Category Archives: feminist media studies

hot connections

Our book, Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter, coauthored with Jenny Sundén and Katrin Tiidenberg, will be out in March on open access with the MIT Press: very exciting conclusion to what has been such an enjoyable collaboration within the Rethinking Sexuality project. As has been the case with my previous books with the publisher, the cover design is fabulous. This is the summary:

A rethinking of “the social” in social media which includes the sexual.

What can we learn from including sexual platforms in definitions of social media and, by extension, from including sex in definitions of “the social” itself? Hot Connections explores three locally operating sexual platforms: the Swedish Darkside, used by kink and BDSM practitioners; the Estonian Libertine Center, used mainly by nonmonogamous people; and the Finnish Alastonsuomi, used for a wide variety of nude and sexual displays of self-expression. What avenues do these platforms open for understanding the role that sexuality plays in people’s networked routines, social bonds, and forms of relating?

Sexual social media affords freedom of worldmaking, belonging, and a right to sexually exist. While providing vital spaces for sexual self-expression—and indeed, hot connections—platform connectivity also involves friction as expectations, wishes, and desires clash and collide.

Intervening in debates on the value of sexual social media, Hot Connections discusses what it means to research sexuality when sexual data is understood as sensitive by default, what platform governance may look like if viewed from the margins, and how sex and intimacy are not the same thing in networked sexuality.

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in/conveniences

Screenshot 2024-11-27 at 17.54.40In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround edited Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg is out just now with the Insititute of Network Cultures’ Theory on Demand series. The collection covers a lot of ground and also includes my bit, “Platform economies, reputational stains, and the in/conveniences of porn”, a Lauren Berlant-inspired essay on porn’s current financial deplatforming and the moral platform imaginaries that this involves. All on open access!

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Filed under affect theory, data culture, feminist media studies, internet research, sexuality

objectionable nipples

Screenshot 2024-03-01 at 16.16.27Our chapter with the marvelous Jenny Sundén, “Objectionable nipples: Puritan data politics and sexual agency in social media,” is newly out in Queer Data Studies edited by Patrick Keilty for University of Washington Press’ Feminist Technosciences series. As the title suggests, we are intrested in the politics of nipples in a context where nudity and sexual content are aggressively and horizontally deplatformed on leading social media platforms, also attending to Puritan underpinnings of content policies and the unwillingness of “free the nipple” activism to address sexual desire.

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vanilla normies and fellow pervs

Our article with Katrin Tiidenberg, Jenny Sundén and Maria Vihlman is out today on OA with Sexualities. Vanilla normies and fellow pervs: Boundary work on sexual platforms continues our study of local sexual platforms within the Rethinking Sexuality and Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture projects, paving way for our book on the topic currently under contract with MITP. The abstract goes like this:

Building on a study of three Nordic and Baltic digital sexual platforms, this article analyzes the perceptions of enjoyable sex and sexual belonging among 60 people, who self-identify as sexually liberal. In dialogue with Gayle Rubin’s formative work on sexual hierarchies and “good sex,” we explore our participants’ complex and often ambiguous sexual boundary work to delineate liberated sex. Independent of particular preferences (non-monogamy, BDSM, fetishism, and exhibitionism), liberated sex for our participants is definitionally enjoyable and articulated via an aspirational hierarchy based on willingness, diversity/variability, and self-reflexivity—partly set against national sexual imaginaries of vanilla normalcy, yet allowing vanilla some gradations and nuances.

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Iiu Susiraja

Screenshot 2023-11-10 at 13.54.45Reconfiguring the Portrait, edited by Abraham Gell and Tomáš Jirsa, is freshly out from Edinburgh University Press. It includes my co-authored chapter with Kaisu Hynnä-Granberg, titled Iiu Susiraja: self-shooting as playful practice. Focusing on the Instagram presence of the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja in particular, our chapter explores the playful aspects of her work while also engaging in relations between self-portraits and selfies, body aesthetics, and the critical edge of ambiguity. The piece was a joy to write and we hope it does some justice to the general mood of Susiraja’s art.

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about sex, open-mindedness, and cinnamon buns

Our article with Jenny Sundén, Katrin Tiidenberg and Maria Vihlman, titled “About Sex, Open-Mindedness, and Cinnamon Buns: Exploring Sexual Social Media“, is just out (on OA) with Social Media + Society. It’s the second joint article coming out from our collaborative project on local sexual platforms, with more to come.

