Ambient Affects: Narrativizing Global Gay Youth

• In Event: Everyday Scenes and Affective Intensities

Abstract

In a moment of national and global optimism for the progress of “gay rights,” gay youth bullying and suicide become doubly “backward” (Love, 2007), bringing to the present adult memories of injurious adolescence and belying narratives of national progress and gay community success. This inquiry explores the assembling of global gay youth through Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project, its Chilean affiliate, Todo Mejora, media representations, and a web of transnational organizations promising to improve gay youth’s lives.

Theoretical Framework
What Love (2007) calls affirmative LGBT projects that deny negativity function as “ambient affects” that circulate to create worlds (Flatley, 2008). Ambient affects of the promise of moving from trauma, injury, and exclusion to happiness, harmony, and inclusion constitute adults’ responses to gay youth abjection. As “affective economies” (Ahmed, 2004), in which affects do not reside in subjects or objects, ambient affects circulate, accumulate force, and materialize subjects as they “stick” to them. The sticky assembling of gay youth through adult affects of disappointment and desires for happiness and through national promises of a modern, tolerant, rights-granting society, places gay youth on a narrative trajectory to normative, productive citizenship (friends, community, partner/marriage, job). Constituted as knowable subjects through preconceived goals, they are positioned in “striated space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), a linear historical space that defines their movements from point to point. Contrary to “smooth space’s” openness, in which movement creates new paths to becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), striated space limits becomings through sticky, affect-laden patterns of connection, such as bullying, suicide, coming out, allies, gay community, inclusion, and rights.

Methodology and Analysis
Analyzing It Gets Better and Todo Mejora’s websites, videos by politicians and LGBT adults, and their enmeshment with transnational and local organizations (the UN, UNESCO, various NGOs), I ask: How do “It Gets Better” discourses position nations, communities, and gay youth? What affects sustain these discourses? Affective modes of address by politicans and LGBT adults imagine youth as future well-adjusted gay adults, alternately binding them to relations of responsibility to the progress of the always-improving inclusive nation and the welcoming gay community. The future gay adult is stuck to the duties, alliances, and responsibilities performatively attached to a political identity, “which is felt as ‘what a person like me does’” (Patton, 1993, p. 147). Videos address US and Chilean society as responsible for becoming the “good bystander” characteristic of anti-bullying discourses by cultivating tolerance and inclusion that enable gays and lesbians to contribute to society. Longings for a harmonious future enmesh the social and the state in enforcing investments in the promise of rights and protections through a juridical future that becomes an end in itself (Williams, 2010).

Significance
Berlant (1998) asks, “what kind of (collective, personal) future can be imagined if, for example, sexuality is no longer bound to its narrative, does not lead to stabilizing something, something institutional” (p. 287). If promise and abjection can exist simultaneously in collective and individual pasts, presents, and futures, we might imagine less predictable subjectivities and spaces.

Author

• Susan Talburt, Georgia State University