Corpo de sentidos: cartografia intensiva do gaydar e da algoritmização das transensorialidades

Abstract

In this dissertation, I propose an intensive cartography of the gaydar, understood as a process of (homo)sexualizing signification of bodies, and I investigate how this process of meaning production is modulated by human affects and by the incidence of algorithmic systems of artificial intelligence. Drawing on situated experiences as a gay man, I take gaydar as a privileged phenomenon through which to problematize the ways bodies are learned to be signified, by mobilizing physical and non-physical bodily signs, as well as to reflect on the effects of these significations on the subjects’ constitution. The objective of the research is to understand processes of bodily signification from a perspective that articulates discourse and affects, proposing a discursive-affective approach grounded in the notion of transsensoriality, understood as the simultaneous and non-hierarchical implication of bodily sensorialities in the production of meaning. I analyze how products generated by artificial intelligences materialize hegemonic discursivities that act upon these processes and produce affective effects on human bodies, even though such systems are themselves neither capable of signifying nor of being affected. In doing so, I seek to displace approaches that conceive signification exclusively as a discursive effect, inscribing the body as a constitutive dimension of meaning production. Methodologically, based on Deleuze and Guattari, I propose intensive cartography as an investigative practice, conceived as a processual, rhizomatic, and non-replicable mapping, constructed in the very act of research. The corpus consists of accounts of human-human and human-AI interactions, as well as linguistic materialities circulating in digital environments, selected according to the criterion of the intensity with which they affected my body as cartographer. I refer to these accounts as intensive sites, understood as events in which discursive and affective displacements relevant to the territorialization of the investigated space are produced. The theoretical framework articulates materialist Discourse Analysis, especially drawing on Michel Pêcheux, with Spinoza’s philosophy, mobilizing the concept of affect as a modification of the body’s state produced in encounters, in dialogue with critical perspectives from indisciplinary and transgressive Applied Linguistics and with reflections that reject claims of epistemological neutrality, assuming embodied first-person writing as a political and methodological gesture. As a proposition, I argue that the functioning of gaydar requires the mobilization of one’s own body in the signification of other bodies, such that meaning production takes place in encounters where mutual affective resonances are recognized. It is through this process that gaydar is constituted as a social phenomenon, sustained by shared and historically situated sensorial experiences. I thus advocate a discursive-affective analytical practice that places the body and its transsensorialities at the center of signification and challenges the limits of traditional discursive approaches in the face of contemporary algorithmic mediations.