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    Remediating affect: “Luclyn” and lesbian intimacy on YouTube

    McBean, Sam (2014) Remediating affect: “Luclyn” and lesbian intimacy on YouTube. Journal of Lesbian Studies 18 (3), pp. 282-297. ISSN 1089-4160.

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    Abstract

    This article focuses on Kaelyn and Lucy, a long distance (US–UK) lesbian couple who document their relationship on YouTube. Their channel has attracted a following of hundreds of thousands of individuals who profess to feeling an intimate attachment to the couple. This article considers how Kaelyn and Lucy's performance of lesbian intimacy online has amassed such a following. In exploring the multiple feelings that Kaelyn and Lucy's YouTube channel contains, it builds on and contributes to theorizing online emotion, and in particular, frames their channel as a “digital archive of feelings” (Kuntsman, 2012). Picking up on the way in which followers profess to having unmediated access to their relationship, I build on Bolter and Grusin's concept of “remediation” to argue that Kaelyn and Lucy produce a sense of immediacy for their followers through the remediation of other romantic genres. Secondly, I draw out the importance of time to the creation of a sense of shared intimacy, arguing that Kaelyn and Lucy's use of YouTube invites followers to feel as though they are sharing in the timing of the couple's relationship. This article thus uses this case study to reflect on the process by which a contemporary representation of lesbian intimacy has become a scene of attachment, whereby a larger “intimate public” (Berlant, 2008) has formed.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): YouTube, lesbian publics, intimacy, digital cultures, remediation, online emotion, intimate publics
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 01 Jul 2014 08:54
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:35
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/10036

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