Enclosing the Sexual Commons

• In Event: Sexuality and the State: Borders, Boundaries and the Sexual Commons

Abstract

The internet and the rise of new social media have been hailed by many LGBT scholars and activists as offering an unprecedent way for queers to discover themselves and build community. Utilizing Walter Benjamin’s insights about the Paris arcades in the 1920s, I argue that such queer optimism for the internet and social media is premature. Searching through the archives for material that would elaborate on how the arcades represented a form of consciousness that has already been swept into the dustbin of history, Bejamin pieced together a world in which the flaneur could cruise the city and see the unexpected, the extreme, and the new. I argue that the early internet was similar to the Paris arcades of the 19th century. Sex on the early internet drew upon but also remade certain forms of sociality and sexual consciousness alive at the end of the 20th century. This was being done while physical sexual commons were being enclosed (for example, Times Square’s sex industry came under intense policing by the Guiliani administration in order to remake the urban landscape and to ‘Disneyfy’ Manhattan). However, digital spaces are now facing their own enclosure with the rise of new security discourses around sex trafficking, pedophilia, and child pornography, with new predictive technologies to sell commodities to online consumers, and with commodification of personal internet data. Websites that facilitated cruising and online sex (Craigslist, Back Page, Rentboy.com) are being shut down through federal legislation like the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) of 2017. The internet is also being transformed by algorithms that mark the end of online cruising and enclose the space of digital sexual commons. Due to the algorithmizing of the internet, one now sees only what one has already seen before, which is expanding to the realm of pornography and sexual practices. Thus, one never experiences the new, the different, the unexpected, or the extreme like one would in the Paris arcades or the early internet. I will talk about new legislation and the transformation of algorithmic technologies represents perils for queer sexual politics and for a queer sexual ethics that would prioritize undoing and unbecoming.

Author

• Kevin Anthony Henderson, University of Massachusetts Amherst