ABSTRACT
The contagious socially spread forces of networks create moments of direct or mediated affective encounter which produce a kind of 'imitative subjectivation'. Virality is evident in corporate and political efforts to organize populations by way of the contagions of fear as represented through, for example, the War on Terror. In 2010, a blogger for the Washington Post reported on a fanciful scheme devised by the CIA as the US was planning to invade Iraq in 2003. While this hilarious anecdote might tell about the creativity and desperation of certain members of the CIA, it illustrates nevertheless the deployment of media and of homosexuality as weapons of war. Scandal is a function of mediation not just because questions of morality and transgression are publicly worked through in a scandal is 'narrativized by the media'. The masculinist and blatantly homophobic culture of many nations' military institutions, including the United States, offers a paradigm case.
