Visual Heteromasculinities Online

Introduction

While the hetero/homo binary upholds both heterosexual and lesbian/gay identities, contemporary liberal-humanist society continues a disavowal of alternative, non–gender-based and complex sexualities, attractions, and desires. Where heteronormativity and “compulsory heterosexuality” are increasingly questioned, a persistent “ownership” of non-heteronormativity is claimed by lesbian/gay cultural discourse by disavowing that non-heteronormativity can be anything but lesbian or gay same-sex sexuality. In theorizing alternatives to the dominant hetero/homo binary that maintains narrow, essentialist, and innate perceptions of both heterosexuality and homosexuality as normative monoliths, there are a number of alternatives that emerge from recent intellectual discourse. These include queer-inspired arguments for sexual fluidity as well as practices that may not necessarily undo masculine heterosexuality as a deeply felt identity that is authentic and real to those who perform it and maintain attachment to it. The latter case opens opportunities to explore the ways in which some sites of sexual and gender practice may be marked by—rather than obscure—the distinction between a sexual preference for a particular gender (men desiring women) and practices that are not always clearly heterosexual.

This is to take up the imperative to develop alternative, non-monolithic, and heterodox views of masculine heterosexuality beyond simplistic and highly problematic depictions of heterosexuality as either mundane or hazardous in contrast to its supposed homosexual other (Beasley, Brook, and Holmes 2012, 56). Within contemporary theoretical critique of sexualities, all sexual identity is historical, culturally constituted in codes and norms, and is performative in Judith Butler’s sense that our understanding of bodies, sexualities, and desires are produced by “the regulatory practices of gender coherence” in line with the social compulsion to perform an intelligible and unified subjectivity that lends the illusion it is driven by an inner identity essence (Butler 1990, 24–25). This does not, however, foreclose on the fact that there are lived performances and practices of heterosexuality that disrupt its overall coherence without dismissing heterosexual identity altogether, and thereby extend the possibility for a broader set of understandings of sexuality as complicated, diverse, and sometimes illogical. One site in which can be found disruptions between masculine heterosexuality and the sexual practices of those who claim that identity is in online sexual performance for spectators using camming sites. Digital technology has helped in several ways to enable—or at least reveal—some of the ways in which masculine heterosexuality is disjunct from heteronormativity. The phenomenon of chat room camming, in which heterosexual men (typically alone in the private space of the home) perform sexually on camera for other men—including gay men—opens the possibility of a heterosexuality that is practiced through gay spectatorship and/or through undertaking acts such as self-penetration which are more traditionally and stereotypically associated with gay male sexuality.

Online camming performers may undertake acts coded as queer, yet maintain an attachment to heterosexuality as authentic, if not necessarily normative. What such sites introduce is a form of sexual fluidity which does not rely on a liberal or celebrationist strand of queer theoretical and post-structuralist thinking that writes fluidity as the wholesale dissolution of all boundaries, categories, or identities (much as that might be a valuable ethical outcome). Rather, it can be understood as presenting a form of fluidity that allows for a certain kind of “play” around the fringes of what masculine heterosexuality might mean, and how it might be articulated otherwise. If the challenge is to find, develop, encourage, or foster ways in which masculinity and masculine men can articulate gender and sexuality beyond heteronormativity, and if that challenge involves new, alternative, and heterodoxical approaches such as demonstrating that masculine opposite-sex desire, attraction, and sexual experience can be just as non-heteronormative as gay male sexuality, then there is benefit in investigating how masculine sexuality is expressed in online camming forums in ways which challenge heteronormative assumptions about sexuality, but do not necessarily undo masculinity or adopt more “feminine” ways of doing sex.

This article focuses on the possibilities for disjuncture between masculine heterosexual identity and practice in examples drawn from an online sexual camming site used by both gay and straight men and women (and others) known as Chaturbate. The site, as the name indicates, frames sexual online performance through a combination of user chat room textual engagement, and typically a sole performer or “cammer” who engages in sexual behavior such as masturbation for an audience of spectators who, likewise, might utilize the experience for personal sexual gratification. I do not propose to present a systematic survey of all camming, textual chat, and user profiles on the site in order to determine ratios of narrow or secure heterosexual performance in contrast with more complex or fluid heterosexual performance, which would be impossible, given the hundreds of users at any one time. Rather, I am interested here in presenting a narrative analysis of a small number of examples that demonstrate the disjuncture between heterosexual identity and practice, allowing a reflection on the ways in which the disruption of heterosexual masculinity might be theorized otherwise through paying attention to digital communication’s role in “making public” practices that ordinarily might be more private but unspoken in public discourse on sexuality.

I begin with a brief overview of Chaturbate as an example of Web 2.0 online interactive engagement in a sexual context, followed by an investigation of examples of (1) heterosexual men openly courting gay male spectatorship of their performance as a form of sexual exhibitionist pleasure and (2) heterosexual masculine practices of performing sexual acts that are more ordinarily associated with gay male practices, such as self-penetration. I end with a discussion of the ways in which thinking about disruptive practices that do not necessarily undo the attachments to heterosexuality but expand their potential at the fringes might allow for a more productive theorization of sexual identity.

Sexual Performance Online

Chaturbate (http://chaturbate.com/) is an online site which allows people to narrowcast webcams from private home or workplaces to a broad, international audience. It operates similarly to other, better-known adult websites, such as Adam4Adam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam4Adam), by serving at the interface between online dating, exhibitionist camming, real-time textual chat, and making recorded videos and images available, sometimes for a fee. Users have an individual profile by which they describe themselves, gender, age, sexual interests, and other biographical material, although most users are there either to perform on camera for a broader audience or to view the cameras of performers. It differs from real-time pornographic video sites in that users are not normally paid pornographic actors, they narrowcast from their private homes, and the system of payment, if any is received, is markedly distinct from the payment for professional pornographic labor (Albury 2009, 651). Such tipping sites thus complicate the distinction between professional pornography and amateur erotic video distribution online.

Many users perform online because the act of exhibitionist solo or coupled sexual display is pleasurable—it may be exhibitionist in tone or involve mutual camming between two users that is available for view by a broader audience. However, the website makes available a mechanism for payment: viewers can use a credit card to purchase tokens which can then be paid to cammers as “tips” (not unlike tipping a performer in a strip club), as payment in advance for fulfilling a request (a cammer will masturbate, e.g., or engage in fellatio with a partner, or display a body part in exchange for a specified number of tokens), or to join a private showing (whereby a cammer will perform a specific act for a larger sum and the narrowcast of that act will be available only to those users who have paid the specified amount). Tokens are valued at five cents (US currency) per token, so a tip of 100 tokens involves a viewer making a US$5 payment. Those users who are seeking to raise money and, in some cases, earn a living, therefore aim to maximize the number of tokens received by pleasing the audience of viewers, meeting particular requests, or engaging in both sexual performance and friendly chat. Not unsurprisingly, this results in a “star system” in which particular cammers, typically younger men and women, are able to charge more for their performances.

Importantly, seeking funds on Chaturbate and similar sites is a form of crowdsourcing. Coined in 2006 in Wired magazine, the term crowdsourcing describes a web-era business model by which a user or group harness the creative solutions, labor, funding, or other resources through a distributed network of individuals accessed online through digital communication (Brabham 2008, 77). In the context of online sexual display camming, funds are earned through the crowdsourcing principle whereby a low, market-driven cost for particular acts of sexual expression encourages a larger number of viewers, allowing the activity to be worthwhile for the cammer and relatively low-cost for most users. Arranged as a tipping system (except in the case of private cam rooms), a payment is voluntary, and others can watch the same activities for free. The development of a supportive community around many cammers, then, results in a mutual, collective, and networked “encouragement” to pay. Nevertheless, cammers still need to please their viewers, particularly given there may be hundreds of other alternative cammers on that one site alone. That can involve cammers being required to perform acts or display parts of their bodies in ways outside of their normal, everyday sexual experience. This is not to suggest that all users are there for payment, of course, as many cammers engage sexually online simply for the pleasure of it.

Users of Chaturbate set up an account and, when online, menus of webcams are displayed, divided into page categories of male, female, couple, transsexual, and group shows. Whether the performer is heterosexual, homosexual, or otherwise is not a profile category in itself, but may be indicated in the personal details on the cammer’s page. For each user, the profile page displayed directly below the streamed image provides details of age, their own gender, and the gender of those they are “interested in,” which may include “Men, Women, Transsexuals, or Couples.” Within that process, then, an indication of sexuality and sexual identity needs to be interpreted by making sense of the gender configurations.

