The Geographies of Digital Sexuality

Catherine J. Nash, Andrew Gorman-Murray, Catherine J. Nash, Andrew Gorman-Murray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811368752
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811368769
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited book engages with the rapidly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, that is, the interlinkages between sexual lives, material and virtual geographies and digital practices. Modern life is increasingly characterised by our integrated engagement in digital/material landscapes activities and our intimate life online can no longer be conceptualised as discrete from 'real life.' Our digital lives are experienced as a material embeddedness in the spaces of everyday life marking the complex integration of real and digital geographies. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ways that our social and sexual practices such as dating or casual sex are bound up online and online geographies and in many cases constitute specific sexuality-based communities crossing the digital/material divide. The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements through wide-ranging, innovative and original research in a new and quickly moving field.

© The Author(s) 2019

Catherine J. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray (eds.)The Geographies of Digital Sexualityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6876-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Catherine J. Nash¹ and Andrew Gorman-Murray²

(1)

Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

(2)

Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia

Catherine J. Nash (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Andrew Gorman-Murray

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Sexuality and genderDigital technologyDigital geographiesOnline communitiesIntimacyActivism

End Abstract

Contemporary life is increasingly experienced through the ‘screen’—a life lived within a complex agglomeration of digital and material worlds. Our engagements online can no longer be understood as discrete from ‘real life’ and our real life is increasingly ordered through online behaviours, habits and practices. This digital/material intertwining reflects “both [the] expression and emergence of new spatial practices” marking how we are increasingly experiencing a “complex interplay between real and digital geographies” (Cohen, 2007, pp. 212–213). Geography has arguably taken a ‘digital turn’ as geographers pursue the “digital as both object and subject of geographical enquiry” (Ash, Kitchin, & Leszczynski, 2018, p. 25).

In this book, we use the term ‘new technologies’ to encompass a vast array of hardware and software assembled into the artefacts and practices now shaping our lives. These technologies include information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as the internet, Web 2.0, digital media, location-based services (LBS), social networking applications and locative and mobile social networks (LMSN) (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2016a). And while these new technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life, our central focus here is the transformations we are experiencing in the realm of intimacy, romance and sexual and gendered life. Engagements with the digital are reshaping bodies and embodied practices, domestic intimacies, our habits and routines, what we consider erotic and who we understand can be the object of our desire and perhaps even the meaning of ‘desire’ itself. As we have argued elsewhere, new technologies are shaping “a new ‘sexual revolution’, one that is rewriting how we understand what our bodies can ‘do’ and how we comprehend ourselves as sexual beings” (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2016a). Garlick (2011, p. 223) goes so far as to argue that we are experiencing “a technologically-mediated reorganization of the social relations of sexuality” and as geographers, we would assert the reorganization of the geographies of sexualities and queer geographies.

These new geospatial relations of sexuality are not universally welcomed or revered. While some scholars celebrate life online as a place of liberation and celebration, others worry about the seemingly unconstrained access to all things sexual including the dangerous, the perverse and the pornographic (e.g. Cooper, McLoughlin, & Campbell, 2000; Griffiths, 2001). And yet, life online is spawning new communities of interest around sexual/social relations and supporting intimate relationships over great distances (e.g. Sandow, 2014; Whalen & Schmidt, 2016). Intimacy, largely understood as including a physical closeness, is being reshaped as people develop genuine connections with others who they may never meet in real life. The rapid development of mobile technologies and locative media has strengthened the merging of digital and material spaces, helping to forge new sociabilities, mobilities and environments—enveloping social worlds where body, screen and space are continuously being transformed.

