UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores how sutura – the Senegalese ethic of discretion – has transformed within shifting landscapes of digital media use. In historically contingent ways, sutura has predicated one’s moral legitimacy, legible gender identity, and national belonging on one’s ability to shield aspects of life considered “intimate” from public view. Those who disrupt gender expectations may be construed as lacking sutura. This can undermine their claims to moral belonging. What happens when social media allows users to share intimate life with wide audiences in real time? What does digital media use entail for sutura, and for the configurations of gender and moral belonging invoked in its name? I show that fears of non-consensual digital exposure and image-based sexual abuse have grown in tandem with the importance of digitally mediated intimacy as a site for defining oneself as an ethical Senegalese subject. This affects sexually stigmatized Senegalese acutely and paradoxically. For example, sex workers face high risks of non-consensual exposure online. Yet others may accuse them of transgressing sutura through purported “digital dissidence,” indiscreet or excessively embodied online behavior.Rather than provoking straightforward censorship, perceived digital transgressions of sutura produce unlikely collaborations between “digital dissidents” and institutions that seek to align everyday practices with national ideals of ethical intimacy. Drawing on over 18 months of ethnography and participatory action research, I trace these unlikely interactions across multiple sites: from digital sexual health programs, to Muslim youth groups, to pornography production. In this dissertation, sutura is more than an object of research. I argue that sutura challenges the intransigent analytical distinction between “communication” and “health.” Moreover, it illustrates the gendered operation of health/communicative inequities. Magnified by anxieties about social media’s capacity to multiply affective or erotic attachments, sutura may be invoked to conflate communicative excess with bodily excess, and associate both with gendered illegibility. However, digital dissidents reject the devaluing of their communicative practice. For them, sutura is not a boundary dividing the “intimate” from the “public,” but rather, a practice of collective protection. They reframe digital privacy as mutual aid. I argue that digital dissidents’ reimagining of sutura disrupts dominant paradigms in digital privacy policy that emphasize individual awareness and responsibility. If we heed the expertise of those most vulnerable to digital harms, we can better leverage digital health strategies to promote health equity. By reclaiming sutura, digital dissidents gesture to an alternative digital future, one marked by the equal distribution of digital privacy, health, and protection.