The Erotic Wound: Sexual Racism and Queer Resistance in Digital Spaces

This article proposes the erotic wound as a sociological concept to examine how queer people of colour (QPOC) experience sexual racism in digital intimacy, and-equally-to demonstrate how they actively contest, rework, and transform its effects through engagement in digital counterpublics. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of 37 online narratives from personal blog posts, essays, news reports, Reddit threads, TikTok and YouTube videos, we identify four interlocking dynamics: racial filtering and exclusion, racial fetishization, hypervisibility and erasure, and digital acts of resistance in subaltern counterpublics. Together, these dynamics reveal that the erotic wound is both an affective injury-producing anxiety, exhaustion, and diminished self-worth-and a social harm sustained by durable inequality, intersectional power relations, and performative scripts of desire in the neoliberal architectures of digital platforms. We draw on feminist andqueer scholarship, and Shiloh Whitney's theory of byproductive affective labour to explain how the wound intervenes in the body through the very relational encounter it organizes, and on Michel Serres's theory of noise and mediation (via Crocker) to show how platforms actively generate, rather than merely transmit, racialized patterns of exclusion and fetishization. Yet the erotic wound is not only diagnostic of harm; it is generative of social worlds. Through digital counterpublics, QPOC convert private harms into public critique, produce alternative imaginaries of desire and belonging, and propose new architectures of intimacy free from racial hierarchy. Foregrounding counterpublics as a primary site of collective world-making is not a secondary contribution of this article but its central one, alongside the theorization of harm. By conceptualizing the erotic wound as simultaneously diagnostic and generative, this study advances sociological understandings of how desire becomes both a site where sexual racism is reproduced and a terrain where it is contested and reimagined.