Gender Talk Series with Jenny Sundén
This GEXcel seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register the latest by November 1st! The link will then be sent out the day before the seminar to the registered e-mail.
Dis/connections: Quarantine humor and queer longing
Jenny Sundén, Karlstad University
This presentation zooms in on transformations of intimacy and relational spaces in a time of a viral, global crisis. Set against the backdrop of “social distancing” practices, it opens with a discussion of digital intimacy, focusing on the layering of anxiety and anticipation within networked connectivity.
Secondly, it moves on to discuss how such anticipatory anxiety may become punctuated by humor and laughter. Considering the dynamics between physical disconnection and digital intensity within pandemic hookup practices, it explores in particular instances of quarantine humor in queer hookup cultures.
This humor stems from impossibly contradictory spaces of self-isolation, desire, and longing, in relation to which the swiftness of the swipe is transformed into a disconnect in the shape of a delay. The presentation ends with an example of Swedish, queer quarantine humor and a discussion of partial disconnections, or selective connectivity in difficult times in the interest of self-care.
Jenny Sundén is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Karlstad University, as well as Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her work is situated in the intersection of digital media and technology studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminist and queer theory, and affect theory.
She is currently working on queerness and digital intimacy, disconnection, and delay; feminist social media tactics that use humor to counter sexism by rewiring the dynamics of shame and shamelessness; and the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures across Nordic, Baltic, and Anglo-American contexts. She is the author of Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (MIT Press, 2020, with Susanna Paasonen), and Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (Routledge, 2012, with Malin Sveningsson).