JP: COVID 19 might end up revealing a lot about people’s relationship with technology in their intimate lives, do you think?
JH: Yeah, I think, as your question suggests, there’s a real focus now on the way that technologies like smartphones and video conferencing platforms are being used to replace physical intimacy at this moment of social distancing. We’re definitely interested in looking at that. But we’re also interested in looking at the political, social and economic crises that the pandemic has precipitated in the UK (and globally) and what gay men’s place within these crises might end up being. So we’re looking at those things at the same time.
JP: It seems there has been a moral positioning of individual behaviours in terms of public health and social distancing in relation to COVID-19. People are called out as irresponsible if they see non cohabiting sexual partners and so forth. There is something in this that is reminiscent of some of the judgement of gay men’s sex lives in response to HIV. Public health enables moral scrutiny of people’s sexual and intimate lives. Do you agree?
JH: Absolutely. And something else that I’ve been thinking about is the reduction of the publicness of a gay cultures of intimacy during the pandemic. I mean, think about community spaces—community centres, bookshops, bars, clubs, sex on premises venues, outdoor spaces—obviously what’s happened as a result of COVID is the absolute retraction to the private sphere. This might work for some gay men in the age of gay marriage and homonormative domesticity, but it completely erodes the other kinds of spaces that gay men have historically relied on for intimate connection.
JP: I think you have written about that trend toward the privatisation of gay men’s intimacy before. Can you talk a bit about that?
JH: I have written about privatisation and gentrification of urban space, and what that has meant for gay men’s cultures of intimacy. I need to think about that more in relation to what’s happening now. I understand social distancing as a public health issue, where there has been an urgent need to lock down and keep people safe. I do understand that. But there are implications that it has had for gay culture that I think we need to think very carefully about. To be clear, I am not arguing against lockdowns as necessary measures to contain the spread of coronavirus. I am saying that we need to think intersectionally about the retraction of society to the private sphere and what it has meant for different social groups—gay men included.
JP: Human intimacy is often thought of as entirely human, something that exists between two people, whether that’s physical or emotional. Given this, how would you explain where technology sits within this dynamic?
JH: There are certain kind of critical perspectives that are being used at the moment that can help make sense of this question. Science and technology studies and ‘actor network theory’ in particular describe non-human objects like technology as having a degree of agency. Another way of putting it is that agency is distributed across assemblages of humans and non-humans. This is a perspective I admire and find very useful, although don’t draw from it much in my work. The concept of intimacy that I am working with at the moment comes from Lauren Berlant. She describes intimacy as the attachments that we depend on for living. This opens a far more capacious understanding of what intimacy is beyond the common sense understanding of intimacy as the private thoughts or feelings two people share. I think questions about the human and the non-human were not in the forefront of critical theory at the time Berlant wrote this, but you can see how it moves us beyond the human. She did write about fetishistic attachments to objects—sexual fetishes—but of course we can develop life-sustaining attachments to technology. We did a focus group a few weeks ago with five gay and bisexual guys in London and what became apparent was that the phone itself was absolutely central to their intimate lives. They actually had an emotional investment in the technology, because it was so crucial to the way that it mediated their human relations, and as a result they had absolutely become very invested in it as an object. There was this great quote from one participant who said: “I wonder when [Alexander Graeme Bell] invented the telephone if he realised that we’d end up investing so much emotions in this piece of technology.”
JP: I think anyone who’s had a long-distance relationship would concur as well with that. The phone becomes so central to that everyday connection. There can be anxiety if the phone’s not with you.
JH: Yeah, the participants talked about that. They also talked about the way blue ticks on Whatsapp dominated their life, especially the investment in the blue ticks. The blue ticks show someone has read their message, so they know and then wonder why they haven’t got back to them, or why hadn’t they read it. I mean this wasn’t incidental, it was very much part of it. The phone and the blue ticks became ways of mediating their relationships. They also talked about what we’ve called purely mediated intimacy, so for example the relationship they have with porn stars and so forth.
JP: So, imagined relationships or actual interactions?
Imagined relationships. So there’s this whole kind of continuously shifting terrain of technologically mediated intimacy in which people and technology are, using a word which I think is useful from post-humanism, ‘entangled’. These things are entangled: they’re separate, but they are deeply entangled—like spaghetti you can see the strands are separate but they’re impossible to delineate. I think that is a useful image to describe the ways that the human and technological relate, certainly now with digital media.
JP: That makes a lot of sense to me. Even just to go back to that long-distance relationship example, if you had a lover in different city or country 20 years ago you couldn’t have maintained the constant connection in the way that you can now with phones. So technology is neutral in that sense, it shapes what’s possible and becomes entangled in that relationship.
JH: Exactly. I 100% agree with you. Did you see [the television series] Normal People? There is a scene where the two main characters are watching each other sleep using Skype.
JP: That’s my favourite scene, I’ve thought about that many times when talking to people about tech and intimacy. I never imagined Skype could be so intimate. Or at least the scene was filmed in a way that made it seem intimate.
JH: Yeah and as I’m talking, I think I realise we’re talking against a more common-sense idea that technology interrupts intimacy or is inauthentic intimacy. But then people’s experience is not necessarily this. It came up in the focus group—there was definitely a sense that meeting in bars is much better than meeting on Grindr because a Grindr meet was always somehow inauthentic. But later on the participants were saying things that completely contradicted this and that their intimate lives absolutely depended on apps like Grindr and their smartphones more generally.
JP: I agree, I hear a lot in kind of contemporary discourse or discourse on technology about it being an inauthentic or a stilted form of intimacy. But I have also heard some people speak about the way technology opens intimacy or gives people confidence to say more or be more vulnerable because it is often communication that is at a distance but also quite spontaneous—like texting or messaging. Has that come up in your work?
JH: That’s a really interesting question. Well I mean, one of the examples I can think of is from my own life, where my partner is better and more comfortable expressing himself in writing, which can be annoying! So if we have had an argument later on he’ll send text messages and I’m like ‘oh right that’s what you meant’. Text messages enable him to express intimate thoughts more clearly.
JP: Do you think some technologies are part of human intimacy in unexpected ways or perhaps that there are technologies entangled with human intimacies that are not on even our radar when we look at tech and intimacy?
Yeah, I think space and place is relevant