Presider: Alyce Currier (@notalyce)

Hashmod: Lynette Yorgey Winslow (@yorglow)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Casual Encounters: Sex, Sexuality, and intimacy

Justus Harris (@therealjustus) Rehearsing (R)evolution: Radical Intimacy and Intimate Games
Since the release of the smart phone, GPS-based applications have evolved to permit users to view each other’s images and determine locations when they come within a defined physical radius. Users can then request to meet at an agreed upon location. Grindr, used primarily by men seeking other men (MSM), was the first application to utilize location-based services this way. Similar applications, such as Skout, Blendr, and Tinder, have been developed for the heterosexual community. Regardless of whether users meet, these location-based applications often offer a sense of “proximal intimacy”, in this case an emotional feeling of closeness resulting solely from viewing the image of another user within a defined physical proximity. Drawing from Laud Humphreys’ research of the social codes of MSM in tearooms (public restrooms used for sex) after World War II, my paper postulates that while such technologies are new, the underlying behaviors and motivations are preexisting. They are part of a continuum of our socio-sexual history within public spaces.

My research examines social practices that Humphreys documented in tearooms and how they are mimicked by these applications. Stereotyped identities are produced by limiting users to one profile image with overlaid body stats and the experience of being cruised is made possible by giving users the ability to see when and by whom their profile was viewed.

My objective is to create an inclusive conversation that examines how our search for intimacy through new technology intersects historical social practice and evolving economic systems. As a gay man, I would like to acknowledge my personal experience with these technologies as well as the conference’s location in New York City, where many of the economic, technological, and social movements have emerged – Stonewall to Grindr to Wall Street. I am interested in sharing activist, legislator, and actor, Augusto Boal’s, praxis for looking at communication through games and acting, which he developed as a way to view the level of empathy and communication within groups of people, in this case those looking for sexual intimacy. Using this model, I challenge the notion that these applications are games, whose stakes primarily pertain to creating more efficient hookups (Jamie Woo, Meet Grindr). I present them as tools which have the potential to either liberate us from or replicate existing social oppression depending upon our capability to empathize and communicate. I seek to answer the questions: Why and how have we been willing to take risks in our search for intimacy and what are the stakes involved as we rely more upon these technologies to connect with each other?

Maggie Mayhem (@MsMaggieMayhem) #NotYourRescueProjects: The Red Light District Speaks
The digital red light district is a commercial hub where erotic providers interface with interested parties for the sale of items, live shows, custom films, as well as time and companionship navigating difficulties such as arbitrary and capricious terms of service, squeamish payment processors, and the ever prying eyes of law enforcement and “community standards.” This paper will present a survey of the limited modes of practical sex worker discourse. In spaces where sex related speech is tolerated, online erotic ecosystems are formed. In addition to being a rich and diverse erotic marketplace with its own jargon and culture, activism and community building are fostered on forums and with social media. Many aspects of the sex worker rights movement have been made possible specifically through the web.

Sex workers operate with nuanced personas demonstrating both marketing and political prowess juggling the desires of their client base, peer-to-peer networking, industry development, online activism, and direct action. An online sex worker presence walks a tightrope of appealing to immediate economic survival needs, personal social networking among peers, and practical hurdles of politics. This paper will demonstrate the bridge between commercial speech in adult entertainment and human rights activism by and for sex workers and why it must be protected. The specific challenges of community building in a landscape censored keywords, legal implications of speech, net neutrality, and an increasingly conservative internet will be discussed as well as the benefits and opportunities presented by social media when unregulated speech is permitted and encouraged.

A history of sex worker led activism and initiatives will be presented with a special focus on digital initiatives such as safety bulletins and bad date lists, the #NotYourRescueProject and #BanFreebies projects, humanizing sex workers through micro/blogging platforms, sex worker media, why we see a proliferation of sex worker speech on some platforms and not others, and the future of sex worker activism from the perspective of a sex worker and will specifically counter the “Nordic Model” of sex work legislation in which the purchase of sex is criminal but not the sale as well as end demand campaign as a whole.

Kevin Geyer (@kevgeyer) Doing Digital Gender: A Multi-Level Analysis of Gendered Behavior and Masculinities in Virtual Space
This paper explores how users negotiate and perform gender and sexuality in virtual video game spaces. Drawing from participant observation of several popular video games – from first-person shooters such as the Halo franchise to role-playing games such as World of Warcraft – I examine gender dynamics at the individual, institutional, and interactional levels. While users do have a great degree of creative freedom when assembling their avatars and dealing with other players, factors of game design and social norms hamper such liberties. Game developers regularly encode hegemonic masculinity, female hypersexuality, and heteronormativity into their creations. Furthermore, players’ engagements with each other in popular shooters more resembles a “boys’ locker room” than the “identity playground” that previous scholars imagined. I investigate these violent matches as contests for achieving masculinity: players regularly dish out misogynistic and homophobic speech, various weapons and prizes serve to bolster one’s masculine image, and imposing armor accoutrements (which actually make in-game success more difficult) are celebrated. Specific gendered patterns of behavior are examined as well, such as ‘corpse humping,’ a normalized act of rape which emerged organically from the masculine gaming community and is committed by players in dozens of shooter titles. I hope to understand how female players fit into this hyper-masculine world; I posit that women may be engaged in ‘clandestine masculinity,’ which allows them access into the game world without being outed. Finally, a number of gendered elements are considered in other virtual contexts, from aspects of gang rape in a violent episode of LambdaMOO to the sale of rape ‘pose balls’ and the marginalization of the furry community in Second Life. Ultimately, this study notes that while individuals technically have a great deal of control over their sex, sexuality, and gender in virtual spaces, there are strong normative and institutional restrictions in place against these kinds of freedoms. As adolescents spend a significant amount of time participating in these communities, it is vital to understand how video games affect notions of gender socialization and masculinities, both on- and offline.

Julian Gill-Peterson (@gpjulian) The Unruliness of the Cyberbully: Governing the Sexual Child Online
This presentation considers cyberbullying and sexting as symptoms of a generational crisis in technologically mediated knowledge about the child. As children in the United States have been baptized “digital natives” over the past decade they have also inverted the generational order of things by coming to know more about the Internet and social media than adults, thereby threatening in turn to become ungovernable online by parents, schools, and the law. Looking at dominant framings of cyberbullying, as well as the institutions that try to produce, contain and punish the cyberbully, I explore specifically how this crisis in governing the child opens onto the problem of the mediation of gender and sexuality by digital technologies in the treatment of girls cyberbullying one another, gay victims of cyberbullying, and teens who sext.

Cyberbullying is presented in cultural narratives as more pernicious and dangerous than offline bullying and this paper maps its conceptual genealogy and pursues its media archaeology across state-level anti-cyberbullying statues, criminal cases, professional and private spyware surveillance technologies, and popular film. Each of these material institutions, I argue, promises to deliver the absent knowledge of children’s mysterious online lives to the right adults and so to make them governable, whether by revealing sexting, the circulation of vicious rumors, or the otherwise hidden taunting of peers. By examining the problem for adults of how to produce a governable sexual and gendered child online, this paper asks after what kind of child-subject is produced by digital and new media.