Pleasure, Privacy and Playful Exposure: Gay Sharing of Digital Sex Chat

• In Event: Towards Hookup Apps Studies: Sexual Cultures, Digital Queers, Locative Media

Abstract

The tendency to privatization attributed to digital sexual cultures is a source of worry in early formulations of queer counterpublics. Dyadic structures of private messaging are indeed a prominent feature of online hook-up devices, even in gay contexts. In practice, users make use of other affordances of digital devices such as the screen cap function to capture instances of sexual interaction and subject them to wider forms of access and circulation on a range of social media. This paper will consider the significance of these practices in relation to queer theories of sex publics and counterpublics. A focus on unexpected uses and pleasures multiplies the potential of digital devices, I argue, by expanding our perception of their affordances.

BIO
Kane Race is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published widely on gay male responses to HIV/AIDS in the context of antiretroviral therapy. His book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (2009, Duke University Press) draws on gay community responses to HIV/AIDS and drug harm reduction to promote what he calls ‘counterpublic health’. In recent work he has considered gay sexual practice in the digital context and how it might contribute to counterpublic formations. His work on gay sex in the digital context is published in Culture, Health & Sexuality (2014), Sexualities (2015) and Contemporary Drug Problems (2015). Other publications include Plastic Water: materiality, markets and biopolitcs (with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter, MIT Press, forthcoming).

Author

• Kane Race, U of Sydney