Sexual Confessions – From the Sheets to the Streets: Brandon Arroyo Guest Blog

“Confession is the primary modality of the internet. It is the force that maintained its impetus through the conversion from analogue to digital, and it remains at the centre of people’s interactions within online culture.” Thomas Waugh and Brandon Arroyo, I Confess!

Whether it be social media posts, online comment boards, or even online pornography, the material we produce and consume on the internet usually originates from personal information we share about ourselves. As authors of I Confess! Brandon Arroyo and Thomas Waugh explain, our relationship with the internet is one that revolves around the act of confession.

This week, we asked MQUP author Brandon Arroyo the question:

“The dichotomy of private and public spaces has never been sharper. When both areas take on an intensified experience or meaning, how does that reshape or highlight the importance of your area of study?”

Taking into consideration the confessional nature of the internet and our current political climate, Arroyo’s response explores whether the distinction between the private and the public sphere truly exists and how we can construct spaces that are safe and socially responsible.

Through its collection of thirty original essays by leading international scholars, I Confess!: Constructing the Sexual Self in the Internet Age explores the ideas of confession and sexuality in moving image arts and media over the last quarter century, offering a critique and excavation of sexual confession as the key ritual of twenty-first-century moving image culture. Inspired by theorists from Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to Gayle Rubin and José Esteban Muñoz, I Confess! reflects an extraordinary, paradigm-shifting proliferation of first-person voices and imagery produced during the third sexual revolution, from the eve of the internet to today.

Recognizing what others have identified as a “contrarian” impulse within myself, I would instead frame that characterization as believing in the Marxist dialectical approach towards learning, as well as social and political change. I think that one must engage with questions and perspectives that you knowingly disagree with, not only to convince that other person to join your side of the argument, but also refine your own perspective in the process. By doing so, perhaps we can arrive at a new synthesis of thought. Regarding the question prompting this blog, this is another instance where I cannot help being a contrarian and disagreeing with the premise of the question I am engaging with. I think we in North America have mostly lost our capacity (or any sense of urgency) to keep anything private, and as a result, we are unable to recognize the political potential that staying private might offer us. However, I hope that my deconstruction of the question’s premise will enlighten some readers and help you better understand the context of our co-edited anthology I Confess!

I Confess!: Constructing the Sexual Self in the Internet Age, was born out of an attempt to understand how and why contemporary internet culture is oriented around confessions. Most every moving image composing the internet these days—from YouTube videos, Tweets, Instagram posts, vlogs, think pieces, as well as the deluge of television, film, drone, body cam, and security camera footage accessible on the net—are a testament to how confessions and “private” footage has become the primary currency of internet culture. It is seemingly impossible to engage in a social media browsing session without seeing, hearing, or reading someone confessing about a personal experience as a way to expand upon, or relate to, a social issue stirring the political discourse on that day: whether it be someone admitting to being the victim of sexual violence, coming out of the closet, confessing to a past indiscretion, revealing one’s engagement in a racist encounter, or aestheticizing confessional discourse as a form of political commentary/activism. When I identify confession as a “primary currency” within internet culture, I am not only accounting for the entertainment and emotional value exchanged between users in their roles as confessors and confessants, but I am also identifying the vast amount of money being made off confessional discourses—especially regarding sexual confessions. Both amateur and professionally produced pornography is still big business on the internet. Tom Waugh and I not only consider pornography as a type of bodily confession exposing sexual preferences, fetishes, and hang-ups, but we have also noticed that contemporary pornography has fully incorporated itself within queer communities as part of the visual matrix. This matrix is composed of the confessional discourse of what it means to be queer today, including “confessing” your sexual, gender, and pronoun preference. Confessing the “secrets” of your sex life is just a prerequisite for entry into the charmed circle of queerness.

Of course, it is no surprise that my and Tom’s brains would immediately gravitate to the topic of pornography when considering the nuance of sexual confession, but I assure you, I Confess! considers much more than pornography. The book covers a range of topics, with scholars addressing the role of sexual confessions since the birth of the popular internet age (starting in 1995). There is Tal Kastner and Ummni Khan critically analyzing the case of the Columbia University art student who dragged a mattress around campus to bring attention to her rape allegation, Ela Przybylo and Veronika Novoselova analyzing the role of confessional blogging in feminist conscious-raising, and Stephen Charbonneau deconstructing the confessional aesthetics of a trans woman whose DIY 8-bit videogame documents the uncomfortable truths about the effects hormones are having on her rapidly changing body. These are just a few of the book’s many highlights.

Considering that our contemporary media environment is centered around the practice of confessing, the question becomes, is there really such a sharp divide between private and public anymore? If the social etiquette for participating across a range of social media platforms requires you to confess something about your sexuality, race, gender, or even who you vote for, then what remains within the private realm? It is important to remember that this is not a new question. As one of our contributors, Nicholas De Villiers, examines in his book Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (2012), there is a strong intellectual and aesthetic queer lineage that has long resisted the pressure to conform to the social scripts of “coming out of the closet,” and has instead engaged in distracting, avoiding, and denying questions about their sexuality when prodded to confess. Even the heterosexual Deleuze found himself frustrated by a media environment focused on poking a subject until they finally confess. Deleuze writes:

As for the bunch of you, you are still busy provoking, publishing, making up questionnaires, forcing public confession (“admit, admit…”). Why should we? What I anticipate is just the opposite: an age of clandestine-ness. Half voluntary and half obligatory, which will shelter the new born desire, notably in politics…Thus I have nothing to ‘admit’” (1977).

When one couples this historical lineage with contemporary political efforts like the European Union’s “right to erasure,” which allows citizens to request that search engines eliminate websites from searches containing information about that individual under certain circumstances; Or aesthetic projects like Zach Blas’ Fag Face Mask, which is an actual mask composed of a collage of gay faces as a queer answer to combat facial recognition surveillance of public spaces, one can see that our glorification of public confession is coinciding with a parallel movement working to actively destroy any personal autonomy we imagine gaining from remaining “private.”

But how does one go about convincing a generation of feminist, racial, sexual, and trans activists—whose movements are built around a unified public discourse of confession—that perhaps social justice movements might have something to gain by constructing private spaces working in service of their cause? Importantly, it is essential to understand that public confessions itemizes, categorizes, and lays an unfair burden on the subjective experience of the individual, which only further engrains the structures of neoliberalism within our own mindset. Merely confessing your own pain and trauma out into the world does not translate easily into broad social movements. Such confessions are seamlessly incorporated into the self-care industrial complex, where your search inquiries eventually lead you buy self-help books, join a yoga class, or buy a candle that smells like Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina in hopes that these temporary “fixes” will help you forget about your past traumas. While these activities are fun (if somewhat weird), they ultimately distract from broader political action, like protesting in the streets. To accelerate social change we need to transition from public confessions to public demonstrations! Confessions extend and exacerbate trauma, while working in the service of active social change serves to heal trauma. Therefore, perhaps we need to start “privatizing” our own individual confessions by staying individually silent, so that we may instead physically commit ourselves to being a part of a larger collective dedicated to a singular confession: “we’ve had enough!” This is how sexual confessions can finally move out of the sheets and into the streets.

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles. 1977. “I have nothing to admit.” Semiotext(e). 2:3, 111-116.

Brandon Arroyo is instructor of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York.

For more information on I Confess!: Constructing the Sexual Self in the Internet Age >