[Commlist] New Book: Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era by Tom Roach

/Screen Love/ incorporates Michel Foucault’s work on neoliberalism and 
Leo Bersani’s work on sexuality into a novel analysis of dating/hookup apps.

In work, play, education, and healthcare, we are using social media 
during COVID-19 to approximate “normal life” before the pandemic.  In 
/Screen Love/, 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, 
fungible, and the notion of selfhood championed in liberal-humanist 
traditions—intelligent, altruistic, eloquent, emotional—is a potential 
liability.  By teasing out the queer ethical and political potential of 
virtual fungibility, Roach compels readers to think twice about media 
typically dismissed as sordid, superficial, and narcissistic.  Written 
for students, professors, and nonacademics alike, /Screen Love/ is an 
accessible, provocative, and at times subversively funny read.


“With a raucous sensibility and a light touch, Tom Roach reads the 
screened aesthetics of neoliberal fungibility not as a trap, but as an 
invitation to explore its queer, world-making potential.” — Shannon 
Winnubst, author of /Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics/

//

“Tired of being a square on a virtual grid? Lean into it; relish your 
interchangeability. Can’t find love online? Rethink your relationship 
goals; enjoy the sensual nonsense of the cruise. In /Screen Love/, Tom 
Roach extends the arguments developed in his seminal /Friendship as a 
Way of Life/ to consider the shared estrangements constitutive of 
contemporary screen-mediated intimacies. In the emphatically queer 
tradition of antisociality, Roach offers a series of brilliant, and fun, 
meditations on the radical ethical potential of impersonality, virtual 
fungibility, and embracing the sameness of our irreducible differences. 
My own takeaway? Get over yourself if you want to better make an art of 
your (impersonal) life.” — Shaka McGlotten, author of /Virtual 
Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality/

“Wonderfully thought-provoking and incisive, this book made me feel as 
if I were engaged in an interesting conversation with its author.” — 
Greg Goldberg, author of /Antisocial Media: Anxious Labor in the Digital 
Economy/


*Tom Roach* is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Bryant 
University. He is the author of /Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, 
AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement/, also published by SUNY 
Press.

The hardcover is out now and the paperback is slated for July 2021.  To 
order, click here:http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6989-screen-love.aspx


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