Gender and Sexuality Autobiography: Navigating Identity in a Digital World

Course: FAS 264 - Sociology of Gender

ASU-Tempe

Introduction

The thing is that my life has always been filled with the tension of my relationship with

the gender and sexuality, and it is the clash between self-discovery and social expectations.

Being a Black queer individual, I have existed in a place where there are competing demands on

masculinity, desirability and authenticity. Such contradictions have never been as vivid to me as

they were in two key incidents first, my unwilling dabbling in the hookup apps domain and

second, the strange episode which I will refer to as the Itchy and Scratchy incident, all these were

crazy yet very telling about deeper emotional injuries. Both scenes emphasize a certain

discomfort of the dance of discovery and play, passion and punishment, humiliation and erotic

power. Presented in the context of Judith Butler gender performativity and thoughts of Michael

Arceneaux in I Can’t Date Jesus, I discuss how digital spaces make queer identity more complex

and, at the same time, making it clearer. The experiences have taught me that as much as

technology provides new ways of linking to the other, it links back to the ways of

marginalization. My identity does not only express itself but it is always negotiated, particularly

when desire, race, and visibility are thwarted by the internet.

As Parry et al. (2018) point out, hookup apps' digital environments are not indifferent

places where one can simply connect, but rather they are the places that re-establish the pre-

existing power relations. These programs with their setup of profiles, swipes, and geo-locational

immediacy, implement the logic of a market that treats desire as a product. This happens quite

often in the case of technological platforms which silently (or sometimes quite evidently)

reinforce the rigid hierarchies of masculinity, body type, and race that in turn exercise

discrimination based on these aspects of identity. For instance, a Black queer body, in the digital

marketplace, could be the one that gets overexposed or at the same time completely invisible,

theaters where it is forced to be a type, either a fetish or an exclusion, rather than the

multifaceted self. This mechanism serves as digital codification of the very social norms that the

majority attempts to get free from. Thus making it inevitable to put on the persona which is a

mix of authenticity of one's desire and the pre-arranged scripts of being desirable which are

culturally and algorithmically enforced.

This behavior would be even more complex if identity modulation was not there, without

which Duguay (2022) would not have been able to refer to it as ongoing editing of one's self-

presentation aimed at dealing with both visibility and safety. In the queer digital world, the

mentioned modulation is a nervous practice of revealing one's personal side while also

considering the possibility of a threat, thus the authentic self can only be shared with the public

in a strategically prepared manner. The Itchy and Scratchy incident, notwithstanding its strange

and embarrassing nature, revealed in a very clear way the ridiculous yet very consequential

nature of the modulation where the fast change of seeking connection into experiencing

objectification or ridicule can be very quickly made. Such experiences bring home the idea of

digital platforms being, on the one hand, mediums for personal exchange. On the other hand,

they are completely opposite to the idea of being private in any way; arenas where the intimate

self is broken down into data points and can be looked at by a usually unforgiving gaze that is

shaped by racist and homophobic norms even if they are very much subtle.

Still, amid the anxious terrain, there is a spar of transformative power, a notion that is

Coleman’s (2019) investigation of “digital innocence” and queer futurity reflects. The very deed

of constantly maneuvering through these antagonistic or reductive online spaces as a Black queer

person thus becomes a repeated, hopeful act of queer world-making. The crafting of self in the

face of monolithic categorization is slowly done through every profile creation, every blocked

user, and every painful lesson in digital discourse. In the words of Bharathi (2023), the creation

of an online identity is essentially an ongoing story through which a conscious self-presentation

can surpass the limitations of a platform. Therefore, it transcends the notion of a mere survival

game; it represents an act of critical hope. This hope is the firm belief that the complicated self is

able, and will, find a way to be acknowledged even if it has to use the flawed means of the digital

world to do so.

Key Experience #1: Gender, Masculinity, and Intimacy in Digital Environments

I had a reluctant start with hook up apps. Similar to Arceneaux, who confessed to being

terrified about sex and thirsting to be connected, I avoided using Jackd even though a good

friend encouraged me to be a better gay. I remember that phrase because it shows the ridiculous

standard that queer men tend to live up to expectations to be overt in our wants, but to be

punished because we are perhaps too candid about our wants. The experience was not free when

I joined the party finally. Due to being a writer, I was not anonymous; I could not even have the

chance of being anonymous. Even in places that were supposed to be the domain of personal

fantasy, messages such as Hey Michael, love your work! appeared and transformed even sexual

experiences into simulations. It compelled me to perform in two distinct positions: public

intellectual during the day and sexual being at night- a repetition of the concept of gender

performativity as proposed by Butler. I was not only hooking up with the hookup culture, but

also displaying masculinity under scrutiny. Arceneaux described that his luggage had a byline.

