium of the profile [twinks, otters, chubs, desperate & dateless semioticians etc] but this method of representation simultaneously serves as a technique of surveillance. In authoring a profile, which then becomes his online persona, the gay man subjects himself to a discursive machinery that fragments, analyses, codifies and evaluates him. This surveillance apparatus is a knowledge machine and its aim is to identify the gay male subject through a specifically erotic knowledge established within the arena of commercial gay pornography. The 'newbie' may not necessarily conform to the categories of Sex Factor but if he is to 'fit in' - that is, if he is to function, be understood and be found within search engines - and perhaps most importantly, if he is to attract attention from other users, then he must submit to the conventions of this cybercarnality.After that it's back to rereading Stanley Cohen's Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment & Classification (Blackwell, 1985) and Penal Populism, Sentencing Councils and Sentencing Policy Hawkins Press 2008) edited by Arie Freiberg and Karen Gelb.
