Available From UC Press

Affect’s Engine is an immersive ethnography of queer people of color on the social media platform Tumblr during its “peak” years, 2010–2015. Alexander Cho tells the story of Tumblr users and the hurricane of content that they circulated—and that circulated around them. Chronicling a formative time in social media history, Cho shows how a multiply minoritized population utilized Tumblr's unique structure to express, emote, and bond together as a survival strategy for resisting white supremacy and heteronormativity. Paying critical attention to user-facing design, he argues that this was not as possible on other platforms. The same features that drew queer people of color to Tumblr—to feel intensely—also explain why the platform did not succeed financially: its design did not instantiate a version of the good liberal subject—linear, singular, discrete, orderly, public, and market legible. While painting a vivid picture of a vital and bygone internet era, Cho asks readers to take seriously how affect is shaped by user-facing design on social media.

Alexander Cho is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“Alexander Cho shows what happens when a platform refuses to capture the affects that made Tumblr live for the queer and trans people of color who engined socialities there. Sure, there's elegy here (long live Tumblr!), but also an accounting of the still-living movements of queer desire.”—Shaka McGlotten, author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality

“Cho is the world authority on Tumblr, and this book is a brilliant critical reading that takes emotions and sensations seriously. Affect’s Engine is both a deeply historicized, novel account of Tumblr's economy, form, design, and protocols and a love letter to the platform. This beautiful, sophisticated book is the last word on the site that became synonymous with queer online community.”—Lisa Nakamura, author of The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet