Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

This article, concentrating on trends in the field of gender and sexuality studies of the last decade or so, makes a case for expanding both the geography and the methodology for early modern gender studies, broadly conceived. Themes considered here include the intermingling of the intimate and the imperial as well as marriage, law, slavery and labor, freedom, settler colonialism, intersectionality, queer studies, mothering, and reproduction. This topic, and article, also point to the need to make use of material culture and to interrogate the silence and violence of the archive remaining.

“I'm Hard to Catch”

This article examines Living with Pride: Ruth C. Ellis @ 100 (1999) by Yvonne Welbon, an independent documentary film centered on the life of African American lesbian centenarian Ruth Ellis to advance a queer of color theory of longevity. The analysis closely considers Ruth Ellis's assertion in the film that she: “. . . wasn't in—What you call it? . . . Closet. Never.” Although Ellis explicitly disavows “the closet” declaring instead that she was never in it, both in the film and commonly she is often referred to as “out.” The article addresses the ways in which “out,” along with Ellis's declarations of “never” and “wasn't in,” examined together as “never in,” render Ellis's living legible within black sexuality studies and LGBTQ cultural politics. Ellis advises at the end of the film that cultivating “atmosphere” interpersonally in daily life engenders longevity. Living with Pride puts forth a model of longevity that is personally and collectively grounded in black sexual difference and queer of color resistant social practices that trouble public health life expectancy discourses. Drawing on queer of color critique, black sexuality studies, and visual cultural studies, the article engages Ellis's formulation of black queer atmosphere as a site of imagining that advances the livability of racialized sexual difference.

TOP 5 TINDER HACKS! BLACKBOXING ALGORITHMS IN THE DATING APP INDUSTRY

Tinder’s swipe feature operates algorithms that have influenced a new generation of dating apps. In this paper, we argue that the mystique surrounding Tinder’s algorithms is as productive for the dating app industry as the actual technical operations they perform. We seek to understand how actors in the dating industry construct matchmaking algorithms as strategic unknowns that can be harnessed to reach commercial objectives. To do so, we mobilize the notion of ‘algorithmic blackboxing’ – how actors strategically construct algorithms as black boxes to reach certain goals – to analyze a corpus of 48 online dating guides that offer ‘best advice’ to exploit Tinder’s matchmaking algorithms. Our analysis shows that dating guides overwhelmingly construct Tinder’s algorithms as black boxes whose secrets must be unlocked for users to generate matches and, therefore, find love. The alleged unintelligibility and opacity of Tinder’s algorithms allow self-proclaimed ‘dating experts’ to sell their advice or services in the context of a speculative dating economy. To obtain more matches, dating guides promote a common injunction: to hack Tinder. They invite users to modulate their behaviors and practices to become more algorithmically recognizable. Dating guides also readily invoke rhetorical arguments that draw on statistical data produced by Tinder, which highlights the emergence of new ‘regimes of truth’ within the matchmaking industry that enact a dataist ideology. We conclude by advocating for the importance of critically examining the increasing algorithmic mediation of dating cultures at the intersection of Internet, gender, and sexuality studies.

Play! A Special Issue

Sexuality, as it relates to video games in particular, has received increasing attention over the past decade in studies of games and play, even as the notion of play remains relatively underexplored within sexuality studies. This special issue asks what shift is effected when sexual representation, networked forms of connecting and relating, and the experimentation with sexual likes are approached through the notion of play. Bringing together the notions of sex and play, it both foregrounds the role of experimentation and improvisation in sexual pleasure practices and inquires after the rules and norms that these are embedded in. Contributors to this special issue combine the study of sexuality with diverse theoretical conceptions of play in order to explore the entanglements of affect, cognition, and the somatic in sexual lives, broadening current understandings of how these are lived through repetitive routines and improvisational sprees alike. In so doing, they focus on the specific sites and scenes where sexual play unfolds (from constantly morphing online pornographic archives to on- and offline party spaces, dungeons, and saunas), while also attending to the props and objects of play (from sex toys and orgasmic vocalizations to sensation-enhancing chemicals and pornographic imageries), as well as the social and technological settings where these activities occur. This introduction offers a brief overview of the rationale of thinking sex in and as play, before presenting the articles that make up this special issue.

Feminist Space Invaders: Killjoy Conversations in Neoliberal Universities

As teachers of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies (GWS), whenever we think about our pedagogical goals, we imagine our classrooms as spaces in which students can learn not only the what, but also the how and why of feminism. The strategies we employ, and the ways in which we invite students to imagine what could be, are meant to expand our collective agency, courage, and creativity in the interests of transforming oppressive practices in formal schooling and beyond. While developing our classes, we thought about what new connections we could foster between our students and each other as teachers, given that we were located on different university campuses. We asked ourselves what the possibilities for and benefits of sharing space might be, as well as how the process of forging connections itself could be a subversive practice. Particularly since feminist theory is a dynamic practice of study in which communicating across difference is so imperative, we took the opportunity to foster a cross-campus dialogue between our classes. In setting up the collaboration, we decided that facilitating an ongoing conversation between the two groups would best achieve the goals of helping our students to “pull back the curtain” on how the other class was processing this information. By intentionally invading each other’s spaces, we hoped to open up possibilities for our students to share new insights with each other as well as to demonstrate ways in which the classroom experience can be pushed and prodded beyond standard, normative practices.

Language and sexuality studies today

This article presents a short overview of the field of language and sexuality since the mid-1990s and discusses two issues that have repeatedly played a role in my own work in the field during the last decade: the incompatibility of the term homosexual with non-heteronormative language use, and the question of what counts as queer linguistic work.

Thickening language and sexuality studies

In this contribution to the special issue of the Journal of Language and Sexuality celebrating its 10th anniversary, I reflect on several key articles in the journal that related to my work in language and sexuality with queer, Latinx and bi/multilingual individuals and organizations, survey the field of language and sexuality today from my vantage point, and propose several directions for the future of language and sexuality studies, namely: to engage multilingualism, to question our ideologies as researchers, to grapple more deeply with intersectional through ethnography, and to consider age more seriously.