Unruly Exposure: The Subversive Practices of Online Exhibitionist Communities

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Masculinities in Science and Technology

Abstract

The internet is changing sex. Online sexuality is becoming increasingly relevant as technologies of the internet continue to grow, expanding the world of erotic possibilities. However, conversations about online sex frequently speak about the dangers of sex while focusing less on the ways that people find pleasure. Based on 26 in-depth interviews with men participating in an online exhibitionist fetish, I explore the fetish of exposure, in which participants disclose information about themselves (including their names, addresses, social media accounts, and government-issued IDs) alongside their sexually explicit media. I argue that online exposure is a unique phenomenon that subverts emerging ethics around emerging discourses and technologies. Exposure is a fetish that radically challenges the discourses that aim to control sexuality through transgression and eroticization, but also a practice that has the potential to allow its participants to reforge their subjectivity as sexual beings. These participants deploy eroticization to (1) subvert expert knowledges such as public health discourses on sex addiction and legal mores about online privacy, (2) contest traditional narratives of sex and technology by experimenting with sexual limits while developing complex lay knowledges of the pathways of online sexual media, surveillance, and technologies such as facial recognition and search indexing, (3) rewriting the self by incorporating their erotic desires in practices of confession, and (4) carving out space for sexual community as censorship rises. I also present a methodological consideration of the possibility of our own work as social scientists becoming eroticized, whether by readers or research participants. This project grapples with rapidly evolving questions of sexuality, science, and technology, and the possibility of alternative considerations to traditional notions of knowledge.

Author

• Evan Jiancheng Zhao, Northwestern University