My profile picture was active. I did not have more freedom thanks to the app, it was my

digitalized process of trying to be natural.

I felt that the internet hookup platforms were rolling out the red carpet for the data-

hunvesting of desire as soon as they made it clear that all the information on sexual longing

would be used as data. Indeed, Bharathi (2023) cites a trend wherein the online persona is more

and more determined by algorithmic legibility, i.e. the user-sharing more personal information

leads the platforms to not only be able to predict one's behavior but also to guide it with more

precision. Thus, in the year 2022 alone, the world-leading dating applications managed to

interact with user profiles more than 70 billion times (Bolton et al., 2018). This serves as proof

for the extent of the data that is harvested thereby leaving the space for interaction and or data

collection to be almost synonymous. This radical transformation of desire into something

measurable or data points is not done without the users being subtly incentivized to do so. It is

because the latter then do or feel compelled to produce identities which in turn make one more

visible than one is authentic. The same phenomenon is also subject to the jargon of Fazi (2019)

who in relation to my own experience states the shift undergone by the concept of personal

continuity to that of individually calculable fragments. These fragments here being the very

components with which my profile was reconstructed and analogized as a digital résumé. The

performance that followed was not only sexual but computational in nature. Thus it was under

the influence of invisible infrastructures that rewarded the particular ways of self-presentation

that this performance was shaped. Within this analytical space, fulfilling an online desire made

the act less of a yearning and more of a submission to an evaluative framework.

The platforms further complicated the ambivalence of digital desire by converting the

users’ acts of consumption into those of self-expression without giving them the chance to

breathe in between the two. Fontenelle (2020) puts forward that the online erotic transactions

also serve as “networks of enjoyment”, demonstrably indicative of the users “oscillating”

between leading pleasure in life and the control of technological agencies that mediate it. The

average Grindr user is said to access the platform about 52 times each day, a number that

indicates the mixing of the dependent and the exhausted side of the user in such environments

(Soror et al., 2022). There is a recurring engagement between the parties involved that obliterates

the very distinction of each other's quest for some kind of bond and their performance thereof.

Therefore, leaving them in a kind of wheel of permanently experiencing and depleting

themselves. The duration and desire aspects of Keilty's (2018) research hint at the possibility that

such repetitive exposures prolong and stretch desire into an almost everlasting state of

anticipation. Thus this makes it eventual culmination into the much-touted satisfaction extremely

rare. More often than not, I was grappling with this drag of digital temporality, this persistent

feeling that the app required more from me than I did from it or vice versa. The web of desire

was turned into one of endless cycles rather than momentary ones.

On the other hand, the emotional friction that these platforms produce originates from the

difficult task of constantly juggling between digital and real worlds logically and coherently.

Gosse (2021) defines such non-stop work as ontological labor in it, the users have to

continuously prove not only to others but also to themselves that their real-world experiences are

authentic while countering the idea that the virtual world is somehow less real. This conflict is in

line with the findings of the study which shows that 68% of LGBTQ+ users say that they are

forced to keep dual identities under control in the online world, mainly for the sake of safety or

to be able to maintain professional relationships (Nelson et al., 2020). The necessity to negotiate

between the two aspects also raised the level of the internal battle within me. The imperative to

shield my social self at the same time as my longing for the impromptu nature of the hookup was

still there. Rylander Eklund and Simpson (2020) argue that such dual structures usually create

design paradoxes in that these systems grant liberty on one hand but at the same time put

restrictions. The apps on which I was active made me feel as though I was able to follow desire

through a location specifically geared towards the emancipation of desire while at the same time

it was quietly being disciplined. The upshot of the drama was the unfolding of an identity

existing in conflictual spaces of the different demands.

Key Experience #2: Embodiment, Risk, and Gendered Vulnerability

The story about getting itchy and scratchy after having a hook up was embarrassing and

allegorical. Following several days of compulsive cleaning, visits to the doctors, and Google

searches on symptoms, I understood that the man whom I brought home was the source of it all.

