Susanna Paasonen, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku, Finland

A key way in which porn works is through creating bodily resonance between the viewer and the actor. It relates to moments when an individual is moved, touched, affected when moved by images resonating at the right frequency: a bond is formed before conscious processing happens.

Negative resonance or dissonance occurs when something unpleasant is viewed – such as in “Two girls, one cup”.

No two experiences are ever the same. In porn, the effect on men is mediated through cognition of elements such as movement, and rhythm. The body constantly learns: so the experience of porn shapes the ways in which the body responds to porn.

Experience shifts between detachment and resonance – so identification between viewer and porn actor is never constant.

Sharif Mowlabocus, Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Sussex

However, prior to the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967, gay men had no legitimate place in which to seek pleasure – and were forced to do so in dedicated commercial and often semi-legal – and public – locations. In space terms, therefore, gay sex has often been associated with public places – and understanding the impact of changes to the geography of those spaces (from changes to public lighting to the situation of street furniture) is key to understanding interaction.

Sharif has been interested in looking at how the use of digital technology has become a tool both for opening up public spaces – and also, to some degree, to close down the options permitted. He has looked at how gay men have used digital technology – including app culture such as Grinder – for digital cruising in order to satisfy the three ‘F’s – friendship, flirting and fucking.

Example given of how a gay man in Madrid without access to gay community is using app technology to meet others on a tube train travelling through a known gay area. Mobile technologies are enabling physical encounters in real time between individuals unable otherwise to access the gay community: the technology is creating a new (hybrid) gay space.

However, while this technology has enabled and empowered, there is also some degree to which it is used to close down communication. For instance, a gay man last year went to update his Grinder App – and Google “suggested” he might wish to download a sex offender identification app. The app locates on a map current known sex offenders – is a form of digital panopticon, subjecting both individual offenders to policing and also generating fear amongst users.

There is a serious danger, however, with these apps: the underlying data is very shaky, so mimicking the real time locative aspects of current mobile technology, without actually providing it. But is this reallyhelpful or about generating fear.

Even more dangerous is the way in which these apps, while providing inaccurate data on supposed sex offenders request permission to use the current location of the person potentially downloading it. In other words, both by generating fear and by asking individuals to own up to their current location, the app encourages individuals to self-police.

Thus, instead of opening up spaces, digital technology is now being used to re-inscribe public space as a place of danger and deviance, mostly through exaggerating and reifying very marginal risks.

jane fae xx

Vice-versa, if anyone is able to offer lifts, please say. I suspect i will be able to offer a couple of seats in a car towards central london (but not all the way) or at least as far s Uxbridge tube at the end of today. let me know if that would be useful for anyone.

jane xx

Ahead the Soccer World Cups 2006 in Germany and 2010 in South Africa, the media was abuzz with articles on sex work and human trafficking. It was especially striking that a specific number – 40.000 anticipated extra sex workers to meet the needs of the male World Cup visitors – occurred in many articles before both World Cups, 2006 and 2010. In Germany, these 40.000 sex workers often became 40.000 trafficking victims, mostly from Eastern Europe. Even though there was no evidence for 40.000 extra sex workers in 2006, this rumour was kind of recycled in South Africa in 2010, and sometimes even increased to 100.000 people who were feared to be trafficked into the country. The paper analysed some of the discourses that adapt to this number and which fears might have been effected by it:

1. Major sporting events seem to be linked to a higher need in sexual services. Football with its references to ‘real’ masculinity and obvious heteronormativity offers a ‘battlefield’, in which the discourses on Sex Work are part of a discursive field that interrelates with hegemonic constructions of maleness and male, heterosexual sexuality.

2. The conjured ‘fact’ of 40.000 extra sex workers who are expected to enter the country, as well as all the world cup visitors, disclose the fears of open or permeable borders. Linked to it are xenophobic discourses of ‘the others’ who are regarded as threatening: either the foreign soccer fans to ‘our women’ or the foreign sex workers to ‘our morality’.

