Jody cultural studies

 This week's readings seek to destabilize, in various ways, the study of culture as essential, static, and bounded. Abu-Lughod (1991) offers three strategies for how to “write against culture.” First, a focus on discourse and/or practice, as opposed to culture, avoids constructing culture as bounded and allows for incoherency and contradiction. Focusing on connections also avoids the trap of boundedness. Connections can take many forms and exist, for example, between the researcher and the community they are researching, history and the present, colony and colonizing power. Abu-Lughod also suggests conducting “ethnographies of the particular,” arguing that generalization is a dangerous analytic practice that not only sets up the researcher as a supposed authority but also renders culture as homogenous, coherent, and timeless.

For my own research, the first two strategies are the most useful for avoiding the use of culture as a concept of sameness, boundedness, and essentialism. Any attempt to use grindr as a study of “gay culture” surely falls into these traps. However, by focusing on discourse and practice, I can show the inconsistencies and contradictions of the practices of self-identified gay man as they position themselves in relation to both hegemonic discourses and discourses circulating in the gay community. (Though of course, this use of community easily slips into the same problematic role as the notion of culture. I'm struggling with a way of linguistically conveying a sense of “the gay community” that is both recognized and referred to by the men I interviewed, but not uniformly taken up or identified with. In this way, community is in fact bounded in a certain sense, and it is this boundary itself that creates incoherency, instability, and resistance.)

For example, almost all of the men I interviewed—including all who were under 30—positioned themselves in relation to a mythic Other, to the promiscuous gay man who was on Grindr purely for hooking up, was lewd and explicit, and was not interested in conversation or human connection. Yet, by the end of the interviews, most of the men had disclosed engaging in the same practices that they condemned. A focus on discourse, and the connections between discourses in gay communities and mainstream discourses, reveals “gay culture” to be dynamic and ever changing in response to political struggles and large cultural shifts.

The cultural practices of Grindr users can not be read with out attending to the discourses of homonormativity and the assimilationist politics of large political organizations focused on marriage equality. It is within these cultural imperatives that the men I interviewed went about their sexual lives, sometimes refusing them, sometimes embodying the contradictions of a multiplicity of discourses that often fall at the ends of a continuum, either distancing gayness from sexual practice, or embracing sex and promiscuity as essentially gay. The focus on discourse, practice, and connections allows for a multi-dimensional picture to emerge that does not homogenize or essentialize gay culture.