Sutura 2.0

Abstract

Abstract Wolof ethics of sutura “discretion” have historically conflated perceived communicative excess with bodily contagion and associated both with queer subjects. For health non-governmental organizations (NGOs), online dating among gay Senegalese men presents two risks to sutura: contagious sex and contagious discourse. A Senegalese eHealth NGO hires gay men to send HIV/AIDS prevention messages through Facebook and online dating websites in order to contain HIV and, invoking sutura, contain queer communication and bodies. This NGO projects a heteronormative metapragmatic model of health communication, casting information as instrument of containment, and a unitary, de-eroticized digital self as informational messenger. In what I call queer biocommunicability, eHealth activists create erotically seductive digital personae incongruous with offline characteristics. Construed as communicative-bodily excess, digital seductions actually facilitate information exchange. NGOs instrumentalize queer biocommunicability to bolster a care framework that marginalizes queer subjects. This paper traces historical underpinnings and ethical-political implications of heteronormative biocommunicability’s dependence on queer transgression.