Remediating Affect: “Luclyn” and Lesbian Intimacy on YouTube

Abstract

This article focuses on Kaelyn and Lucy, a long distance (US-UK) lesbian couple who document their relationship on YouTube. Their channel has attracted a following of hundreds of thousands of individuals who profess to feeling an intimate attachment to the couple. This article considers how Kaelyn and Lucy's performance of lesbian intimacy online has amassed such a following. In exploring the multiple feelings that Kaelyn and Lucy's YouTube channel contains, it builds on and contributes to theorizing online emotion, and in particular, frames their channel as a "digital archive of feelings" (Kuntsman, 2012). Picking up on the way in which followers profess to having unmediated access to their relationship, I build on Bolter and Grusin's concept of "remediation" to argue that Kaelyn and Lucy produce a sense of immediacy for their followers through the remediation of other romantic genres. Secondly, I draw out the importance of time to the creation of a sense of shared intimacy, arguing that Kaelyn and Lucy's use of YouTube invites followers to feel as though they are sharing in the timing of the couple's relationship. This article thus uses this case study to reflect on the process by which a contemporary representation of lesbian intimacy has become a scene of attachment, whereby a larger "intimate public" (Berlant, 2008) has formed.

Researching LGBT+ Youth Intimacies and Social Media: The Strengths and Limitations of Participant-Led Visual Methods

“…In thinking about digitally mediated intimacy, I join other social media scholars who find analytic promise in Lauren Berlant's work (Kofoed & Charlotte, 2016;McBean, 2014). Asserting that intimacy may operate publically and at any distance, Berlant (1998) observes that the "kinds of connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living (if not 'a life'), do not always respect the predictable forms" (p. 284).…”

Live streaming, intimate situations, and the circulation of same-sex affect: Monetizing affective encounters on Blued

“…These intimacies are predominantly produced through gay and lesbian users' affective encounters with same-sex texts, images, sounds, videos, and other audiovisual materials on social media. Mcbean's (2014) study of the videos through which a long-distance lesbian couple communicated on YouTube, for example, finds that their audiovisual performance of lesbian intimacy emotionally bonds same-sex viewers. The repeated re-blogging of explicit images/videos on Tumblr also connects LGBTQ users through the circulation of sexual affects (Cho, 2015).…”

“…Social media has become an important site at which sexual minorities acquire intimacy for their desires fall outside heteronormative acceptability (Attwood et al., 2017; Cho, 2015; Mcbean, 2014; McGlotten, 2013). These intimacies are predominantly produced through gay and lesbian users’ affective encounters with same-sex texts, images, sounds, videos, and other audiovisual materials on social media.…”

Music video covers, minoritised languages, and affective investments in the space of YouTube

“…Regarded as ‘objects, mediators and repositories of affect’ (Kuntsman 2012:6), social media sites, YouTube among them, have attracted a growing body of research in cultural and media studies (e.g. Karatzogianni & Kuntsman 2012; Knudsen & Stage 2015; McBean 2014; Reestorff 2015). Kuntsman (2009), among others, has studied what might be termed, following Billig (1995), ‘hot’ nationalism in cyberspace.…”

“…Although questions of method and methodologies in affect research have been of increasing interest in recent years and empirical studies on textual, especially (social) media, material, proliferate (e.g. Wetherell 2012; Mcbean 2014; Knudsen & Stage 2015; Reestorff 2015; for more linguistically oriented studies, see e.g. Chiluwa & Ifukor 2015; Malmquist 2015), more work needs to be done to explore analytical approaches to ‘reading for affect’ at the micro level of language use 10 .…”