Not all users, of course, state an interest in a gender that might be the gender of those with whom they would have face-to-face bodily sexual contact. Rather, anyone who is going to tip or pay to view will be welcome, regardless of gender or sexual orientation of the cammer. In that context, an avowedly heterosexual man may welcome a viewing by a gay man who is willing to pay, as well as his textual chat, erotic demands, tips, and tokens. Although camming does not involve physical contact, this is much the same as straight men who participate in gay pornography with other men (gay for pay) which often stages masculinity through verbal and physical roughness, despite the fact it involves engaging sexually with other men in the theatrics of nonheterosexual sex—effectively queering both straight masculinity and the genre of gay pornography (Tortorici 2008, 201–4). Indeed, “gay for pay” sexual behavior by heterosexual men is not new. According to Steven Zeeland (1996), many U.S.’ marines since at least the 1980s have been involved in pornography that records them sexually engaged with other men, often other marines—pornographic production companies are keen to use their über-fit, toned, masculine bodies while they themselves are interested in the payments that supplement their low military salaries. Such performances are, at once, both a queering of heterosexuality but a reestablishment of masculinity, actively separating sexual desire from gender performance, appealing in many ways to that subjugated discursive representation of sexuality which Halberstam (2011, 155–56) has referred to as the “Masculinist Gay Movement” which flourished in continental Europe (particularly Germany) in the 1920s and 1930s whereby homosexual engagement is seen as the performance of hypermasculinity and by which all forms of femininity and effeminacy in men are disavowed, regardless of whether they are expressed through heterosexual or homosexual desire. Indeed, in his interviews with Marines, Zeeland uncovered the view that nonheterosexual sex can be a “manly test of endurance.” More recently, Anderson and colleagues have analyzed athletes’ comments on same-sex kissing during and after sporting events which, while not perceived as a sexual act, were understood by the athletes as forms of masculine bonding but were available to be read sexually (Anderson, Adams, and Rivers 2012). In the case of Chaturbate and other similar sites, the same framework is at play, in which fit young masculine and heterosexual men are interested in earning funds by performing sexually on camera in ways which appeal to a gay male spectator. Effectively, such behaviors upset the link between identity and what bodies are “capable of,” including the capability for practicing forms of gay desire from a heterosexual identity standpoint, thereby opening up fields of possibility.

In masculine heterosexual cammers who are performing in sites in which there is substantial gay male participation, through a digital-interactive chat room and camming format that was arguably adopted earlier by gay men, and in the context of performances that may or may not be for pay, we witness forms of experimentation—with bodies and with spectatorship—which permits representable nonheterosexual acts among heterosexuals without falling under the category of what has been described as the one-time rule of homosexuality, in which any nonheterosexual slippage renders the subject’s sexual orientation as gay (Anderson 2008; Kimmel 1996). These slippages are not, however, the same as articulations of fluid sexual experimentation related to youthful curiosity prior to settling into a more secure, gender-related sexual orientation (McKnight 1997, 51). Rather, this is evidence of a sustained practice that is neither casual nor one-off experimentation with behaviors that sit in the interstices between heterosexual and homosexual. In several ways, it is the outcome of shifts in discourses of sexuality away from binary-based sexual identities that ground identity in consistency of behavior toward an adjustment—albeit not wholesale disavowal—of that relationship such that non-heteronormative pleasures and behaviors need not be seen as logically shackled to masculine identity, which is able to maintain its own coherence while acknowledging the possibility of gradients of different sexualities and erotics on scales of pleasures and values. This can include the pleasures, benefits of value a cammer might gain by appealing to a gay audience or by performing sexual acts that appear to be more “edgy” than other straight cammers.

Sexuality in this context is articulated as domestic and private, rather than framed by participation in public minority communities yet, through confessional activities, the private of sexuality becomes available for public consumption—literally in the case of cammers engaging in sexual acts in the private home that permit viewing from public sites, a crossing between the private-domestic and the public that is endemic to communications technologies since television (Williams 1990) and that finds its contemporary fruition in online interactive engagement (Cover 2006). Thus, rather than experimentation, new possibilities for framing sexuality are seen in heterosexual men’s use of webcams filtered through broader sociocultural shifts in public/private distinctions and the development of a framework for making diverse sexual practices thinkable and representable within existing gender identities. This can include the possibility of heterosexual pleasures in nonheterosexual behaviors and practices, rather than the more stereotypically perceived elements of disgust or shame over nonheterosexual “evidence.”