When I informed my friend La, she laughed out: Nigga! You got fleas on ya fuckin someone? It

was a ridiculous scene, which concealed a further reality. I was not only embarrassed, I felt

ashamed. This event was used as a metaphor of the danger which queer individuals, in particular

individuals of color, are exposed to when they seek intimacy. Queer desire is usually policed,

shamed, and pathologized as Arceneaux outlines in his essays. Rather similarly to him, I have

experienced situations when the eagerness to attain pleasure clashed with the feelings of intense

guilt. It became quite clear how racialized sexuality is burdened in some way twice: it is all over

the place, hypersexualized, and even when it is made real, it is being judged. The bites healed but

the emotional after affects did not well to remind me of the fact that even when we are in verge

of connecting with someone, danger and judgment are not miles behind.

The "Itchy and Scratchy" episode is a case in point of the risky ambivalence that

characterizes digital platforms that are socially connecting us but nevertheless are immune to

real-world consequences. The latter is a core concept in the argument that these platforms form a

violent nexus between the digital, physical, and social worlds (Bolton et al., 2018). Basically, the

logic of hookup apps is to quickly and effectively get users to meet each other intimately, yet in

doing so, the logic is unaware of the vulnerabilities humans have especially if they happen to be

marginalized. The imperfection in the system leads to the promise of a seamless link going all

the way down to a grotesque physical and psychological tailspin. It means that the user having to

face the offline world again in a most brutal way. There is actually no function of the platform

beyond organizing a meet-up, so in a way, it left me with the full, direct, and unshared

consequences of an encounter it helped arrange. This illustrates a very important point in the

design of such social technologies (Rylander Eklund & Simpson, 2020).

This bodily condition, the persistent, degrading itch, was turned into an especially

powerful metaphor for the continuing psychosocial disruption that comes with living in a world

which pathologizes Black, queer desire. The comparison is with chronic and deeply disruptive

diseases, where an unavoidable symptom takes up all attention and gradually deteriorates the

quality of life (Taliercio et al., 2021). The bites were the external agents of an internalized

embarrassment that was so deep that my skin was changed from a private organ into a public

proof of transgression. This is a very clear example of infection, and it symbolizes a cultural

story that sees the intimate life of the marginalized as dirt, a story that literally writes itself on the

body. Our skin being the most primary and direct contact we have with the world, it was the very

documented place where societal stigma was forcibly turned into matter, and was made to be

visible or accessible to the senses (Lyman, 2022).

The form of these applications also defines the agency exercised or limited in digital

encounters. According to the theory proposed by Shin (2022), the actualization of the meta-

affordance entails the fact that users feel agency not just with the features they have available but

with the way these features predispose the possible actions in time. On hookup apps, it indicated

that the interface, grids, tabs, metrics, themselves became a muted director of my selection,

pushing me towards the patterns of interaction that were closer to habits than intentions.

Research indicates that the frequency of habitual checking apps grows by up to 23% under the

condition of interface based on variable-reward mechanisms, a design option that is directly

linked to the development of compulsive behavior (Soror et al., 2022). In this situation, desire

becomes more of a robot that is less concerned with actual erotic interest than with making a

cycle triggered by the application. The body loses its position to the interface and the desiring is

no more different than acting.

The digital space also transformed my understanding of privacy, exposure and masculine

performance. Digital spaces can integrate social and personal worlds to the extent that users are

forced to operate in the hybrid setting and not in the distinct one, as discussed by Bolton et al.

(2018). Studies show that 57 percent of queer men feel more publicly visible by their sexual

identities due to using apps, despite them not having anonymity in mind (Gosse, 2021). The

statistic is my experience too since I have never thought of myself as a body in desire but as a

public character who acts desire. The point that identity is discretized through digital systems

and it is no longer painfully clear that Fazi (2019) argues that this is what happened to me, as my

professional identity leaked into sexual situations that I could not control. These violations put

me into a constant bargaining of desire to be connected and maintain the selfhood boundaries.

The play of masculinity, desire, and intellect did not happen separately anymore but were woven

together with the technologies that were intended to maintain their separateness.