3. There seems to be a discursive need of the ‘female victim’, which becomes obvious in the constant conflation of human trafficking and sex work.

4. There is the binary of female sex workers as either victims or villains. Therein Sex Workers can be regarded as the ‘abject other’ to white procreative heterosexuality.

On improving performance labor within the pornography industry: female producers and the politics of providing an ethical working environment
Rachel Libermann

Independent sex work: entrepreneurial cultures in the informal economy?
Jane Pitcher. Department of Social Sciences,Loughborough University

Drawing on an on-going study based primarily on interviews with female, male and transgender sex workers to explore their job-related experiences and perceptions of the conditions and nature of their work, this paper will examine labour processes in different indoor settings.

Jane argues that independent escorts’ presentation of themselves as small business managers who take control of their work organization and practices challenges dominant narratives of sex work as an extreme response to desperate circumstances. Her findings so far show that participants working as independent operatives view themselves as exercising a considerable degree of autonomy compared with workers in many other precarious service sector occupations.

Ms Pitcher both draws on and interrogates theories of emotional labour and identity management to make sense of the way in which independent escorts and also sex workers in other settings, such as managed working flats, develop strategies to manage the client-worker relationship and draw boundaries between intimate labour and non-commercial intimate relationships. She also suggests ways of reconceptualising forms of indoor sexual labour to take into account not only market structures and differential skills requirements, but also the aspirations of workers and the comparative levels of agency they experience.

Jane may be contacted via her department.

Cardoso’s input was on the constitution of a polyamorous ethical subjectivity, and how does that subjectivity relate to other social discourses, from the analysis of the e-mails of the first mailing list on polyamory.

Daniel Cardoso may be contacted via danielscardoso@gmail.com or through his website.

Non/Monogamies
Meg Barker

Polyamory – intimate practice, identity or sexual orientation
Christian Klesse, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

Polyamory means different things to different people. While some consider polyamory to be nothing more than a convenient label for their current relationship constellations or a handy tool for communicating their willingness to enter more than one relationship at a time, others see it as an anchor for aspects of their core identities. This paper looks at identity narratives around polyamory.

How do polyamorous identities relate to other sexual identities? The paper rejects the common conflation of polyamory with bisexuality. But what is polyamory? Is it just one more category of sexual orientation? Do modes of polyamorous identification undermine hegemonic categorisation of sexual identities along the lines of sexual object choice?

Are there any accounts on poly desire which have the potential for ‘queering’ our current understandings of eroticism and sexuality? The term polyamory matches rather novel accounts of socio-sexual identification. Contemporary theories on sexual identities still have difficulties to accommodate them within their paradigms.

Christian may be contacted at c.klesse@mmu.ac.uk

Queering non/monogamy: an anarchist approach
Jamie Heckert

The presentation is about the phenomenon of Compensated Dating (CD), which generally refers to a teenage girl dating a man in exchange for financial or social benefits. Since sex is usually associated with CD, CD is regarded as simply a euphemism of teenage prostitution. To date, there is no scientific research on male clients of CD, so I focused on clients’ experiences and how they understand and practice CD. I addressed three questions: (1) what is the process of becoming a client? (2) What are the perceptual factors that initiate and sustain their CD involvement? (3) How do personal meanings of self, CD and CD providers affect clients’ sexual practices?

Based on Cassini’s cyber ethnography of a online CD form, formal interviews and informal conversations with CD participants, as well as participant observations, they have identified three stages in the process of becoming a client, namely exploration, actualization, and protection. They have also indicated how the high level of interactions amongst CD participants leads many clients to perceive that CD is not a form of commercial sex exchange, but a new form of social network. This kind of perception increases clients’ tendency to have unsafe sex with CD providers.