Spectatorship, Exhibition, and the Visuality of Queer Heterosexualities

There are two ways in which the practices of heterosexual men camming in (somewhat) nonheterosexual ways enable the expression of challenges to heterosexual normativity and narrow perceptions of heterosexual identity as solely depending on the coherent and continued performance of heterosexual conduct—first, exhibition to nonheterosexual viewers as a sexual practice and, second, self-penetration as a gay sexual event perceived as being adopted by heterosexual men. One of the interesting elements that emerges from sexually explicit real-time camming sites such as Chaturbate is the substantial number of heterosexual men who will perform sexually for other men without demanding payment or expecting tips. While there are some users who will be emphatic about their heterosexuality and will insist that the only viewers are women, with statements such as “im [sic] into girls only” (given in biographical notes in their user profiles), and will even use Chaturbate’s functionality in preventing male-identified users from accessing their page, this absolute refusal of the possibility of nonheterosexual spectatorship is rare. For many other masculine heterosexual cammers, there is not only appeal to the finance that comes with nonheterosexual viewers’ tips, but an appeal to the pleasure of being viewed by viewers of any gender while engaged in solo sexual performance. For example, it is not uncommon to find profile biographical statements such as the following from a nineteen-year-old cammer in the United States: “I am a straight, white, 19-year-old male. I just like people to watch me, male, female, anyone! Tip if you feel like it but it isn’t required. Feel free to talk to me, I like that the most.” Practices of sexual exhibition, here, are available to anyone and pleasure is derived by engaging in sexual performance, spectatorship, and chat with a person of any gender, while retaining a declared straight identity.

One cammer states in the “About Me” section of his profile page’s biographical notes, “I am straight, just an FYI, but I don’t mind if you guys watch. But I won’t ever do anything with a dude, it’s just not my style. I love women. So if you’re a woman PM [private message] me! The more you tip, the more stuff I’ll do.” Here, a cammer is not only asserting his heterosexuality, but also actively inviting a nonheterosexual form of spectatorship. Significantly, his disavowal of homosexuality as a physical, in person performance is made, on the one hand, through an assertion of sexual identity (I am straight) but also points to both straightness and queerness not merely as identities but as “style.” One way of actively reading this statement, then, is to understand that while sexual identities are sometimes deeply held and meaningful, the user draws on the broadening of a social understanding of identity as the “stylised repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity” (Butler 1990, 140–41), always unstable and in flux. While, at core, he is happy to articulate himself as straight, his straightness does not depend on the pure, coherent, linear repetition of heterosexual sexual practice, for he is open to nonheterosexual sexual spectatorship in a way which “acts against,” as I’ll discuss further subsequently, the regimentary formation of the hetero/homo binary.

Another male user describes himself this way: “Straight guy that does not mind an audience. May consider phone or C2C [cam to cam], maybe even meets (girls or couples, any age).” While he “does not mind” nonheterosexual spectatorship and pleasing a (potentially) gay male audience, his physical preferences are for women or couples in which a woman is involved. The distinction here, then, is not around straightness or non-straightness, but around online and off-line sexualities. While any distinction between online and off-line is not as simple as being understood through cognate binaries of digital versus physical or virtual versus real, the ways in which this user makes sense of an element of fluidity of his sexual expression, behavior, and practice is through an online style (nonheterosexual spectatorship) and an off-line style (predominantly heterosexual bodily engagement). Face-to-face meetings between bodies are the sites for a restrictive heterosexual practice, but the online site of camming is marked by an engagement with an audience that includes, or may be dominated by, gay men. This is sexual performance for erotic pleasure, differentiating the desire of heterosexual physical contact in a “real-life” scenario from nonheterosexual spectatorial contact in an online, camera environment. The distinction between real-life and virtual online performance is, of course, more complex (Cover 2004, 119–21), thereby indicating the ways in which desires to perform sexually are not easily separable into the physical and the visual. However, what requires investigation is the way in which heterosexual men willingly overcome heteronormative masculine expectations that, traditionally and stereotypically, involve disavowal of gay men as participants and viewers, in order to gain their own pleasure. This is not to suggest that all forms of gazing upon the sexualized body of the other constitutes erotic gazing, despite a general shift toward understanding the spectatorship of naked bodies in the context of sexual viewing (Cover 2003). New technologies encourage, as Creed (2003, 126) has pointed out, new and more fluid forms of gazing, in which both the relationship and the disjuncture between the gazer and the performer allows identity to be put into flux.

