Sexual Discretion by Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr

Author:Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. [Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780226096674
Google: LWjAAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-03-07T04:04:02+00:00

FOUR

Goin’ Down Low: Virtual Space and the Performance of Masculine Sincerity

Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.

—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

The “grain” of the voice is not—or is not merely—its timbre; the significance it opens cannot be better defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language. . . .

—Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text

When you on the [phone chat] line, you can tell who real masculine or who a real sissy. . . . Same thing on the Internet, if you listen between the lines, you can tell who out there and who ain’t. . . .

—Anonymous caller1

The black gay club is not the only site where men can “unleash [queer] desire.” In this chapter, I examine the performance of the black masculine by men within virtual spaces—a phone chat line and a popular website designed for men who have sex with men. This chapter shifts focus from how masculinity is read by examining bodily signifiers to the strict interpretations of the aural and visual. By employing Roland Barthes’s metaphorical reference to the “grain of voice,” while also giving it literal significance in how we understand communicative acts, I uncover how the voice is read, constructed, manipulated, and reproduced in two distinct spaces frequented by DL men. In essence, I am interested in how DL men represent themselves in spaces where their voice is the primary mode of communication (phone chat line), while also being attentive to how they render their voice and others as “masculine” in cyberspace (the website for male-male interests called Steve4Steve). In some ways, the Internet as a site of anonymity for DL men is not surprising. However, if telephone historian John Brooks’s claim is true that the “telephone is our nerve end to society” (1976, 9), then the unwritten values of this space in queer cultural production are worth investigation.

Historically, ethnography has been understood as an act of entering a certain physical space while collecting data, conducting interviews, and rendering the scene though a “writing of culture.” This tradition has limited the scope of ethnography’s possibilities to reach beyond physical space and move into virtual spaces. Specifically, one of the most under-researched terrains is the telephone lines. This mechanism of verbal communication has often been pitted outside the imaginable realms of ethnographic research:

When one speaks of working in the field, or going in the field, one draws on mental images of a distinct place with an inside and outside, reached by practices of physical movement. These mental images focus and constrain definitions. For example, they make it strange to say that an anthropologist in his or her office talking on the phone is doing fieldwork—even if what is actually happening is the disciplined, interactive collection of ethnographic data. (Clifford 2002, 54–55)

Consequently, this chapter offers a critique of studies that focus on actual physical space, as well as view Internet exchanges as the sole virtual site of male-male discreet encounters.

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