Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres

Abstract

Gender, sexuality and embodiment in digital spheres have been increasingly studied from various critical perspectives: From research highlighting the articulation of intimacies, desires, and sexualities in and through digital spaces to theoretical explorations of materiality in the digital realm. With such a high level of (inter)disciplinarity, theories, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in relation to digital spheres have become highly diversified. Aiming to reflect this diversity, this special issue brings together innovative and newly developed theoretical, empirical, analytical, and critical approaches in the study of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. By connecting intersectionality and digitality to one another, it adopts an integrated approach that reflects the intricacy and interconnectedness of social categories and markers of difference, privilege, performance, and discrimination. The contributions explore a range of differently situated digital cultural practices, including intimate and sexual experiences with(in) digital media, online self-presentation, expressions of digital resistance, and forms of backlash and online attacks. What connects all these articles, is their critical approach to intersectional inequalities and privileges in relation to digitality, plus their nuanced perspective on gender, sexuality, and embodiment interferentially. The final article is based on a roundtable discussion and aims to encourage interdisciplinary connections and suggests ways of doing research that builds bridges between academia and activism.

Roundtable: Affordances, Diversity, and Inclusion on Dating Apps - A Dialogue between Sociologists and Media Studies Researchers about ‘Hinge’

“…Our observations confirm the findings by other existing studies that digital platforms, such as dating apps, are extensions of the material realities they are embedded in (Van Doorn, 2011). Digital dating apps are only one manifestation of how our lives are now more than ever before dominated by almost untraceable cloud environments, automated smart environments, algorithmic biases, racism, and predictive policing, sellable Big Data, even more, complex codes, and other types of bits and bytes (De Vuyst, Geerts, & Rahbari, 2022).…”

Mapping the social implications of platform algorithms for LGBTQ+ communities

“…Researchers must develop innovative empirical studies to account for the various forms of algorithmic oppression LGBTQ+ users experience on and by digital platforms. Importantly, future studies should examine how platform algorithms affect and oppress LGBTQ+ users in differentiated ways, depending on a variety of intersecting and complex factors (e.g., race, disability, social class, religion, age, local cultures, indigeneity, geopolitical contexts, legal jurisdictions), in line with studies that apply intersectional theories to digital research objects (Geerts & Rahbari, 2022). Furthermore, our review shows how platform algorithms have so far been apprehended as being predominantly oppressive in nature toward LGBTQ+ users.…”