Gaydar: gay men and the pornification of everyday life

This chapter analyses Britain's most successful gay male webspace in order to identify the methods by which British gay men are representing, reproducing and extending subjectivities in digital environments. The analysis develops a new theoretical framework that forges Foucauldian Panopticism with Suzanne Kappeler's work on pornographic representation in order to identify how the seemingly self-authored user profiles of Gaydar.co.uk are in fact subject to codes of representation. These codes serve to transform users into not only 'culturally legible' participants in cyberspace but also docile and 'disciplined' consumers of a Western metropolitan gay lifestyle. The discussion goes on to illustrate the intense patterns of scrutiny and self-surveillance invited by the user profile, before demonstrating how such surveillance and representation draws directly from contemporary gay pornograhic genres. In demonstrating the limitations and restraints placed upon Gaydar users, this chapter provides a response to the previous and largely unequivocal celebrations of digital environments as sites of LGBTQ liberation and freedom.