Screen Love

<p><b>Engaging analysis of men-seeking-men media as paradoxical sites of both self-marketing and radical queer sociality.</b></p><p>In work play education and even healthcare we are using social media during COVID-19 to approximate normal life before the pandemic. In <i>Screen Love</i> Tom Roach urges us to do the opposite. Rather than highlight the ways that social media might help reproduce the pre-pandemic status quo Roach explores how Grindr and other dating/hookup apps can help us envision a radically new normal: specifically antinormative conceptions of selfhood and community. Although these media are steeped in neoliberal relational and communicative norms they offer opportunities to reconceive subjectivity and ethics in ways that defy normative psychological and sexual paradigms. In the virtual cruise Roach argues we might experience a queer sociability in which participants are formally interchangeable avatar-objects. On Grindr and other m4m platforms a model of selfhood championed in liberal-humanist traditions-an intelligent altruistic eloquent and emotionally expressive self-is often a liability. By teasing out the queer ethical and political potential of an antisocial virtual fungibility Roach compels readers to think twice about media typically dismissed as sordid superficial and narcissistic. Written for students professors and nonacademics alike <i>Screen Love</i> is an accessible provocative and at times subversively funny read.</p>