International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 23, No. 1, January–February 2010, 101–124 ISSN 0951-8398 print/ISSN 1366-5898 online © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09518390903447150 http://www.informaworld.com Can we play Fun Gay? Disjuncture and difference, and the precarious mobilities of millennial queer youth narratives Mary K. Bryson* and Lori B. MacIntosh Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, 2125 Main Mall, Vancouver V6T1Z4, British Columbia, Canada Taylor and Francis TQSE_A_445076.sgm (Received 15 September 2009; final version received 28 October 2009) 10.1080/09518390903447150 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 0951-8398 (print)/1366-5898 (online) Original Article 2010 Taylor & Francis 23 1 000000January–February 2010 Dr. MaryBryson mary.bryson@ubc.ca This article takes up the complex project of unthinking neoliberal accounts of a progressive modernity. The authors position their anxieties about an ‘after’ to queer as an affect modality productive of both an opportunity and an obligation to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when queer, and therefore, gay, were organized in a relation of explicit politicization. The authors interrogate celebratory, modernist readings of millennial queer youth narratives where the potentially democratizing significance of the Internet as a cultural technology is deemed constitutive of mobility, play, and possibilities for a redistribution of rights of recognition, communality, and knowledge in a significant public sphere. Drawing on an analysis of research interviews that is framed as ‘anecdotal theory,’ the authors discuss four properties of networked publics – searchability, replicability, persistence, and invisible audiences – not uniquely as properties of technological interfaces, but rather as ‘technologies of otherness.’ Within a modality of critically queer attention, the authors consider the varied and complex precarious mobilities that constitute millennial queer youth narratives. Keywords: youth; sexuality; queer; gender; internet; media Yes, I was thinking: We live without a future. That’s what’s queer. (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, 1953) What are we and what are we today? What is this instant that is ours? … I want to rein- tegrate a lot of obvious facts of our practices in the historicity of those practices and thereby rob them of their evidentiary status, in order to give them back the mobility that they had and that they should always have. (Michel Foucault, What Our Present Is, 1997d) ALICE, GUEST, THE LOOK: Are you saying you don’t want me to be out, just because I think at this stage in my life it’s a little hard to…? DIRECTOR, THE LOOK: Oh no no no, that’s not what we’re saying. HOST, THE LOOK: No, we definitely want gay. No, gay is good! ALICE, GUEST, THE LOOK: Gay is good? HOST, THE LOOK: Get these ratings in daytime. DIRECTOR, THE LOOK: You know, we just want the right kind of gay. HOST, THE LOOK: Yeah. *Corresponding author. Email: mary.bryson@ubc.ca Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 18:44 28 January 2010