“No Rice, No Spice, No Chocolate:” The Online Affirmation of Sexual Racism via Upvoting in the GayBros Subreddit

• In Event: Evolving Representations of Race Within Internet Communication: The Life of Race Captured Within Subreddits, Translation, Twitter, and Blogging

Abstract

From racial fetishizations, to racial hierarchies, race becomes a sexual commodity as experienced by gay-identified men within GayBros. A subreddit community described as “our man-cave corner of the internet where we talk about sports, cars, grilling, video games, military issues, working out, gadgets, and gear,” GayBros is organized around shared understandings of gay masculinity. GayBros is a space where members assemble to discuss online and offline challenges they face, most notably, sexual racism (Stember, 1976; Smith, 2014). Analyzing the discourses contained in all 26 user-identified “racism” discussion threads within GayBros, whose comments numbered from the dozens to the hundreds, we study how sexual racism is expressed, understood, and experienced within the gay male community. In particular, we examine discursive references to the practice of upvoting and downvoting (Urbanski, 2013), through which individual comments are ranked according to their popularity among GayBros users. Such mentions represent an explicit form of reflexivity and an implicit affirmation of the ways that digital technologies augment the social construction of sexual desire along racial lines.

Authors

• Jenny Ungbha Korn, UIC

• Margaret MacAulay, Simon Fraser U