UC Riverside

This paper employs netnography and critical discourse analysis to examine the ways gay men on Twitter foster Satanic communities and orient themselves to gay Satanic practice. How do these men centralize the language of pleasure, the erotic, and phallic objects as a linguistic ploy that both bathes in the pornographic and reifies their identities as Satanists? How does the use of taboos (incest, methamphetamine use, rape play, bondage, sexual demonology) within imagery shape the ways queer Satanists orient themselves within this social media context? For this project, I examine common language, terminology, and themes surrounding queer pornographic discourses on self-identified Satanists twitter pages as touchstones that shape, twist, and deconstruct gay Satanic devotional practice, a practice that is fed predominantly by gay, cisgender, white men from Anglophone countries who consume pornography and enact sexual pleasure as an extension of their religiosity. Each of these Satanists contribute to a synthesized look at the employment of gay pornographic imagery and language and its potential benefits and complications for practitioners who exist in this social media-driven contemporary moment, intent on drafting community and connectedness online. While these Satanists rely on oppositional rhetoric to construct their personhood as antithetical to Protestant Christianity, this paper explores certain remnants of a Protestant, neoliberal subject which still emerge within gay phallocentric Satanism. This phallocentrism, or connection to religious practice as deriving from the phallus (whether symbolically, iconographically, and/or physically), also is prevalent in larger social and religious communities that are separate from Satanisms, like symbolic use of the shiva lingam, the online reemergence of the Cult of Priapus, and specific Tantric practices that focus on semen retention.