Likewise, online camming allows a gaze that is not separable from sexual spectatorship, and in the case of sites such as Chaturbate it is explicitly gazing that is sexualized. While cammers are operating in a context of exhibition and gazing different from that of the plaintiffs on the film set, as it is arguably more voluntary and occurring in the private space of the home rather than a scene crowded by film crew, it can also be said that the channeling through the digital medium of Web 2.0 online communication of the context of nudity, sexual exhibition, sexual performance, and being gazed upon by a nonheterosexual male audience with whom one would not engage sexually in person has established new ways in which heterosexual masculinity is performed without necessarily undoing heterosexual masculinity. Online communication here establishes a frame in which being naked and performing sexuality for a specifically gay sexual gaze permits a fluidity in which particular sexual identity positions may be adopted in the context being consumed (Buchbinder 1997, 115). The spectator positions the masculine heterosexual performer as something other than heterosexual through that gaze, but the fact that this is differentiated from non-online performance also permits the persistent specter of re-heterosexualization of the performer.

In an amusing yet poignant biographical statement, one nineteen-year-old user from Colombia, who speaks predominantly Spanish, gave an English-language translation of his “About Me” statement as: “I’m straight and love women but I do not mind talking to people and make the passing fancy.” While the “passing fancy” an anomaly of translation, it is, much like a biographical statement from another cammer which reads “I’m not gay, I just think gay sex,” points to the fragility of heterosexuality as a secure, dominant, natural, or essentially described identity, but to the always-present potential for its failure, in passing, in thought, in fancy.

Heterosexualizing Stereotypes: Avoiding the Ass

In addition to the spectatorial blurring of heterosexual masculinity through willful engagement with a nonheterosexual audience, there are a number of examples of straight-articulating men who, while likewise cementing their heterosexual masculine desires through textual chat and a profile declaration, actively perform and receive pleasure from sexual acts ordinarily associated with gay men, including self-conducted anal penetration with dildos and other sex toys. While heterosexual men stimulating the anal region of the body is not in any way new, the performance of such acts on sites such as Chaturbate indicate a broader acceptance of a repositioning of the body areas in ways which, again, destabilize the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual without reducing the “felt authenticity” of masculine heterosexual identity. A narrow, traditional, stereotypical understanding of twentieth-century masculinity is predicated on a homophobia that is grounded in an inviolability of the heterosexual, a refusal of penetration (Kimmel 1996). As David Buchbinder (1994, 60) argued in respect to 1990s depictions of masculinity:

The male homosexual is a man who allows his body to be penetrated by another man. In this, the gay man permits that which the discourse of masculinity absolutely forbids—the disruption of the integrity and inviolability of the male body—and so challenges the authority and power of that discourse. In his betrayal of the dominant codes of masculinity, the homosexual man proposes a range of other possible codes, which in turn threaten to destabilise the discourse. The effect, inevitably, is to make men in general feel uneasy and threatened.

One Australian cammer, who is twenty-three years of age, declares his straightness by presenting his sex as male and his “interested in” category as women, but provides pictures on his profile page of his (favorite) dildo, in addition to performing with it on-screen in ways which are difficult to distinguish from gay pornography solo performances. Similarly, a young man, aged twenty-four from North Carolina, is well known among the community of Chaturbate viewers as married to a woman. He discusses his marriage and his wife openly on camera, asserts that he is straight and interested in women on his profile page but is a particular attraction on the site for his active self-penetration with a range of toys (many of which have been bought for him by his online, tipping admirers). One of his regular viewers stated in a textual chat “thanks to you hundreds of sr8 [straight] guys are experimenting with ass play” and “you are a trailblazer for str8 [straight] ass play.” Arguably, there is also a fetishization of the perception of a straight man “doing gay things,” as is also seen in an entire genre of pornographic representation, the plots of which focus on straight athletes, hazing scenarios (Anderson, McCormack, and Lee 2011) and other slippages across the hetero/homo binary whereby the slippage itself is the site of eroticization. Nevertheless, self-penetration by heterosexual men has, on occasion, baffled some viewers both men and women, straight and queer, with one viewer questioning “so wait your [sic] not gay but you like stuff in your butt?” Another, on viewing his self-penetration with a toy stated, “wait ur married to a woman! whattt …” Others are more encouraging about the productive possibilities of experimenting in ways which effectively “heterosexualize” the anus: “All straight guy [sic] should be as open as you” or even nonchalant: “whatever floats your boat bro. you are beasting that thing lol.” While this is only a very small selection of comments from viewers on a single viewing, they indicate that, on the one hand, there is an appreciation of the capacity of this media to allow a heterosexual young man to undertake an activity that is—stereotypically—articulated as a gay one without being accused of being gay (or closeted) and, on the other hand, to point to the surprise, resistance, incredulity of those who had never before conceived that sexual stimulation of a man’s anal region could be possible by men who were not gay. The bafflement, amazement, support, and refusal of different viewers making comments indicates a broad uncertainty over the distinction between the hetero/homo binary, the codes of heteronormative masculinity, and the representability of diverse and sometimes individualized sexual practices.

