SPACE, PLACE AND LOCATION IN SEXUAL SOCIAL MEDIA

Contributing to the swiftly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this panel explores the geosocial and geopolitical dimensions of digital sexual cultures by zooming in on the connections between sexual practices, geographic imaginaries, and locally embedded social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Building on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily by those interested in group sex (LC, est. 2018), a Swedish platform preferred by BDSM practitioners (Darkside.se, est. 2003), and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression (Alastonsuomi.com, est. 2007) we show how these platforms contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. On the one hand, these platforms operate as spatialized tools which put bodies in motion in the interest of hooking up. They function as digital compasses that allow for orientation of sexual desires in physical spaces. On the other hand, these platforms also assemble localized online places for flirtation, imagination, visibility, and appreciation, which interlink bodies with the visual pleasures and vulnerabilities of seeing and being seen. We approach questions of locatedness and place-making both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants’ sense of comfort and investment in the local as a space of sexual play. As sexual content and communication are increasingly pushed out of large, U.S.-owned social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, local and (to some extent) independent platforms where sexual expression is less regulated offer an interesting counterweight.

Fabricating future bodies: making digital sexualities research matter

PurposeThis paper critically examines the development and direction of the Fabricating Future Bodies (FFB) Workshop. Troubling notions of co-production as enacting equality or empowering participants, it draws on feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts to understand it as an eventful process that occurs in unpredictable and shifting affect-laden assemblages.Design/methodology/approachThe FFB Workshop formed part of the final phase of my Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded doctoral study, titled “Exploring young people's digital sexual cultures through creative, visual and arts-based methods”. With additional support from Wales' Doctoral Training Partnership, the workshop provided sixteen young people (aged 11–13 years) from one fieldwork school with the opportunity to work with two professional artists in order to creatively re-animate research findings on the digitally networked body. In a three-hour workshop, participants produced cut-up texts and life-size body fabrics that re-imagined what bodies might do, be and become in the future.FindingsThis paper finds that co-productive practices cannot flatten out the institutional and societal power dynamics operating within schools, highlighting how adult intervention was necessary to hold space for young people to participate. It also observes the agency of the art materials employed in the workshop in enabling young people to articulate what mattered to them about the digitally networked body. While the workshop was limited in its ability to renegotiate institutional and peer power dynamics, it produced rich data that indicated how carefully choreographed arts-based practices offer generative possibilities for digital sexualities research and education.Originality/valueBy employing speculative fiction, cut-up poetry and textiles to explore the digitally networked body, this paper outlines an innovative methodological-pedagogical approach to engaging with young people's digitally networked lives.

Public sex, private intimacy and sexual exclusivity in men’s formalized same-sex relationships

This article revisits the personal stories that younger male civil partners told about their sexual practices, in what most termed their ‘marriage’, to generate insights into the extent to which they succumbed to the dangers that critics of same-sex marriage foretold. It provides a baseline analysis against which the findings of future studies of both heterosexual and same-sex marriages and civil partnerships can be compared. The data we discuss are comprised of joint ( n = 25) and individual ( n = 50) interviews with couples. Participants’ stories about ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘exclusive’ sex can appear to support the predictions of some key critics. Participants tended to make commitments to sexual monogamy and link their sexual practices to deepening couple intimacy. However, viewed as stories of socioculturally shaped and biographically embedded sexual practices, they offer insights into the more complex relationships between civil partnership, marriage, sexual exclusivity and intimacy. On closer examination, they suggest it is not simply the case that civil partnership or same-sex marriage (and marriage more generally) ‘imposes’ heteronormative sexual conventions but that relational biographies are significant in shaping simultaneously conventional and deconstructive approaches to married sexuality. Partners in formalized same-sex relationships do not simply follow heterosexual norms. Rather, they juggle the often contradictory norms of mainstream and queer sexual cultures. Understanding the implications for marriage as an institution requires approaches to analysis that do not pose heterosexual marriage as the ‘straw man’ of queer analysis.

PLATFORMED SEX LIVES

This panel builds on a recently funded research project on the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden, and Finland (2020-2022) investigating three local online platforms devoted to communities around nudity and kink: iha.ee, darkside.se, and alastonsuomi.com. Our case studies are in a sense “edge cases” which partly move within sexual margins, making space for alternate understandings of platform sociability. Contra to the current de-platforming of sex, our case-studies foreground sex as the dynamics that bind users to the sites and fuel diverse engagements between them. The papers are work in progress and provide initial platform analyses inspired by the walkthrough method (Light et al. 2018) and the notion of platforms as microsystems (van Dijck 2013). We focus on platform affordances and governance in terms of gender and sexuality; acceptable behavior and sexual practices; and public visibility and privacy. This opens up three important discussions with relevance to the AoIR community: (1) how digital platforms shape and constrain sexual expression at a political moment when the sexual dimensions of life are increasingly pushed out of public view; (2) how these local platforms, as notable arenas for sexual expression, contribute to sexual cultures within the Nordic and Baltic region; and (3) how our examples, when understood as social media platforms, can help to push understandings of what social media are, how they operate, and what kind of sociability they allow for. The panel opens up a discussion of how sex matters in social media, how it is valued and communicated.