And here’s the abstract: General purpose social media platforms—often incited by American legislation—increasingly exclude sex from acceptable forms of sociality in the abstract name of user safety. This article analyzes interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi, and Libertine.Center) to explore what follows from including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media and, by extension, in including sex in definitions of “the social” itself. We found that instead of context collapse, the users and developers of the studied sites operate with what we call context promiscuity, blending boundaries, but maintaining their structural integrity. This allows for a particular silosociality to emerge based on experiences of safety, risk, and consent. Building on this, we propose thinking of sexual expression as something not contained by, but put in motion across platforms, user cultures, content policies, and sexual norms. Rather than framing sexual social media exchanges in terms of their perceived risks and harms, we would do well to also inquire after the risks and harms involved in ousting sex from networked forms of sociality. Deplatforming of sex truncates our ways of understanding what interests, forces, and attachments drive our sociality. Yet, when analyzing social media as if the socio-sexual matters, platforms designed to support sexual displays and connections become vital nodal points in social media ecologies.

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Natalie Wood Day

Co-authored with Tanya Horeck, our article “Natalie Wood Day”: Sexual Violence and Celebrity Remembrance in the #MeToo Era is freshly out with Celebrity Studies. Not on open access, alas, but here’s a manuscript version at least. The abstract reads like this:

This article inquires after the ethics of posthumous outing and networked forms of remembrance connected to public figures accused of, or having admitted to, sexual violence and domestic abuse. Focusing on the obituary politics surrounding the 2020 deaths of Kirk Douglas, Kobe Bryant, and Sean Connery, it explores the forms that a feminist ethics of disclosure and memorialisation might take in the #MeToo era. Contra the popular tendency of othering sex offenders as exceptional ‘monsters,’ #MeToo’s affective and discursive force lies in framing sexual violence as unextraordinary, banal, and ubiquitous. In what follows, we make a case for forms of remembrance acknowledging that a person can simultaneously be an accomplished professional, a loving parent, and a rapist, so that one aspect of one’s being and actions need not require silence over others. Reflecting on what it means to remember public figures in their totality, we flag the importance of attending to the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts that have contributed to the prominence, and subsequent remembrance of individuals. We argue that such a contextual move makes it possible to see the individual public figure within the social networks and hierarchies that have allowed, or disallowed, patterns of behaviour.

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Filed under cultural studies, feminist media studies, internet research

locating sex

Locating Sex: Regional Geographies of Sexual Social Media, the first article on our study of Swedish, Estonian and Finnish sexual platforms with Jenny Sundén, Katrin Tiidenberg and Maria Vihlman, is out on OA with Gender, Place & Culture. This is a collab between the Rethinking Sexuality project and the IDA consortium, with more to follow. Here’s the abstract:

Contributing to the field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this article explores the geosocial dimensions of digital sexual cultures by analyzing three regionally operating, linguistically specific social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Drawing on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily for group sex, a Swedish platform for kink and BDSM, and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression, we ask how these contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. First, we focus on the platforms as tools for digital wayfinding and hooking up. Second, we consider how the platforms help to reimagine and sexualize physical locations as ones of play, and how this transforms the ways of inhabiting such spaces. Third, we analyze how the platforms operate as sexual places in their own right, designed to accommodate certain forms of display, relating, and belonging. We argue, in particular, that these platforms shape how users imagine and engage with location by negotiating notions of proximity and distance, risk and safety, making space for sexual sociability. We approach geographies of sexuality both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants’ sense of comfort and investment in local spaces of sexual play. As sexual content is increasingly pushed out of large, U.S.-owned social media platforms, we argue that locally operating platforms provide a critical counterpoint, allowing for a vital re-platforming of sex on a regional level.

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short-lived Play

As part of our recently finished research project, Sexuality and Play in Media Culture, Laura Saarenmaa and I explored Leikki (Play), a mid-1970s Finnish sex magazine for women. This lead us to consider popular sex ed of the era, feminist affiliations and methodological challenges. The outcome is now out as “Short-Lived Play: Trans-European Travels in Print Sex Edutainment”, on open access with Media History. And here’s the abstract:

Media history is still written largely from national perspectives so that the role of import and export, translations and franchises is seldom foregrounded. On geographically and linguistically limited markets, imported materials have nevertheless been crucial parts of popular print culture. This paper explores the market of ‘sex edutainment’ magazines in 1970s Finland, zooming specifically in on Leikki (‘Play’, 1976), a sex magazine for women translated from the Norwegian Lek (first launched in 1971) that provided knowledge on topics ranging from marriage to masturbation and lesbian desire. Through contextual analysis of Leikki, a marginal publication that has basically faded from popular memory, this article attends to ephemeral and even failed print media in order to account for the heterogeneity of the 1970s sex press market as it intermeshed with sex advice and education. In so doing, it adds new perspectives to a field largely focused on successful periodicals and addresses knowledge gaps resulting from the exclusion of the sex press from mainstream media historiography.

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Sydney

Until end of April, I am Visiting Professor at University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Science as Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair in Sexuality Studies. My visit includes PhD workshops, a public lecture (tba), as well as collaboration with the local research community and my most excellent host, Professor Kane Race, broadly on the topic of sexuality and social media content regulation. Very exciting.

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