Paranoid viewers and the ‘already knowing’ of YouTube’s coming out genre

Abstract

While viewing LGBTQ+ coming out narratives within speech act theory is certainly nothing new, social media platforms (and YouTube, specifically) have created new opportunities for enacting these performances. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s method of paranoid reading, this article highlights the relationship between LGBTQ+ YouTubers, the coming out narratives they produce and their viewers’ engagement. After looking to YouTube as a platform frequently employed for sharing this genre of performative rhetoric, this article analyses individual video uploads alongside the viewer comments they have garnered to illustrate the paranoid phenomenon of ‘already knowing’ ‐ i.e., viewers’ refusal to be surprised by acts of coming out. While this paranoid approach is complicated through reparative readings and a breakdown of the paranoid/reparative binary, recent offerings of coming out videos uploaded to YouTube also suggest diverging trajectories for the genre’s future.