Theme 1: Doing Gender in Digital Contexts

Hookup apps are not phenomenal fieldwork, they are placebo where identity is designed,

edited, and digested. My experience can be explained with the help of the theory created by

Butler, according to which, gender is not innate but should rather be understood as the result of

the repeated performance. On Jacks, I was under pressure to swing between several versions of

masculinity: intellectual, relatable, sexy, confident but not too much of one. My photos, bios, and

even my message time were also used as powers in a show that I could never get out of. This

reflects Arceneaux when she writes that she was switching between respectable and ratchet

identities in an attempt to be good enough to others without dishonoring myself. These apps

aimed at providing freedom yet they gave hypervisibility. I was a black queer man and I was not

allowed to explore, I had to control the way I was perceived, read, and consumed. It was as

though I was on a spot light during every interaction. Social pressures were not eliminated in the

digital world; they were multiplied and left desire not as something sublime but as something

that is performed, exposed, and publicly visible all the time. When I was trying to find some

connection, I discovered that I was also trying to find my way in the continuous surveillance.

By this creation of a staged performance, it is not liberating and is instead a curation

intensive work done under panoptic circumstances, in which every single aspect of the profile is

another semiotic resource into a high-stakes display of self. The digital environment, as the

example of Bangladeshi women on the internet (Sultana 2018) clearly demonstrates, is enabler of

transglossic practices in which linguistic and visual codes are strategically combined to negotiate

and mark the belonging to different, and sometimes conflicting, social environments. This code

writing is a part of world-making but in a set up that requires legibility to pre-written, frequently

commercial, or heteronormative programs. It was a polyvalent performativity I had to navigate

through Jack in order to craft a piece of culturally approved masculinities that need to be stitched

and stapled into a whole that is consumable and giveable to Jack. This tension is further

contextualized by Thornham (2018) who believes that digital culture should be understood by

assuming a basic protagonium of irreconcilability, between lived, messy subjectivity and the data

rationality of categorizable and stable identity symbols. The platform as such is more of a

regulatory template than a blank canvas, the means of expression oneself are the means of her/his

commodification and surveillance as well.

This compulsion to preserve this exhibited self-spreads into the rhythms of time and

interaction life on the platform where even the time taken to reply is a gendered action. To

design the message, it was necessary not only to measure the content but also the time, and a

slow reply could demonstrate cold-blooded confidence, whereas a swift one can be interpreted as

an expression of desperate impatience, both of which are gendered expectations. This is in line

with the intersectional analysis of Geerts, Rahbari, and De Vuyst (2022) who assume that digital

worlds require a contemporary practice of doing gender, sexuality, and other markers, with the

practice of embodiment being mediated by selective disclosure and algorithmic visibility. Being

a Black queer man, the dialogue between being accessible and safe, sexually viable, not

predatory, intellectually stimulating, not intimidating, a very small gypsy of impossibility

stipulated by the historical stereotypes and codecs of platforms. Here, since Herandien (2023)

addresses the issue of trust and intimacy in her work, even the prospect of genuine connection is

put at a detention by the production of pre-work necessary to be seen as trustworthy or worthy.

The digital phase therefore increases the performative element of the Butler theory and every

interaction is a performance before an imaginary, insatiable crowd.

In turn, the pledged liberation of the digital exploration turns into the case of a hyper-

scripted visibility, with identity being no longer explored but deployed in a strategic way. In their

article about suicide within the community of transgender sex workers online, Chib, Nguyen, and

Lin (2021) describe it not so much as the conformity but as a kind of agentic practice which, on

the one hand, demands to be present and can sometimes be provocative to this end: to increase

the existence in the hostile or reducing systems. My playing around with Jack's navigation meant

similar tactics situations, wherein biotropes and photo angles were utilized as faites to provide

stimulation to specific gazes and inhibit others. This agency is however circumscribed.

According to KhosrowvNik and Esposito (2018), digitally-mediated spaces tend to be full of

what KhosrowvNik and Esposito (2018) refer to as gender-based hostility, in which any failure

to meet the anticipated performative scripts can become a source of harassment or

marginalization. I thought the spotlight was a two-way street, then, one of marking possibility of

association, and one of marking possible disapproval. It is hypervisibility, especially pertaining

to marginal bodies, that pushes the desire to do so to a publicly evaluated commodity, its

performances mediated by the fear of misapprehending it and the necessity to dominate

consumption.