Sexual education and equal sexual rights in Slovenia or how can the government fail to educate its people and equalise their sexual rights

Nina Sirk

Nina derives her accounts on what is going on in Slovenia from an article by Maria Martha Collignon Goribar (2011) where she argues that Western sexuality has been (and still is) constructed around four main characteristics: monogamy, heteronormativity, marriage and reproduction. The problem arises when one of these aspects is missing and clear example of this are two very recent movements in Slovenian society.

The first one is the new progressive Family Code, publicly presented in September 2009, and the second one is the certificate of responsible sexuality that first graders of high schools (15-16 years of age) will be signing for the third time at the end of May. The new Family Code could be compared with some of the more liberal worldwide legislations in the field of the family, while the certificate conveys sexuality as heterosexual, reproductional, possibly marital and of course monogamous. We rejected the Code at the referendum in March this year, while the certificate is by many viewed as non discriminational and not problematic at all.

Nina can be contacted on nina.sirk1@gmail.com

Sex machine: technosocial networks
Cari Lee McKinney

Youth’s sexual culture and consumer society in contemporary Russia
Lili Pankratova

Limor’s research focuses on the tension between the embodiment of the “intersexed” body and the bio-social practices that shape and force it to be like what is conventionally considered a typical male/female body. The lecture analyses Shaker’s story, an Intersexed person who is living in Israel.

Through the body and experience of “Shahker,’ she describes the paradox that exists in the current medical treatment of intersexuality, especially in Israel. Shaker’s body, like other intersexed bodies, simultaneously threatens and protects. Like a secret, it threatens the social order and undermines the stability and the meaning of the sex-gender categories, but the body also protects its unique and particular existence.

The greater the effort made by the bio-social practices to make intersexed bodies to disappear, the greater their presence and existence. Bodies do not speak the language of secrets or play by their rules. “Intersexed” people invite us to reexamine ourselves, to doubt the relevancy of social categories that confine the body-self, but also invite us to rethink the workings of the body within and beyond the social discourse.

Limor can be contacted on limormdanon@gmail.com

“We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united peopple, regardless of race language or religion…” But what if I’m gay? The homosexual as a discursive citizen in Singapore
Melvin Chng

No space for sex: the Tel Aviv lgbt centre and the eradication of public sex
Adi Moreno

“Male impersonation”: understanding the sex panioc over ‘passing’ in Sri Lanka
Shermal Wijerwardene

Katrien Jacobs, scholar, curator and artist in the field of new media and sexuality

However, on consideration, writing about sewx in China is far less sensitive than writing about other more political topics. Response when Katrien’s book came out was interesting: some degree of distancing, use of “foreign images” to stigmatise. However, the reaction was not all negative and the publication of Katrien’s work appears to have opened a door on this as a research subject.

China is awash with control mechanisms. One of the most effective is the “50 cents army” which consists of ordinary citizens, paid by the state to infiltrate and participate in transgressive internet activities in order to monitor. There is also a great deal of threat promulgated through statistics as to numbers of people jailed for internet transgression – but it is likely that this is more state-inspired myth than real.

Content of Chinese porn

A large part of Chinese porn is dubbed Japanese videos. Much of this content is violent, includes much rape play and is demeaning to women: it is not very liberated or liberating – although the existence of such content inspired many Chinese to join Faceook (as opposed to political motivation).

This has now been updated by homegrown porn which is organised online by region – a statement about sexualising “all of” China. Sexual porn in China appears to be very much about “resexualising China”. There is not much obvious DIY porn in China, but the fact it exists at all is significant.

In addition, porn has support from net activism focussed on the fight against censorship. Porn is supported by activists such as Ai Wei Wei: this in turn has complicated matters, as the Chinese authorities have accused him of spreading pornography – and net supporters have hit back with online direct action around the concept of “nudism is not pornography”.

According to a study by Simon Smith, more than 800 items were registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office as sex toys between 1840 and 1997. Among them was a condom with a built-in
computer chip that can play music. Progress?

From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. No one can predict what the future will bring, but history indicates that sex will continue to play an essential role in technological development.

