#HotForBots: Sex, the non-human and digitally mediated spaces of intimate encounter

Abstract

Contemporary practices of sex and intimacy are increasingly digitally mediated. In this paper, we identify two distinctly spatial effects of these mediations. First, the digital extends the spaces of sex/uality beyond the immediately proximate, simultaneously expanding the potential for non-human object choice in intimate encounters. Second, the digital intensifies the experiential fidelity of intimate encounters by folding the remote into the spatially immediate, such that non-proximate intimate relations with human subjects as well as non-human objects may feel more proximate. We articulate these effects by building on and contributing to developments in the geographies of encounter, which allows us to bring together theories and conceptual framings of intimacy, digitality and sexuality in a uniquely spatial register. These effects of extension and intensification resonate in a selection of empirical examples of digitally mediated sex/uality that we place along continuums of more-and-less human and more-and-less proximate. These continuums comprise the conceptual axes of a heuristic framework that we advance to both (i) capture particular points at which configurations of spaces, practices and subject/object choices of sex crystallize given conditions of pervasive digital mediation, and (ii) provoke further interrogations of the multiple ways in which sex, sexuality and intimacy are recast by the digital.

Still getting it on online: Thirty years of queer male spaces brokered through digital technologies

“…That motivation is writ large in the emphasis of these platforms on embodied, rather than only virtual, encounter. Indeed, the almost‐immediate gratifications offered by these locative media represent one key way in which digitally mediated sex and sexualities comprise new “spaces of encounter” (Cockayne, Leszczynski, & Zook, , p. 1128). Far from a wholesale move to online life as predicted in the early days of the internet, locative networks pivot more , rather than less, on physically brokered connection.…”

Inviting the stranger in: Intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter

“…Contact brokered online sometimes stays in the virtual world (McGlotten, 2013;Miles, 2019), particularly in places where local culture makes meeting in public difficult -such as in parts of the Middle East where men and women cannot easily mix (Costa and Menin, 2016;Kaya, 2009) or for those with limited physical mobility, where online fora may offer a social lifeline (Dobransky and Hargittai, 2006). Digital technology can not only extend possibilities for stranger intimacy beyond the immediately proximate, it can also intensify these encounters by transmitting audio, images or video that make them feel more proximate (Cockayne et al, 2017).…”

“…Thinking more widely, digitally mediated forms of stranger intimacy or avoidance can be situated within a wider process of boundaryblurring in our contemporary moment taking place between conventional relations of public/private (Koch, 2020;Qian, 2018), and by association between relations such as formal/ informal work (Glucksmann, 2011;Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2014), between producers/ consumers (Bruns, 2010;Ritzler and Jurgenson, 2010) and in terms of social categories such as friend, guest, host or community member. Further, Cockayne et al (2017) have demonstrated that digital technology can also extend intimacy to the non-or more-thanhuman as people knowingly interact, for example, with robots and algorithms designed to simulate human dialogue in the pursuit of sexual pleasure and fantasy. This parallels work on the role that objects such as the car can play in constituting new forms of relations among unknown others where intimate acts of sharing, caring and even co-ownership emerge (Dowling et al, 2018).…”

Thinking space differently: Deleuze's Möbius topology for a theorisation of the encounter

“…But regardless of its ethical valence, scholars have consistently theorised the encounter in relation to particular places and usually emphasise the geographical proximity of individuals (though see Cockayne et al. [] who discuss remote digital encounters and Wilson , who discusses remote textual and aesthetic encounters with cityscapes). Encounter has been taken to be inherently spatial but the spatiality of the encounter itself – what we'll discuss here in terms of its topological unfolding – has received much less attention.…”

“…Indeed, many geographers have examined how difference and space could be considered co‐extensive or mutually constituted, and the idea of space‐as‐difference reverberates across geographic scholarship (Cockayne et al., ; Doel, ; Jacobs & Fincher, ; Massey, ; McDowell, ; Valentine, ). Moving beyond utopian conceptualisations of the encounter as necessarily generative of positive understandings of difference (Valentine, ) – a notion often underwritten by the assumptions of liberal and representational cosmopolitan politics – geographers continue to see the encounter as a way to think through what happens at meeting points and contact zones, whether they be in physical or in digital spaces (Askins & Pain, ; Cockayne et al., ). Yet arguably, the encounter remains undertheorised, leaving open a series of questions around precisely how key terms like space, difference, and embodiment could be conceptualised (Wilson, ; Wilson & Darling, ).…”