Advanced seminar in Media Technology

Jenny Sundén: Latex, spanking and cinnamon buns – Exploring sexual social media

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University. Her research is situated in the intersection of digital media studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminist and queer theory, affect theory and ethnography. This presentation is based on the collaborative project "Rethinking sexuality: A geopolotics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden and Finland", with Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku), and Katrin Tiidenberg (Tallinn University), funded by The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

Summary: General purpose social media platforms have increasingly excluded sex from acceptable forms of sociality in the abstract name of user safety. Building oninterviews with users as well as the webmaster of the Swedish BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside, this presentation explores what follows from including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media and, by extension, in including sex in definitions of “the social” itself. While social media research has largely been invested in analyzing individual platforms, there is also a growing discussion of how users move between them in promiscuous ways, giving shape to social media ecologies both complex and habitual. The participants in our study describe constant balancing acts between privacy and publicness as they move from explicitly sexual social media platforms to more mainstream ones, as they manage their respective profiles and user names, and as they build and foster connections and disconnections across platforms. Overall, we attend to the complexities involved in sexual self-expression as it is not contained by, but rather put in motion across platforms, user cultures, and systems of sexual norms.