This dynamic completely changes the essence of intimate interaction across such

platforms, positioning connection in an audit and assessment paradigm as opposed to mutual

discovery. The study by Herandien (2023) on trust-building in intimate relationships indicates

the role of vulnerability as the basis and gradual disclosure as the key to building strong

connections in intimate relationships, which goes in opposition to the logic of appraisal adopted

rapidly and based on profiles in hookup applications. My enacted self in the case of Jack was

fixed portfolio to be judged a digest of managed features rather than a flowing, developing

individual. In its discussion of digital music communities, Armitage (2018) addresses the

significance of spaces to fail in, where imperfect identity play can occur in a way that is not

iterative. In contrast, mainstream hookup apps are environments where failure (a bad

performance) is associated with social capital losses of rejection, silence, or blockage. The

unremitting scrutiny, imposed by our own kind and by the structure of the structure, completed

proposed my performances in the direction of reducing this danger of failure, and had the effect

of still further entrenching them as defensive, as refined artifacts, and not as exploratory gesture.

This resultant pressure of performances is what Yoon (2021) may call a digital flesh, a

body and self-reconstructed by the limitations and capabilities of the digital interface. This is not

a purely virtual, but a real, entity, created through the necessity to profile one complex into data

points that are compatible with the platform. Ricca (2022) outlines this process with a metaphor

of spaghetti where the continuous whole of identity is being stretched and twisted across digital

and cultural borders and disrupting the gravity of various audience expectations and algorithm

logic. This was the understanding that was divided in my consciousness; some part was involved

in the real desire of connection, and the other parts were involved in performance, expectations

of readings and the changing of persona in real-time.

These apps also create a paradox a place of genuine self-presentation and connection is

promoted at a structural level and an enforcing regime of performativity making authenticity a

dangerous bet. The subversive practices of users on and against these platforms are what carry

the critical hope, rather than the existing architecture of these platforms. The digital self is a

place of struggle, as Chib, Nguyen, and Lin (2021) document it and Sultana (2018) analyzes. My

experience on Jacks was a struggle of persistently trying to establish a meeting ground between

the wish to be perceived in my complexity and the need to meet a readable and, consequently,

digestible appearance. This is indicative of the larger conflict that Thornham (2018) finds

manifested as the lived experience of gender is in permanent and nearly impossible contradiction

with the datalogical definition of gender. The hope is in the unswerving faith that this tension

itself, the inability of the performance to completely represent the self, is what opens a rift, an

space in which the complexity of being may in its own painstakingly insist on being recognized.

Theme 2: Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Sexuality Online

As a Black queer man on hook up apps, I was never merely looked at but was looked

down upon. The messages varied between the conspicuous fetishization (meaning, I love Black

guys) and the exclusionary caveat (meaning, no Blacks, no femmes), and it is obvious that desire

on the Internet is as much informed by racism as attraction. This is what Arceneaux referred to

when he wrote about how it feels to be tokenized, and how it hurts to be congratulated on his

voice and reduced to a two-dimensional being in real life. I also went through the same paradox

as I was a writer, and in my personal life, I was stereotyped. This is a digital Blackface, as

#raceand describes it, an act of racialized projection in which Black queer users are made visible

by being dehumanized. All the messages would remind me that my identity did not simply

belong to me but was a terrain of social expectation, racial prejudice, sexual projection. These

apps turned into medias where I was wanted and unwanted simultaneously. My body was free to

come in but my humanity was an extra. What emerged was emotional exhaustion posing as

strength-visibility which came along at the expense of getting visibility in full.

Racialization moving in a circular manner on these platforms implied that I did not enter

into a conversation as a person but as a set of pre-existing assumptions available to be scripted in

advance and then visible in excess but insignificant as individuals, as described by Sharp (2019)

as a so-called spatial logic of hypervisibility. The application exploratory was my dealings with

such punk rooms as Sharp wrote about--rooms where being recognised does not safeguard you,

but rather invites attack to be misdiagnosed. My presence was as a play that I had not auditioned

to join, a sketch that light made against my skin but had not allowed me to even exist as myself.

All of these messages were agreeing that the surveillance was disguised as interest and the

attention paid to me was not nurturing but a sort of racialized spotlight. I was enlightened,

though never really observed.

The rule of racialized scripts was also manifested in the hypocrisy of those users who

seek to have a closer route to Blackness, without admitting that they are harming themselves,

which is also reflected in the article by Djerbal et al. (2023) about the notions of hyper

in/visibility and where the racialized are both exaggerated and legitimized in the same breath to

fail the institutional logics. Within these digital sites, the fetishization of statements and

exclusionary disclaimers also did a certain erasure of my body, rendering it desirable only once it

conformed to an already existing fantasy and refuting that which would not conform to it. All

these conflicting urges formed a cycle where I was the show and the nothing, the offered and the

denied presence. My communications built to a map of experiences that viewed the Black

identity as an asset and not a factual experience. I was even permitted to make my appearance,

but never on my conditions.