Self-penetration, and a refocusing (literally) of the camera away from the penis to the anus, while simultaneously declaring heterosexual desire as the preferred sexual practice of the performer, presents a challenge to phallocentrism that, at its most base level, articulates masculinity through phallic penetration of the other, and a heterosexual masculinity predicated on an inviolability. The masculine heterosexual body is refigured through alternative erotics, such that we witness a partial-undoing of the fixation of eros on genitalia as given in Marcusean strands of Freudian philosophy (Marcuse 1969; Altman 1971, 81–83), overcoming an unimaginative and reductive understanding of sexuality as physical contact between gendered bodies: an element of the reduction of libidinal zones of the body to binary sexed notions of genitalia. Instead, it presents the possibility of sexual representation of a polymorphous re-eroticization across nongenital body parts (Grosz 1994, 139), or at least a step toward it.

While the stereotype that heterosexual masculinity is built on penetration of the other and, concomitantly, violent opposition to being anally penetrated as a marker of lost masculinity, these articulations of straight heterosexual masculinities that involve seeking, demonstrating and performing pleasure through anal penetration are notable for two reasons. First, they undo the myth that anal penetration invokes pleasure only for essentially constructed, identity-fixed homosexual men but indicate that for many (and, of course, not all) heterosexual men, being penetrated is a desirable sexual act, one that not only occurs but occurs under the watchful online spectatorship of men and women, straight and queer. If self-penetration by straight men is to be a transgression, it is not necessarily one which needs to be seen as undoing heterosexuality—either as the subject’s identity (i.e., making him something other than heterosexual, making him queer) or as a category of sexual identity (not by any means essentialist but an identity that has genuine, deeply felt meaning and attachment). That is, self-penetration does not “indicate” an underlying homoeroticism, nor does it articulate a subjugated “truth” that everyone was always fluid to begin with, and would embrace that fluidity given a chance. It does not need to acknowledge the constructedness of heterosexuality, which from a queer theory perspective is taken as given, but it does disarticulate heterosexual identity as a sexuality of meaning from certain practices, body parts, and desires to do things or not to do things with those body parts. In that respect, it “rescues” anal pleasures from being exteriorized from heterosexuality and from being viewed as justifiable only if one’s sexual identity is other than straight.

As importantly, the framework that Chaturbate camming provides for thinking about heterosexual masculinity is one which helps to disaggregate heterosexuality from stereotypes that circulate in public discourse in order to make it monolithic, closed, normative, and regimented by a linkage of identity to (restricted) practices. Stereotypes operate by linking an image or an identity with a set of prescribed behaviors, attributes, desires, and ways of thinking and being. As a linguistic tool that solidifies attitudes toward an identity or group—or a singular representative of that identity group—stereotypes operate as through pervasiveness and iterativity of the links they claim, and can be thought of as an element of what Chantal Mouffe refers to as “nodal points”—linguistic functions which prevent the slippage of meaning from a culturally accepted supposition of normativity (Mouffe 1995, 34). Challenging those nodal points through pointing to their experiential fallibility remains necessary in order to open the field of possibility for a greater legitimacy of non-harmful sexual practices and reduced vulnerability of those who do not practice sexual normativity.

