‘And next, just for your enjoyment!’: sex, technology and the constitution of desire

Abstract

In the 1976 sci-fi film Logan's Run, actor Michael York, relaxing in a fetching caftan after a day hunting 'Runners', logs-in to the 'Circuit', a de- and re-materialisation technology that allows those seeking sex to select partners. Logan's first candidate, a young man, is passed over with a smile. The second is co-star Jenny Agutter; she is accepted and we join a sexual ride in the future. Online dating sites such as Gaydar® and RSVP® would seem to have a long way to go to achieve that, and Microsoft™ needs some fast apps development to get us there. Against this background, this paper examines some starting points in our fascination with technosex, long before the Internet, in books and magazines, the creative arts and other media and cultural forms. It focuses upon gay men's contribution to this fascination, and looks at the queering of heterosexuality and the part technology has played in that process. Online technologies are examined, particularly in relation to the 'publicisation' of sexual life and to shifts in sexual identity and practice related to changing processes of sexual objectification, self-objectification and subjectification. Finally, the transformation of sex into health and healthy sex is discussed.

Tongzhi on the move: digital/social media and placemaking practices among young gay Chinese in Australia

“…All of our interviewees claim to have used common mobile apps to find other gay men since coming to Australia, most notably Grindr, Jack'd, Blue'd, Tinder, Line, and WeChat. Recent work on gay apps and constitutions of desire show that apps open a space for connecting with other gay men that transcends traditional demarcations (Abbott, 2015;Dowsett, 2015;Miles, 2017). The prevalence of locative apps or geosocial networking apps as well as locality-based friend groups within apps have had a great impact on user experience as people move online communication and networking from solely online spaces to shared physical spaces.…”

Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Digital Ontotheology

“…Related debates, even those that default to normative and moralistic traditions rather than theoretically informed reasoning, are not merely expressions of the philosophical whimsy of imagination running wildthat is to say, they are not fantasy!-but a reflection of the technological conditions in a growing number of "advanced" societies that are coming to terms with the more or less sudden realization of the deep embeddedness of their technological reliance in everyday affairs. According to the PEW Research Center, 92% of American adults own a cell phone 3 and 87% are now Internet users, 4 which translates into increased reliance on the technological appendage for things like communication, navigating spatial coordinates and temporal obligations, consumption and exchange of goods and services, and even intimate activities, like selecting sexual partners (Dowsett, 2015), and the monitoring of health (Sultan, 2015) and child safety (Oostveen, Vasalou, van den Besselaar, & Brown, 2014), all of which produce vast amounts of data that meticulously record behavioral patterns that are then repackaged, branded, and sold back to the human as technological innovation (Goodman, 2015). A core feature of these phenomena is that they lessen the need for actions that were traditionally conceived of as human by increasing the power granted to the technological base to act in our stead, which by necessity challenges the human subject as the agent of History as these individual actions are homogenized into a singular technological field of action.…”