A Picture’s Worth: Toward Theorizing a Black/Queer Gaze in the Internet “Pornutopia”

Drawn from an archive of online pornographic selfies, this meditation reconsiders black gay art historical critique of the visual fetish of the black male body in the context of the undisciplined and contradictory circulation of images on the Internet. It asks: Does authorship of the image, or the action of gazing, make you a subject? Who is the gazer in the context of the Internet? What does it feel like to be an object looking at an object?