What kind of sexualities are we making?
I love that line. It's my favorite line in this whole dialogue, actually, because I feel like it really sums up the conversation as a whole.
There's this great notion Wilding and Russo touch on* about the way the corporatization of the 'Net has made it more difficult for chance interactions, and discoveries, and--hey, here's this concept popping up again--identity fluidity. We can see that with the Nymwars with Google and the ongoing privacy concerns on Facebook--identity is locked into a marketable set of likes/dislikes.
This is fascinating given their earlier discussion of how technology enables sex discourses but also controls the terms of those discourses. I mean, this isn't new stuff--this is Vintage Foucault, 1976, favorite beverage of contemporary academics everywhere--but it feels fresh in this context largely because the endless dialogues back and forth about the social net work that we're all caught in and how likely we are to be hauled out of the cyber sea and sold as hors d'oeurvres alongside the aforementioned Foucault Wine have, from what I've seen, largely lacked this kind of theoretical critique, at least in the popular media.
And yet the effects of the commodification of preferences has filtered out into our understanding of sexuality within the context of these social net works. There is a strong encouragement to embrace labels and identities that can be caught in these nets--Facebook still, for example, allows you only to describe yourself as interested in Men, Women, Both, or Neither, enabled by a series of checkable boxes. There is no way to customize the descriptor for your relationship, and I know for a fact that you can only be in a relationship visibly with one person at once.
This is fascinating to me because it suggests that part of the more corporate Web** is the easy categorization of sexualities in order to create market groups. One of the possible side effects is that exploration of sexuality is deincentivized as users are encouraged to see the addition or subtraction of a preference as profound alterations of their fundamental identity. And while it is possible to change your orientation or your descriptor for your relationship, such a change is an Event, and signals the end of one era and the beginning of another rather than an arbitrary moment in a fluid progression from one state to another.
Wouldn't it be fascinating to study whether or not coming out or exploring sexuality is more stressful for people that heavily use social media? I think there's some real potential there, especially considering the predominant high school and college age demographics of Facebook*** and the drama already associated with sexuality at that age.
Even kinks are largely codified and divided into subsets. While sites like FetLife are often seen as a boon to sexual exploration, given the critique here I have to question that logic somewhat. After all, the existence of such a major, centralized platform naturally allows that platform to shape the discourse on sexuality. In the context of a web where the application of particular terms creates chunks of identity large enough to be caught and sold, even the simple act of dividing up different kinks and preferences and sex acts into separate pages within a website might be dangerous.
Now, I think Russo makes a great point here that there's some issues with the total breakdown of structure, but at the same time I think maybe there's room for the establishment of some spaces for sexual identity play--even play only in the realm of the mind--without us actually just ending up having lots of queer sex in public, as she puts it. Like, I'm thinking in particular of this interesting little tool I came across today--Yay Genderform!--which is... well, another range of selections to choose from delineated by checkboxes.
Wow, what an improvement.
There's two things that fascinate me here though. First of all, there's the sheer dizzying array of possibilities, most of which I've never even heard of before. The massive number of options is so overwhelming that the exercise immediately becomes not one of identification but exploration. There's no alternative but to explore if you want to use the tool, and by the end I suspect using the tool because quite extraneous. It's a fake tool, in a way, doing its job by adding to rather than reducing effort! The sheer deconstructive flip-flopping here is pretty delicious on its own.
On top of that, there's this absolutely wonderful little button at the very bottom.
"Randomize."
What better way to encourage people to think of this as a tool for identity play rather than identity processing and packaging? Spin the sexy wheel of fortune, the site suggests, and see what you get. See if those identities work for you. If not, spin again! We've got all night.
That's glorious.
There's a danger, I think, in falling too deeply into a kind of assumptive, passive love with set structures. We get really comfortable with the idea that this series of tubes, not unlike the series of tubes within the human (and particularly the female) body, naturally are supposed to function a particular way, and it is paramount that we invent technologies in order to control that functionality. It's not even a question of efficacy past a certain point--it's a matter of making sure that people are using their tubes in the proper way.
Often the demands for the regulation of women are just as sensible, well thought out, and scientifically sound as the demands for bandwidth throttling, data usage caps, &c., &c.
Which isn't to say that the two conflicts are equivalent in the sense that they have equal weight and importance--that would be as ridiculous as treating the Internet like a big truck!--but maybe there's some value to this as an analogy in the way it points out some of these issues of technobiopower and how they unite very disparate fields of interest.****
There's one last thought that isn't really connected directly to the above thoughts necessarily but is still worth at least mentioning, I think. Considering the dominance of women in many (although not all, as the continued awfulness of the gamer and comics communities demonstrates) fandom spaces, it's worth considering the various purges carried out by fanfiction.net of adult content, often without warning resulting in stunning loss of data, from a feminist perspective. If fandoms are potentially a space for the exploration of sexuality in a relatively safe and imaginative way by women, then these purges almost certainly disproportionately affect women and damage the ability of women to engage in a discourse on sexuality.
This seems like a strong intersection between the always-present and steadily-growing culture of data preservation and protection on the web and various strains of feminist and queer theoretical thought. To me, it seems that even if there's an element of perhaps overly idealistic fervor to these sexual liberation projects, making room for exploration is of paramount importance. Maybe that's my artist's bias coming through, but if we're going to talk about the kind of sexualities we're making, we should also be talking about the technological systems that make making sexualities possible.
This is Cyborg Maria, where all the lonely droids and lovers have their wildest dreams.
*Not as long as maybe a longer session would've made possible unfortunately but nevertheless.
**Isn't it interesting that "cyberspace" with its implications of vastness and openness has given way to the "Web" and the "Net," methods of capture and control?
***Google+'s demographics are naturally higher as the social network is used exclusively by Google employees.
****Or it may just be a great excuse to post the "Series of Tubes" remix video.
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