"It Gets Better": A Case Study in Intimate Publicity

In beginning to imagine what a 101 course called "Intimate Publics" might look like, it's become clear to me that one of the first priorities in this speculative classroom of mine would be to give students space in which to consider the implications of the course title itself. The appeal of the phrase, for me at least, is its somewhat counter-intuitive suturing together of the idea of intimacy--that oh so private phenomenon--and the political space of the "public," whatever that might mean. Further, in pluralizing the latter term, the phrase is also a prod of sorts to begin disaggregating a notion of a unified, singular, and largely impersonal thing called the "public" into an expansive field of overlapping, affectively charged, shifting, and often tense constellations of groups and individuals. In allowing the phrase to unfold in class, the goal would be to have students begin reconceptualizing "publicness" not strictly as a largely abstract confrontation with the gray, hulking figure of an impersonal public (figured as the nation, say), but as a complex network of heterogeneous relations and dis/identifications in which they are likely already participating in rich and complicated ways. Rather, though, than have the students immediately turn to examples of this more expansive notion of publicness in their own lives (although this could become a central part of the course), I may consider using the viral anti-bullying campaign It Gets Better as a case study in what an "intimate public" might look like, and the political potential and pitfalls of this particular mode of participatory culture (with apologies for alliteration overload).

First, some background on the project. Launched by queer sex columnist Dan Savage in the fall of 2010, It Gets Better (IGB) began as a response to a series of highly-publicized gay teen suicides in the United States. In a video posted to YouTube, Savage and his partner Terry Miller relate personal stories about the harassment and bullying they experienced as teens, emphasizing that despite those difficult years, they went on to find happiness, fulfillment, and acceptance in later life. This video prompted a wave of similar testimonials from a wide range of people--gay and straight, famous and not--as well as the creation of a formal organization dedicated to supporting the creation and dissemination of more personal accounts. The IGB Project's website describes their mission as follows:

The It Gets Better Project was created to show young LGBT people the levels of happiness, potential, and positivity their lives will reach – if they can just get through their teen years. The It Gets Better Project wants to remind teenagers in the LGBT community that they are not alone — and it WILL get better.

Through personal testimonials like that of Savage and Miller, the IGB campaign aimed to activate an intimate public of LGBT people and their allies around a particular goal: the prevention of gay teen suicide through the public sharing of affirmative personal narratives. In effect, the project worked to constitute this particular intimate public, using YouTube as a medium for spreading a political message of hope and validation derived from individual experience.

Although the good intentions of the project remain unquestioned, it was not without its critics. In online responses to the campaign, cultural critics such as Tavia Nyong'o and Jasbir Puar were quick to point out the ways in which the hopeful message of IGB failed to account for the experiences of those for whom things don't get better, or at least, not in the ways modelled by Savage and others who followed his example in creating their videos. In Puar's cogent assessment,

Savage's IGB video is a mandate to fold into urban, neoliberal gay enclaves, a form of liberal handholding and upward-mobility that echoes the now discredited "pull yourself up from the bootstraps" immigrant motto. Savage embodies the spirit of a coming-of-age success story. He is able-bodied, monied, confident, well-travelled, suitably partnered and betrays no trace of abjection or shame. His message translates to: Come out, move to the city, travel to Paris, adopt a kid, pay your taxes, demand representation. But how useful is it to imagine troubled gay youth might master their injury and turn blame and guilt into transgression, triumph, and all-American success?

For Puar, Savage's optimistic story of personal triumph elides the various vectors of privilege--being white, middle-class, well-educated--that worked to propel him and his partner into the affirmative present they are offering gay teens as a desirable and achievable future. What remains unspoken, then, is both the varying degrees of access individuals might have to such a future, as well as the possibility of a critique of the value and attainability of that future itself.

The problems with IGB chime with the initial setbacks suffered by the Urban Rhythms project described in Stephen Parks' Gravyland. Initially framed as a space for working-class urban students to give voice to the values and difficulties of their home communities, in the classroom, well-intentioned teachers guided the students towards established genres of personal writing that emphasized a bootstrap individualism similar to the one Puar describes over a thoughtful engagement with collective issues faced by themselves and those in their communities. In both cases, rhetorical structures work to determine the shape taken by mediated instantiations of intimate publics, creating blindspots and limitations that ultimately run counter to the political (not to mention pedagogical) intentions of the projects.

That said, for both Urban Rhythms and IGB, opportunities for immanent critique and reevaluation were available within the structure of the project and its tools. In IGB's case, although one could argue the project's message remained (and remains) consistently problematic for the reasons described above, the diffuse nature of digital publication has allowed interventions to occur, both from external commentators such as Nyong'o and Puar as well as observers and participants within the project itself. In Puar's words, "The very technological platform of the phenomenon allows the project to be critiqued from within," with contributors offering video responses, YouTube comments, and blog posts pointing to the insufficiencies of IGB's intervention. In other words, the loose mesh of the digitally mediated public(s) that have sprung up around the project has allowed for an elaboration of discussion and viewpoints, embedding a significant amount of critical attention on the project's implications and limitations within its own web of discourses.

The polyvocal potential of digital tools such as YouTube is discussed by Ryan Skinnel in a recent article in the journal Enculturation. Rejecting both a techno-utopianism on the one hand and an overly-cautious (i.e. conservative) skepticism on the other, Skinnel sees YouTube as a channel for participatory culture that has become deeply integrated within contemporary discourse and carries immense rhetorical power. Rather than get bogged down in interminable debates over whether YouTube is good or bad for politics, Skinnel argues, "it is worth considering the rhetorical effects of the videos as well as the structures that inspire, collect, conserve, and distribute materials that subsequently enable and constrain what can be said, how it can be said, and how it will inevitably continue to influence public discourse." While I still need to do some thinking in terms of precisely how to work through these issues in the classroom, the case of IGB as a digitally mediated intimate public seems like a powerful site for pursuing the kind of critical rhetorical analysis that Skinnel describes, while offering a starting point for a broader consideration of the implications of intimate publicness as it will be explored throughout the class.