Remediating Affect: "Luclyn" and Lesbian Intimacy on YouTube

Abstract

This article focuses on Kaelyn and Lucy, a long distance (US–UK) lesbian couple who document their relationship on YouTube. Their channel has attracted a following of hundreds of thousands of individuals who profess to feeling an intimate attachment to the couple. This article considers how Kaelyn and Lucy's performance of lesbian intimacy online has amassed such a following. In exploring the multiple feelings that Kaelyn and Lucy's YouTube channel contains, it builds on and contributes to theorizing online emotion, and in particular, frames their channel as a “digital archive of feelings” (Kuntsman, 2012). Picking up on the way in which followers profess to having unmediated access to their relationship, I build on Bolter and Grusin's concept of “remediation” to argue that Kaelyn and Lucy produce a sense of immediacy for their followers through the remediation of other romantic genres. Secondly, I draw out the importance of time to the creation of a sense of shared intimacy, arguing that Kaelyn and Lucy's use of YouTube invites followers to feel as though they are sharing in the timing of the couple's relationship. This article thus uses this case study to reflect on the process by which a contemporary representation of lesbian intimacy has become a scene of attachment, whereby a larger “intimate public” (Berlant, 2008) has formed.