White noise, white affects: filtering the sameness of queer suffering

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that media productions of an affective uniformity generate white feelings that operate like a white noise machine. By focusing on the inaugural season of the Viceland television series, Gaycation, I explore the ways that US liberal queer whiteness is performed affectively as an experience of feeling for others. I consider the ways that a performance of feeling (of sympathy, empathy, identification, and solidarity) for queer and trans people of colour creates a field of white noise that is central to the constitution of contemporary US liberal whiteness. Whiteness becomes an affective tone—of neutrality, benevolence, morality, innocence, vulnerability, and caring—constituted from bits of information, facts, feelings, experiences, and analyses provided by non-white people and mashed together into a continuous indistinct hiss that, while so familiar as to be nearly imperceptible, works to flatten and obscure any apprehension of content or detail that might unsettle attachments to whiteness.