• Patterns within GridsA review of Tom Roach, Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. SUNY Press, 2021
• Susanna Paasonen (bio)

What would follow from detaching considerations of hookup apps from simplistic, pessimistic diagnoses of neoliberal commodification and exploitation, and from coupling critiques of the data economy with a potential queer ethics of relating instead? These are some of the questions that Tom Roach asks in Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. The approach of the book is that of both/and: it addresses the destructive, expansive, and intrusive dynamics of neoliberalism, while also arguing, in response to Audre Lorde, that the master's tools might just be used to dismantle the master's house (127). That is, the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism—where all subjects are seen as ultimately replaceable cogs in the machine, and where social media platforms treat their users as data points visually represented within horizontal grids foregrounding sameness—can bring forth a queer ethics premised on fungibility and shared alienation. Roach's doesn't shy away from complexities and ambiguities that make culture, society, and the self. This approach is refreshing, not least because much contemporary analysis of social media tends to be more unequivocal when outlining what apps and platforms do, and can do. The lines of argumentation are rich, and the examples and comparisons drawn often surprising. For me, Screen Love reads as a welcome invitation to think about networked sexual screen culture through the logic of both/and.

The founding argument of Screen Love suggests that, by presenting individuals seeking company as horizontal elements of an endless grid, m4m ("men seeking men") media such as hookup apps Grindr and Scruff foreground nonidentical sameness and equivalence in ways disinterested in personal connection or inner depth. In so doing, m4m media allow for escapes from their own neoliberal logic. Working with and through Leo Bersani in particular, Roach argues that treating social media users as fungible—both in their visual representation as profile pictures within a grid, and structurally as data points used to aggregate broader patterns of tastes and preferences for targeted advertising—is at once a neoliberal operation of power and an opportunity to foreground an ethical, nonidentical equivalence between people that makes it possible to see life as mattering only as part of a larger composition (17, 22, 50).

In presenting users as types ("the jock," "the daddy," "the bear," "the twink," etc.) rather than as unique characters, m4m media, Roach agues, hollow out personality and perceived individual uniqueness in favor of anonymised, depersonalised patterns. Roach here thinks against or at least beyond most standard analyses of objectification, which see the reduction of people into things as a violent dehumanization that intensifies social hierarchies and relations of exploitation and that is to be resisted at all costs. This does not entail blindness about historical or present practices of racial dehumanization within which fungibility operates as a means of denying the value of an individual person or life. For Roach, fungibility as equivalence does not undo hierarchical relations or stand for equality insofar as in a fungible structure different bodies and data points are differently valued (57). Rather, fungibility becomes an exercise in self-lessening: attending to sameness—from which differences sprout—so that a given self could, by and large, just as well be someone or something else.

Screen Love is at its strongest in mediating something akin to thinking in action, as examples, anecdotes, and theoretical flights spring out of and intermesh with amalgamations where Marcel Proust meets the interface design of Grindr, and where Aristotle's takes on philia (brotherly love) frame promiscuous cultures of cruising. Some comparisons and analogies—such as thinking about the grid-like design of Grindr in relation to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (107–109) that treats all deaths with equal weight regardless of a person's fame, or Andy Warhol's soup cans that repeat so that gradual differences emerge from similarity (144–148)—are likely to rub critics who would foreground the contextual specificity of cultural objects the wrong way. This, however, is not a...

• 网格内的模式汤姆·罗奇 (Tom Roach) 的评论，屏幕之爱：Grindr 时代的酷儿亲密关系。纽约州立大学出版社，2021
• 苏珊娜·帕森宁（生物）

将联播应用的考虑与对新自由主义商品化和剥削的简单化、悲观的诊断分开，并将对数据经济的批评与潜在的酷儿相关伦理相结合，会带来什么？这些是汤姆·罗奇在《银幕之恋：Grindr 时代的酷儿亲密关系》中提出的一些问题. 这本书的方法是两者兼而有之：它解决了新自由主义的破坏性、扩张性和侵入性的动态，同时还争论说，作为对奥德丽·洛德的回应，主人的工具可能只是用来拆除主人的房子（127 ）。也就是说，新自由资本主义的动态——所有主体都被视为机器中最终可替换的齿轮，社交媒体平台将用户视为在水平网格中以视觉方式呈现的数据点，前景相同——可以带来一种以可替代性为前提的酷儿伦理和共同的异化。Roach's 不回避构成文化、社会和自我的复杂性和模糊性。这种做法让人耳目一新 尤其是因为在概述应用程序和平台可以做什么和可以做什么时，对社交媒体的当代分析往往更加明确。论证的线条丰富，所举的例子和比较往往令人惊讶。为了我，Screen Love是一个受欢迎的邀请，通过两者/和的逻辑来思考网络性屏幕文化。

Screen Love的创始论据表明，通过将寻求陪伴的个人呈现为无尽网格的水平元素，m4m（“寻找男人的男人”）媒体，例如联播应用程序 Grindr 和 Scruff，以对个人联系或内在深度不感兴趣的方式突出了不相同的相同和对等。这样做，m4m 媒体允许逃避他们自己的新自由主义逻辑。Roach 特别与 Leo Bersani 合作，并通过 Leo Bersani 认为，将社交媒体用户视为可替代的——无论是在视觉表现上作为网格中的个人资料图片，还是在结构上作为用于聚合更广泛的口味和偏好模式的数据点以进行定向广告——都是既是新自由主义的权力运作，也是展现道德的机会，

在将用户呈现为类型（“运动员”、“爸爸”、“熊”、“弱智”等）而不是独特的角色时，m4m 媒体、Roach ague、挖空个性和感知个人独特性匿名的、去个性化的模式。罗奇在这里反对或至少超越了大多数标准的客观化分析，这些分析将人简化为事物是一种暴力的非人化，它加剧了社会等级和剥削关系，并且不惜一切代价予以抵制。这并不意味着对历史或现在的种族非人化做法视而不见，在这种做法中，可替代性是一种否认个人或生命价值的手段。对于罗奇来说，作为等价的可互换性并没有消除等级关系或代表平等，因为在可互换的结构中，不同的主体和数据点的价值不同（57）。相反，可替代性变成了一种自我减轻的练习：关注相同性——差异由此而萌芽——这样一个特定的自我基本上可以成为某人或其他人。

Screen Love最擅长调解类似于行动思考的事情，例如例子、轶事和理论飞行的出现并与 Marcel Proust 遇到 Grindr 的界面设计以及亚里士多德对philia（兄弟之爱）的融合相结合构建混杂的巡航文化。一些比较和类比——例如考虑与 NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (107-109) 相关的 Grindr 网格状设计，无论一个人的名气如何，都以同等重量对待所有死亡，或者 Andy Warhol 的汤罐重复因此，从相似性中逐渐出现差异 (144-148)——这可能会激怒批评者，他们会以错误的方式突出文化对象的语境特殊性。然而，这并不是...