[Commlist] Viral Masculinities online conference

Free registration is now open for the Viral Masculinities online 
conference, which will take place between the 31 Aug and 11 Sep on Zoom.


*Keynote Speakers:*
- Professor John Mercer (Birmingham City University)
- Professor Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku)
- Professor Tim Dean (University of Illinois)

We’re living in viral times; ours is a time of contagion. As Tony 
Sampson writes in his book Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of 
Networks, “the networked infrastructures of late capitalism are 
interwoven with the universal logic of the epidemic” (Sampson 2011, 
1–2). Deeply connected to contemporary biopolitics and modes of digital 
sociability, virality also underpins news forms of wealth creation and 
accumulation sustained by 21st-century media, whilst at the same time 
(paradoxically, perhaps) presenting a political threat through the risk 
it carries of “contagious overspills” that may undo borders, nation 
states, institutions, ontologies and subjectivities (2). Defined by 
Sampson as “contagious relationality” (3), in the age of memes, “fake 
news,” hacking, epidemics, ecological crisis, global migration flows, 
antiretroviral drugs, YouTube and Pornhub, virality is at the centre of 
contemporary forms of both control and liberation (5–6). Whilst, on the 
one hand, it sustains the logics of 21st-century biopolitics 
(antiretrovirals, hygiene, cyber security, monitoring and surveillance 
systems, etc.), on the other, it has the capacity to disrupt 
subjectivities and social assemblages, a capacity that resides in its 
ability to facilitate unforeseen flows of desire and affect (chemsex 
parties organised through Grindr and facilitated by Uber, biohacking, 
citizen journalism, Wikileaks, Anonymous, the “Arab Spring,” the “Yellow 
Vest Movement,” etc.).

If our time is a game of push and pull fuelled on all sides by 
contagious forms of relationality, what then for masculinities? If our 
understandings of masculinity are “inherently relational” (Connell 2005, 
68), what happens to them in a context of “contagious relationality” 
(Sampson 2011, 3)? If “gender is a way in which social practice is 
ordered” (Connell 2005, 71), what has been the impact on masculinities 
of a social order both coded and disrupted through viral means?


To check the individual sessions and register to the ones you’d like to 
attend, *please visit http://porousmasculinities.exeter.ac.uk/conference/.*



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