What is striking about the Chaturbate performances described here is that they provide an opportunity not to point to the fragility of masculine heterosexuality as an identity (as fragile as it may be in its constructedness), but to the stereotype that, in public discourse, links heterosexual masculinity with a supposed desire not to be penetrated, not to self-penetrate; the behavioral disavowal of the anal region as an area of libidinal pleasure and erotic sensation; the attribute that heterosexual men (wrongly) believe the anus is the field of pleasure only for effeminate gay men who sacrifice their masculinity for an unintelligible pleasure. Within this framework, the linkage between heterosexual masculinity and those beliefs and practices is critiqued by those performances, permitting a variation of heterosexuality to emerge. The cultural knowledge of the “core” of the identity does not change—sexual attraction to women—but the ways in which that identity is reinforced through disavowal does shift, even if only marginally. This movement in normative identity has potential to be politically productive as a more effective alternative to the opposition. In the case, here, it might be said to be a more effective alternative of undoing the mechanisms that make masculine heterosexuality normative than simply indicating outright alternatives of gender-based desire or pointing to heterosexuality’s constructedness and leaving it at that.

Beyond Binaries: Queer Heterosexualities

While it is the case that homosexuality is, in an identity-based or orientation-governed framework, reductively and problematically presented as the only alternative or challenge to masculine heteronormativity, another realm that requires disruption is the notion that emerges through the hetero/homo binary that all sexuality and sexual pleasure is, at its most discernible and lowest-common-denominator, predicated on a trajectory of desire from gendered subject to another gendered object, either heterosexual or homosexual, regardless of the relative tolerability of these two positions. What the practices of camming shows up is that there is more productive form of fluidity at the edges of both of those positions, that present fissures in coherence around the normativities of sexuality regimented into desire for a gendered object first, and fetishistic preferences only second. If an ethical goal is to make heterosexuality a relatively harmful event by pointing to the fissures in its own internal coherence and thereby opening up alternative, diverse possibilities for sexual legitimacy, then examining how the regimentation of sexuality into gendered trajectories can be undone is imperative.

One of the available ways in which to make sense of the capacity to challenge heterosexual practice through the fissures in identity coherence opened by Chaturbate cammer’s disarticulation of heterosexual identity from practices that eschew homosexual spectatorship or penetrative sexual performance, may be through refiguring concepts of queer sexual fluidity. This is queer in the sense of post-structuralist approaches to gender and sexuality (as distinct from a gay-affirmative “studies” approach that challenges the dominance of normative masculine heterosexuality but fails ultimately to undo the cultural frameworks through which it retains its normative separation from a broader and more fluid range of practices). I am referring here to the strand of queer theory that actively interrogates “normativities and orthodoxies” by examining the forms by which sexual subjectivities are produced and articulated without necessarily “obliterating [all] boundaries” (Oswin 2008, 92).

Since the application of post-structuralist “queer theory” to the fields of sexuality and gender, it has been well represented that sexuality is not a fixed, essentialist category of identity, but is instead organized through matrices of performativity and materialization. There is no foundational reason why sexuality should be shackled to gendered objects-of-attraction, that there are ways to think about, critique, and perform erotic desire that are different from the contemporary cultural imperative of sexual beings dichotomized as heterosexual and homosexual. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s (1990) History of Sexuality, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggested that the heterosexual/homosexual binary was historical, mythical, and without “natural” or “essentialist” foundation (Sedgwick 1990). In contrast with what is often understood as the nineteenth-century proliferation of sexuality-based identities, the western twentieth-century understanding of sexuality has been reduced to a categorization of sexual species as either heterosexual or homosexual, always and only directing desire toward a gendered object.

Despite the persistent force of the hetero/homo binary as a disciplinary practice that produces and normalizes discrete masculinities as heterosexual and homosexual, and as a biopolitical category of power that asks subjects to view place themselves on a normative curve in proximity to norms of sexual identity such as fixity, innateness, continuity, consistency, and subject coherence, gender, and sexual identities are increasingly being experienced as complicated and fluid (Cover 2012). While essentialist notions of sexual identity, fixity, and coherence are products of the nineteenth century, examples of alternatives, externalities, and blurring of heterosexuality and homosexuality can be found across the twentieth century. Michael Warner (1999, 18) noted that, “People know more about the messiness and variety of sex than they allow themselves to admit in public,” indicating the fact that certain public discourses strictly align masculinity with heterosexuality, heterosexual practices, the emphatic refusal, and sometimes disgust in relation to the possibility of erotic behaviors associated with same-sex attracted persons such as anal penetration (Halberstam 2011, 67). However, it is the twenty-first century and the Web 2.0 environment of interactive visual representation online, real-time video communication, and the emergence of new forms of creative engagement through digital expression (Cover 2006) that the messiness of sexual identity, the fluidity of sexual articulation, and the disjuncture between identity and practice becomes accessible, shifting from the private sphere into the more public realm of online engagement. Such fluidity and complexity of sexual expression have been noted as producing a challenge to dominant regimes built on upholding traditional boundaries of a binary sexual identity (Harvey 2012, 326). For Barbara Creed (2003, 55), much of the challenge produced through fluidity is inspired by a sense of sexuality framed by personal autonomy rather than moral codes, but simultaneously emerges from a postmodernization of sexual cultures that demystifies dominant master discourses of sex that are made legitimate through family, religion, patriarchal, and naturalizing discourses. If digital-interactive communication is, itself, produced within a late capitalist postmodernizing culture, then it becomes the natural site through which a “real” fluidity of sexual identity and expression is witnessed.

