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Article published In:
Sexuality and the discursive construction of the digital self in the Global South
Edited by Nell Haynes and Baird Campbell
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 9:1] 2020
► pp. 14–47

Sutura 2.0

Queer biocommunicability and digital self-making in Senegalese eHealth activism

| University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Wolof ethics of sutura “discretion” have historically conflated perceived communicative excess with bodily contagion and associated both with queer subjects. For health non-governmental organizations (NGOs), online dating among gay Senegalese men presents two risks to sutura: contagious sex and contagious discourse. A Senegalese eHealth NGO hires gay men to send HIV/AIDS prevention messages through Facebook and online dating websites in order to contain HIV and, invoking sutura, contain queer communication and bodies. This NGO projects a heteronormative metapragmatic model of health communication, casting information as instrument of containment, and a unitary, de-eroticized digital self as informational messenger. In what I call queer biocommunicability, eHealth activists create erotically seductive digital personae incongruous with offline characteristics. Construed as communicative-bodily excess, digital seductions actually facilitate information exchange. NGOs instrumentalize queer biocommunicability to bolster a care framework that marginalizes queer subjects. This paper traces historical underpinnings and ethical-political implications of heteronormative biocommunicability’s dependence on queer transgression.

Keywords: biocommunicability, queer theory, digital media, metapragmatics, intimacy, care, Senegal
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The emergence of MSM eHealth
  • 3.Histories of queer biocommunicability
  • 4.Digital sutura and eHealth
  • 5.Instrumentalizing queer biocommunicability
  • 6.Potentialities of queer biocommunicability
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.19006.fri
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