UC Irvine

On December 17th, 2018, Tumblr—a site once known as an oasis for queer and trans people on a notoriously hostile internet—implemented an all-encompassing adult content ban. With this change in policy, the site saw massive waves of flight. Less than a year later, in August 2019, Tumblr sold for less than $3 million, a substantial loss from its $1.1 billion valuation in 2013 (Siegel 2019). In the years since the “Tumblr Apocalypse,” the site has retained a core userbase, but it no longer maintains its ubiquity as a space for queer organizing online.

What the Tumblr case study illustrates is not only the shape and texture of digital spaces where queer and trans youth people congregate, but also the modes of social ordering that structure all our lives. Rather than revealing the necessity of disciplining those rendered “abject” or “sexually excess,” Tumblr offers an example of the possibility that these spaces of “excess” sexuality offer. In other words, Tumblr is a case study of the people who make a space “excess,” and the modes of refusal that they embody, even as—and because—they are marginalized by both state and non-state agents of racial capitalist regimes.

In this project, I utilize Tumblr as an opening to develop my concept of sexual mythmaking as a technology of racial capitalism. Sexual mythmaking shapes the conditions of possibility for all populations by distributing power and precarity along two antagonistic binaries: the “sexual excess” and the “sexually innocent/sexually acceptable.” This theoretical framework reveals how understandings of sexuality have always been a key component of the difference-making projects central to the development of capitalist modernity, and remains a central ordering technology, even as some marginalized sexual subjects become incorporated into the political mainstream. As such, modes of resistance against sexual mythmaking as a technology of racial capitalism—and thus racial capitalism writ large—refuse both assimilation into “sexually acceptable” and the ordering schemas that implicitly produce the “antagonistic differences” that sexual mythmaking relies on, and thus offer us alternative imaginaries of possibility in the long arc of “unprecedented times.”