To point to the potential of fluidity is not, however, to argue that the best approach to de-normativizing heterosexual masculinity is to impose fluidity on all sexualities, which may not necessarily be the case. More research is needed, then, on how heterosexual men who perform online in nonheterosexual ways (through either availability for gay spectatorship or self-penetration or both) actually perceive of their behaviors, experiences, desires, and performances as fluid. Fluidity, here, may prove to be as much a myth as the rigidity and essentialism of the hetero/homo binary (Oswin 2008, 92). In several respects, we might instead argue that the phenomenon of heterosexual men performing nonheterosexual practices online indicates an overlaying of twenty-first century practices of more fluid sexual performance and sexual consumption over nineteenth century regimes of sexual identity, with the two existing in an uneasy relationship, through which new narratives are produced in online chat in order to ensure a coherence in their coexistence. The Chaturbate examples discussed earlier would indicate the messiness of sexual activity does, in several ways, permit a modified continuation of sexual identities that emerge from the hetero/homo binary and continue to have real meaning and attachment for many subjects, but a simultaneous blurring at the edges by undoing the link between (hetero/homo) sexuality and supposed (hetero/homo) sexual acts in regard to both desired audience and the extent to which sexuality is spread beyond genitalia to a broader re-libidinalization of the body.

Conclusion: Resilience in Anti-heteronormative Fluidity

It remains to be asked if the challenge to masculine heteronormativity that such disruptions to coherent identity produced in online camming practices has broader social significance and benefits in a cultural regime in which sexual nonnormativity is, at times, a factor in making vulnerable of those without the discursive resources to articulate and live a sexually complicated life (Cover 2012). Indeed, there may well be benefits in not only the intellectual deconstruction of the hetero/homo binary and the role it plays in upholding masculine heteronorms, but in pointing to evidence such as that found in Chaturbate that undo innate heterosexualities and homosexualities as distinct sexual orientations, allowing identity to remain but in non-monolithic, heterodoxical forms. This is not just to challenge identities but to make them challengeable in ways which cannot necessarily be known in advance. Resilience for, particularly, young men against being made vulnerable by the cultural demand for hetero/homo distinctiveness and fixed connections of identity and practice, may well produce the kind of necessary challenge to heteronormativity in ways that permit masculine heterosexuality to be maintained as a preference or a practice but not an exclusive one; in ways which allow a person to articulate sexual desires without being governed by the regimentary restraints of binary sexual identity. In discussing vulnerable nonheterosexual youth, Ritch Savin-Williams (2005, 21) noted that resilience may be produced by the disappearance of the gay adolescent, whereby “teens who have same-gendered sex and desires won’t vanish. But they will not need to identify as gay.” Yet perhaps the overall vanishing of sexual identities need not be the only path away from the regimentations of sexual identity, behavior, and orientation that uphold heteronormative masculinity. As Judith Butler (1999, 16) has pointed out, there is no throwing off the shackles of the regimentary normalizational identities that emerged in the nineteenth century in order to return to an earlier, premodern framework of (mythical and nostalgic) free pleasures, and certainly to conceive of a vanishing of extant identities risks an imperious invisibilization of sexualities that many have and will hold as legitimate and meaningful. Rather, the point here is to focus on the dissolution not of masculine heterosexuality but of normativity, and the cultural, discursive, and experiential mechanisms that make heteronormativity possible. If, by pointing to the real, lived experiences of heterosexual men who perform explicitly for nonheterosexual spectatorship as a sexual act in itself, and who engage in sexual play with their own bodies that represents gay sexual expression, then it becomes possible to perceive of wider shifts and fluidities that de-normalize heterosexuality without relying solely on homosexuality as an oppositional alternative and without delegitimizing heterosexual masculinity as identity, orientation, preference, practice, or desire.