The porno effect accompanies every new technological development. Immediately after producing his famous bible, Gutenberg used his press to print erotica. Photography was utilized just as quickly. In 1874 the London police discovered 130,000 pornographic photos in the course of a single house search. The introduction of cinematic technology also confirmed the close relationship between pornography
and technological innovation: in 1896 a pornographic film was shown publicly for the first time, two years after the premiere of the first films of any interest to the general public. Since then, more
pornographic films than nonpornographic films have been produced.

That in 1977 the first video cassettes to appear on the market featured pornographic content should come as no surprise. The development of the camcorder and the instamatic camera made it possible for anyone so inclined to produce porno in privacy at home.

The fact that the first affordable Polaroid model was named “The Swinger” seems to indicate that the industry was well aware of this possible use.

All of these facts could be relegated to the status of curiosities were it not for the important role that pornography has played in the development of new technologies. New technologies are quick to appeal
to pornography consumers, and thus these customers represent a profitable market segment for the suppliers of new products and services. Without telephone sex, a sector that has been yielding
enormous profits since the 1980s, providers would have had no incentive to upgrade the communicational infrastructure. And of course one should not forget the internet, which is notorious for
being flooded with pornography. Porno sites were the first to use technologies like audio and video streaming. They were also a driving force behind the spread of high-speed internet connections and made
necessary the development of better data systems. Additionally, porno sites have promoted the development of new cultural technologies like (in)formal partnering, outsourcing, upselling and site tracking.

Today a new technology’s success with porno consumers is a dependable indicator of the product’s overall market potential. Currently, all factors show that high-tech developments like virtual reality owe a
great deal of their success to the need for further sexual stimulation. One could cite the example provided by the science-fiction concept of a full-body interface designed to produce sexual stimulation. But it isn’t science fiction anymore.

Is it going too far to assume that research in nanotechnology and genetic engineering will be influenced by our sexual needs. The surgical modification of sexual organs is no longer something very unusual.
The question is not whether these technologies alter humanity, but how they do so.

The genre of the “fantastic” is especially well suited to the investigation of the touchy area of sexuality and pornography: actual and assumed developments are frequently depicted positively and
approvingly, but just as often with dystopian admonishment. Here the classic, and continuingly valid, themes of modernism represent a clear link between the two aspects: questions of science, research
and technologization are of interest, as is the complex surrounding urbanism, artificiality and control (or the loss of control).

Depictions of the future, irregardless of the form they take, always address the present as well. Imaginations of the fantastic and the nightmarish give rise to a thematic overlapping of the exotic, the
alienating and, of course, the pornographic/sexual as well.

Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called “Culture” in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the “Culture” are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete – on command – mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person’s bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs – and control over the associated nerves – to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a
static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their
lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society
would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established.

Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species.

And that’s why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of
literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough.

“Bizarre enough for what?” — you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within
the next century.

Don’t you think, replicants?

The dildo, the cyborg and the BwO
Yael Rozin

Pins and needles: body mod in bdsm
Angelika Tsaros

Experiments in extensivity: play piercing
Laura Kane

The paper explores how the post-/queer gender-fuck switch makes incoherent the active/passive dual structuring of heterosexual sex.

By looking at practices of play piercing – temporary piercings that slide under the surface of the skin – within the queer kink scene, the paper argues for new considerations for exploring penetration and climactic intensities. While sensitive to the “magnetic field of trauma” surrounding masculinity and penetration, the paper unfolds an argument for thinking about play piercing using the language of holes and orifices.

The paper looks at how piercing anchors and integrates the body in its environment, giving context and process primacy in negotiating bodies and genders, and argues that our current gender gestalt is effectively shifting the contours of what fucking can look and feel like.

Drawing upon the work of Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz, Laura explores how representations of ‘normal’ bodes are undone by examining the affective aspect of piercing, paying attention to the politics of creating space though care and intention.

Laura can be contacted on glassantler@gmail.com