As repeated interactions, the app space started to reflect the wider trends of transnational

racialized desire that Amos (2022) traces in her research of the sexualization of Blackness in

China, in which hypervisibility is a process of objectification and not recognition. Digital images

and fantasies circulated to recreate colonial frames of the exotic, powerful, or dangerous Black

body even though the users thought they were simply stating their preferences. This was

experienced through the manner in which unknown persons projected strength, dominance or

sexual extremity to me without applying any knowledge other than the fact that my skin was of a

particular color. The application turned out to be the gate where the outdated imperial glances

crept into the modern queer politics. My body was objectified way before it became handled as

an individual. The aim at me was not curiosity but consumption.

The breach of connectedness between hyper-house and non-visibility was sometimes sent

to the emotional quality of being marked as queer, which DasGupta and Dasgupta (2018)

establish to queer racialized migrants in the UK, as they traverse spaces that desire their

existence but reject their location. On hookup apps, the contradictions developed a geography

where I would be everywhere and nowhere, floating between chat rooms that would require my

racial identity as the qualifier of value and chat rooms that would not accept it at all. This is the

emotional labor in these negotiations across this digital terrain that created a sense of tension all

the time of desiring intimacy and protecting against being hurt. All the messages served as

reminders that being there was provisionary, and the room which I had been welcomed into

might become hostile at any time. The bulk of my humanity was not condoned, only my

presence was.

What was still most hurtful was how this fractured visibility continued outside the screen

and tore apart within the interior territories of self-perception and freedom upon which Avilez

(2020) attributes Black queer life, in which injury and desire are entangled together in complex

forms. Such applications helped me realize that I was an object onto which fantasies were

projected, a racialized surface upon which other people projected their interpretations of

Blackness without having to encounter the reality of actual Blackness. Kitzie et al. (2022)

explain that visibility and invisibility do not stand in opposition, but both sides rely on each other

as visibility and invisibility dictate how marginalized individuals are set up within the social

domain; I experienced both extremes of this dichotomy whenever I was glorified as an aesthetic

and dehumanized as an individual. Instead, Hernandez (2020) reminds us that racialized

sexuality is not a new challenge but colonization-past taxonomy echo and its resonance could be

felt through every virtual experience. I was permitted to be wanted, but only in their conception

of me, in a form of me that was made clear by being rendered in a monochrome.

Theme 3: Gender Norms, Sexual Stigma, and Social Control

The Itchy and Scratchy episode came to me as a reminder that sexual agency, at least

most often with queer people of color, is commonly accompanied by shame. It may have been an

impulsive move to hook up, but years of religious guilt, cultural policing and internalized fear

dogged my step. I panicked (not only with respect to health, but with respect to its meaning)

when I received the rash. Similarly, to the cycle of deleting and redownloading apps, discussed

by Arceneaux, I experienced some kind of swing between being brave and rejecting myself. I

needed intimacy and was afraid of the price. However, as time progressed, I started to reconsider

shame as a personal issue but instead something forced on you by religion, by racism, by

heteronormativity. raceand made me realize how marginalized people are socialized into not

believing what we want. But at some point I ceased treating the bumps as punitive and started to

regard them as indicators of danger, development, and flawed agency. I am not an ideal person,

but I am here in my life. And that, it has turned out to me, is the beginning of real freedom.

The sexual agency of queer people of color is not an individual struggle, rather it is a

negotiation with a history that goes back a long time and is full of racialized sexual projections.

According to scholars, this is the racialization of sexuality, a colonial process that not only

created the idea of Black and Brown bodies as being very sexually active, deviant and even

hypersexual, but also served as a way to justify the domination and control of these bodies

(Hernández, 2020). The past this is based on changes social dynamics of the present day in

which queer people of color are trapped in the paradox of being both extremely visible and at the

same time invisible. Our desires are stereotyped and exaggerated whereas our being and the need

for real intimacy are quite often completely disregarded (Kitzie et al., 2022). So the distress that

followed the physical symptoms was not merely about health but, rather, the confrontation with

this deeply rooted narrative. The fear of an occurrence that my very own actions had brought

about the fulfillment of a toxic prophecy that talked about the inherent danger and dirtiness of

my body and its desires, which, ultimately, was a modern echo of a colonial past.

