Romantic Utopias and Affective Morality in the Use of Digital Media As Emotional Support

This paper discusses, from results of my doctoral research, the circulation of affective morality by the use of digital media as emotional support in Brazil. This research aimed to analyze the uses of digital media such as emotional support, conceptualized as a social relation in which subjects seek for help to deal with emotional demands. These refer initially to affective-sexual relationships which lead to subjective processes that deal with gender, social class, sexuality, race, age, occupation, among other possible axes of analysis. The aim was to explore the meanings around the use of digital media as emotional support interfaced with subjective processes evoked by the analysis of objects that reveal the components of emotional morals. In this paper I focus on two empirical universes that were part of the research, from which I intend to understand the affective-sexual morals and, above all, reflect about love conceptions going through the horizons of aspiration of each segment analyzed. Thus, the analysis will be guided by support modality conceptualized by “digital sentimental offices”, used by homosexual men and heterosexual women of popular classes; and online communities used by heterosexual men and women mostly of medium Brazilian classes.

In this sense, I suggest an approach in this text which contrasts experiences that circulate within each proposed object of analysis, and verify the correspondences between provided emotional support with each social context of each public targeted. The hypothesis is that different sexual experiences of the empirical universes establish regulations about gender and sexuality morals, allowing reflect a framework that observes different conceptions of love in the both speeches on each object of analysis, as the horizons of aspiration in each kind of emotional support.