Recent ace_dac09_sex items

International Video Pornography on the Internet: Crossing Digital Borders and the Un/disciplined Gaze.

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

How does engagement with internationally produced pornography function to underscore or to undermine the full human subjectivity of ethnic, racial, national Others? I argue that contemporary global sociopolitics and the changing structure of the distribution of video pornography online (specifically the emergence of free “sex tube” video hosting sites), create a moment with particular potential for resistance to the forces disciplining Western engagement with unmediated cultural products from outside the U.S.

Disarticulating the Artificial Female

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Disarticulating the Artificial Female

GRID: Viral Contagions in Homosexuality and the Queer Aesthetics of Infection

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This paper seeks out a new queer viral aesthetic configuration that binds, interconnects, extends, and reproduces the biosocialities of homosexuality. The digital art and activist organization Queer Technologies presents their project “GRID” as viral methodologies for reconstructing the dominant GRID of homosexuality, working from Alan Liu’s call for destructive creativity—a creativity that goes “beyond the new picturesque of mutation and mixing to [. . .] the new sublime of ‘destruction.’ [. . . a] viral aesthetics.” Such an aesthetic tactic would be a viral exploitation of the homosexual’s self.

Command and Control: Cybernetics and BDSM

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This paper explores correlations between restrictive interfaces in computational systems and restrictive interfaces in BDSM (Bondage & Discipline/Dominance & Submission/Sadism & Masochism) culture. Novel technologies often serve as pet fetish objects, but how do technologies perform as subjects in fetish culture? When digital technologies appear to us as objects, they present us with an illusion of mastery. In reality, technologies are active subjects and we, their "users," must bend to their requirements. In gaming scholarship, the process by which users must first internalize machinic logic in order to win mastery over a machine is termed learning the algorithm. Indeed, in cybernetics command and control through communication has much in common with sexual power dynamics. Both involve getting a partner to do what one wants and to not do what one doesn't want. The dominant consumerist relationship with technologies is already sexually charged. But in order to imagine...

Is There Life on Adult FriendFinder? Sex and Logic with the Happy Dictator

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates web users and their sexual behaviors and pornographic self-representations as observed on the sex and dating site http://www.adultfrienfinder.com. The website is a social network and encourages members to find real-life partners for sex whether it be casual sex affairs between singles, swinging couples, or polyamorous extra-marital affairs between “aba” (“attached but available”) individuals and their lovers. The analysis is based on theories of ethnography and social networking and analyzes the effects of corporate networks and homogenizing “sex scripts” on sex lives and Internet culture in Hong Kong.

Sensuous Extimacy: Sexuation and Virtual Reality. Taking on a Gender Identity in Second Life

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

When people meet they apologize for their bodies: their bodies are never perfect, never adequate, and never quite behave exactly how people want them to. Today it seems that the virtual reality of cyberspace offers itself as an effective medium that can transport its users into a different universe, freed from the burden of the body and from the necessity of any such apology. The quickly growing number of the networking users demonstrates the rising demand for a new kind of symbolic realm, whether it be in the form of the user-friendly layout of a website or the appealing architecture of a simulated space, where one can easily inscribe oneself by obtaining a two-dimensional profile or a threedimensional digital body.

This paper addresses one of today’s myths about cyberspace that pictures it as a realm where users can discover their “true selves” or acquire new identities (and especially sexual identities), and by performing them, users may eventually become...

Islam, Sexuality, and the Internet: A Historical Reflection of the Shifting Sexual Self in Turkey

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

From the mid-1990s onward, the internet has stimulated the unprecedented development and growing tension between cultural values and identity. This is evidenced in the relationship between the dissemination of cultural values and the formation of identities on national and individual levels. The growing tension in this relationship is most particularly overt in societies that have a history of well-developed moral mechanisms of cultural protectionism.

This paper looks at the effects of internet culture on Turkish sexual identities, and its role in changing socially acceptable sexual codes and norms. It explores the developmental process of Turkish internet culture through a comparative analysis between two distinct framings of sexual identify: 1) as a product of historical and religious suppression and, 2) as a reflection of cultural rendering in electronic environments. When vectors of sexual behaviour, both explicit and implicit, are translated across cultural boundaries...