This internalized shame is a source of social control with great efficiency. Contemporary

feminist shame theory situates shame as an affective instrument that polices gender and sexual

norms and thus enforces the existing oppressive systems (Fischer, 2018). Racialized queer

individuals experience this shame more deeply as a result of "internalized oppression," meaning

that dominant society's negative attitudes towards one's group are believed and thus the person

turns them inward manifesting either as self-punitive thoughts or behaviors (LaGuardia-

LoBianco, 2019). The cycle of repeatedly downloading and deleting hookup apps is thus not an

indecision only but rather an internal conflict manifestation where the longing for connection is

interrupted. Time and again this happens by the internalized social voice which considers the

desire wrong. Each time something is deleted the person is rejecting him/herself, momentarily

succumbing to the shame that wants to silence one's agency.

The journey to regain power over one's decisions is dependent on a fundamentally

different view of the body and desire from one of shame to one of usefulness and even self-love.

What Silverio (2019) refers to as the "desexualised" view of the body fits in well here, i.e. not

removing sexuality, but rather separating it from being a mere performance or an oppressing

script and realizing that the body is, in fact, a single, unitary source of experience, pleasure, and

communication (Silverio, 2019). The very thing that sexual agency research points to as a main

and unique factor to a person's sense of sexual self-efficacy and ownership is body appreciation,

i.e. a positive, respectful attitude toward one’s body irrespective of whether it conforms to the

established ideals (Grower & Ward, 2018). In the case of a queer person of color, it implies that

he/she should continuously strive to disconnect his/her physical reality and desires from racist

and homophobic projections, which to a large extent have been the way of defining them.

Reaching this condition is an act of appropriating what Avilez (2020) conceptualizes as

Black queer freedom, a practice that navigates through the spaces of injury to create paths of

desire. This freedom is not a place of pure liberation but a constant movement of passing through

and against places of injury even those that are internalized. To cease regarding the physical

bumps as a moral penalty, and to learn to take them, instead, as a-priori, as indices of danger,

that there is, and as data of learning as well, is a vital turning point in this direction. It is a shift of

a morality story into a practical, self-serving narrative, whereby the latter can be used within the

context of the queer racialization studies to talk about the desire to belong to oneself, even in the

context of the individual feeling out of place in the world around.

This re-taking is particularly tricky in an internationalized digital world where racialized

sexual stereotypes do not exist in their historical geographical context only. As an example, the

study of sexualization of Blackness in China records how the hypersexual tropes are

disseminated and restructured by global media to produce a situation in which the Black bodies

are fetishized and hyper visible, according to fundamentally misconstrued Western framed

narratives (Amos, 2022). This is circulatory, and this shame and hyper-presence of the black

queer subject is not a localized action; it is transnational and the search of authentic agency

becomes a struggle against a diffuse and omnipresent set of projections, whether in an

international or local interaction.

It implies that the overcoming this shame is not concerned with reaching the level of

unconditioned, fearless activity. It is the paradoxically achieved understanding of the existence

of agency in the imperfect and human process of desiring, making decisions, making mistakes,

and sticking to them. The concept of the knowledge of the fact that my sexual story does not

need to be a redemptive story that justifies me right of being sinful or a tragic movie that rectifies

stereotype. It may instead be a banal, intricate narrative of a man who comes to know how to

hear his own voice among the voices of hypocritical criticisms. This freedom is about valuing the

imperfect agency of a life that is present and lived, lives with the marks of danger and endurance,

and who then chooses to proceed on to where that is. Not out of a perfect, shame-free fantasy of

my own, which was never intended for me.

Conclusion

These experiences made me learn that gender and sexuality are not fixed identities but

instead, they are negotiations that are simplified with the passing of the day, depending on

choice, pressure and performance. Since hooking up is stressful enough due to the burden of

maintaining a public profile in such apps, to the physical and emotional fallout of a hazardous

hook-up, I have started to regard my own narrative not only as a personal one but also as part of

a larger queer story: the desire to be real when we are always forced to perform. Similar to

Arceneaux, I am not after perfection anymore, but after the truth. The apps are all still a mess,

but they also became mirrors: not only showing the person I am, but the person that I am

becoming. And in this process going along, I have repossessed something so fundamental, the

chance to say who I am, in my words and in my own terms.

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