Displacing the Gender Binary Through Modes of Dis/Organizing: Sex Toys, Sexuality and Trans Politics

Scholars in sexuality and organization studies have highlighted the centrality of sexuality in organizational power and the ways in which sexuality is in/visibilized, controlled, violently exercised, normativized, and/or resisted in organizations. However, there is still little empirical research focusing on social-movement organizations that promote political change in transgender sexual cultures. With this article, I contribute a qualitative case study of a trans and non-binary do-it-yourself (DIY) sex-toy workshop. Drawing on organization, social-movement, and transgender studies, I develop the notion of ‘trans-organizing’ as a specific mode of organizing and ask: How does trans-organizing around sexuality displace the gender binary in the context of a DIY sex-toy workshop? My findings hint at three dis/organizing processes: dis/organizing language, embodiment, and knowledge sharing.

Historical Views of Homosexuality: European Colonialism

The history of colonialism encompassed diverse meetings between societies and cultures, providing chances for discovery (by both the colonizing and the colonized) of differing sexual attitudes and behaviors. Varying sexual cultures inspired European ethnographical research, relativised sexual certainties and incited both fantasies and moral concern. Eroticised images of foreign men appeared in art, and affective relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans featured in literary works. The sex lives of “natives” and Europeans overseas provided subjects of speculation. The conquest of overseas territories by European and other expanding powers also led to the imposition of Western law codes regulating sexuality, including same-sex relations, gender norms, and marriage. Prohibitions on “sodomy” entered law codes throughout the British Empire, often with provisions of severe penalties. Only in the late 1900s did decriminalization occur in the British settler Dominions, though less often in former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. For European countries where same-sex activity had been decriminalized, such as France, it generally remained legal in the colonies, though surrounded with taboos and social opprobrium. Same-sex desire (and relations between Europeans or between them and indigenous people) appeared in many forms in colonial societies and in the lives of men associated with overseas empires. It was castigated by authorities as a menace to colonial mores but experienced by some men in the colonies as an opportunity for pleasure and a source of male bonding; non-Western sexual cultures provided arguments for both campaigns of “moralization” and for homosexual emancipation in Europe. Occasional scandals underscored the ways in which debates about sexual difference intertwined with colonial-era attitudes and policies.

Sexualities in Africa

Human sexuality is a highly complex phenomenon that involves the ways we feel, think, and act (or not) sexually, all subject to change over time in relation to our physical bodies as they age, and to the political economy and culture in which we live and relate to others. Nature (genetics, hormones, physical endowments) interacts with nurture (childhood socialization, culture, law) in ways that are not predictable and indeed often only rudimentarily understood. Scholars thus often prefer the term “sexualities” to reflect the contingent and changeable plurality of human sexual behavior, and the ways in which sex is conceived in relation to the wider worlds, seen and unseen. Yet in Africa, political and religious leaders frequently assert or imply that “African sexuality,” as distinct from “Western sexuality” or “Arab sexuality,” exists as a distinctive, timeless, and singular phenomenon, often in ways that promote harmful stereotypes. “Homosexuality is un-African,” to give one notorious example, is a widely made claim that has been made to justify vigilantism and state repression against sexual minorities throughout the continent. Certain features of Africa’s modern political economy, in conjunction with inherited gender, ethnic, and other aspects of culture and identity, have meanwhile facilitated the emergence of seemingly distinctive expressions of sexuality on the continent, or among specific peoples from regions within. For instance, high levels of male migration together with low levels of male circumcision and a long-standing culture of having multiple concurrent sexual partners have combined to abet the spread of HIV in southern Africa to a far greater extent than elsewhere, particularly in contrast to Muslim-majority regions. Such distinctions bear important social, health, and human rights implications. The study of how local or regional sexual cultures within Africa arose can thus potentially address harms, like HIV transmission, that are linked to stigma, stereotypes, secrecy, and shame around sexuality. This essay introduces some of the key issues as revealed through a range of literatures primarily in the social sciences and humanities. The various headings chosen for this article are for convenience only—the works cited in most cases transcend easy categorization, much as sexuality itself transcends neat heuristic borders. Note as well that the number of studies devoted to the topic has exploded since the late 1990s to shed light on an ever-widening circle of factors pertinent to understanding sexualities (alcohol and drug use, pornography, asexuality, cults, and social media, for example). I have included a small number of references to material in French but there are bound to be further rich sources in Arabic, in indigenous African languages, and in other former colonial languages like Portuguese that await future research projects.