Geographers of sexuality and queer geographers argue that these developments have profound implications for how we understand both material and ‘cyber’ spaces. Online life is increasingly portable, mobile and connected and we need to understand how such engagements rework material, social relations and places with as of yet less well-understood dimensions of how we experience our everyday lives. And despite initial claims that virtual spaces offer a degree of liberating anonymity, it cannot be denied that “articulations of gender, sexuality and embodiment are intricately interwoven with people’s physical embedding in everyday life as well as the new technologies they employ to extend daily experiences into digital locales” (van Doorn, 2011, p. 532). Further, our absorption into layered digital and material worlds is palpably evident in the social practices relating to sexualities, such as online spaces (both websites and mobile applications) for a variety of sexual practices (e.g. long-term dating and casual sex) and for constituting specific sexuality-based (and gendered) communities (e.g. LGBTI and queer networks; heterosexual Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, and Sadism/Masochism (BDSM) communities and crossdressers).

The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted, technically mediated and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements. The geographies of everyday life are where embodied sexual identities, communities and practices unfold at the interface of digital lives and material encounters and are profoundly transforming spatial experiences and knowledges (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2016b). As Wilken (2009) argues, conventional sense of place is now inadequate for understanding digitally mediated mobile life.

We have organized the chapters into three parts reflecting three overall themes. In Part I, entitled ‘Making Worlds: Conceptualizing the Digital/Material Divide’, the chapters provide a broad range of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for thinking about how new technologies are implicated in the making of new digital worlds and how emergent online communities are intertwined within and implicated in the (re)constitution of material places. Part II is concerned with ‘Dating and Intimacy at the Interface’ and the four chapters explore how dating life and the practices, protocols and experiences of intimacy and community are being reshaped through various digital engagements. Finally, Part III examines the connections between ‘Activism, Politics and Communities’ as these are experienced through sexual and gendered individuals and groups across diverse landscapes.

In Part I, ‘Making Worlds: Conceptualizing the Digital/Material Divide’, Daniel Cockayne and Lizzie Richardson’s chapter takes a theoretical or conceptual approach to consider the queer temporalities of the internet. They assert that geographers need to come to grips with the temporal as well as the spatial structure of internet systems. They draw on queer theoretical musings to counter the heteronormative understandings of temporality that underpin understandings of the nuclear family and the life course. Temporal internet systems, they argue, are very much embedded within concrete histories that are linked to the “heteronormative-reproductive times of state-capitalism” which also characterizes “imaginaries of the digital”.

Catherine J. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray explore three distinctive and not necessarily commensurate approaches to conceptualizing the intersections between queer place-making and technology. First, they draw on scholarship in feminist digital geographies to sketch out the starting points for understanding the nature and constitution of subjectivities and identities developing through and within the use of new technologies. Second, they draw on Elwood and Leszczynski’s (2018) research on new spatial media to consider how user-generated geographical information can have the effect of constituting new geovisualizations that raise the possibilities of seeing material spaces queerly. Finally, they consider Kitchin and Dodge’s (2011) notion of code/space to think about the disciplining and normalizing processes always-already in play in code/spaces which continue to constitute places as heteronormative. Taken together, Cockayne and Richardson and Nash and Gorman-Murray suggest cogent theoretical interventions into how we might conceptualize queer digital and material experiences that include the constitution of sexual and gendered subjects through new technologies that incorporate both temporal and material factors.

Donna James, Jenna Condie and Garth Lean’s chapter theorizes world-building and community-making at the level of the individual and the intimate through an empirical study of how heterosexual tourists, through the use of apps, facilitate sexual encounters while travelling ‘abroad’. In particular, they consider the so-called Tinder tourist and how Tinder, as a ‘hook-up’ app, facilitates sexual experiences that intersect with travel and colonial encounters. These digitally mediated experiences underpin or contribute to some tourists’ perceptions about the ‘authenticity’ of their geographically bounded local experiences.

Beverly Yuen Thompson’s chapter on digital nomads (Makimoto & Manners, 2008) also examines a form of world-building grounded in the use of technology to facilitate intimacy and romantic connections for lives lived on the move. Increasingly, technologies are facilitating the formation of so-called mobile workers who can create location-independent careers while building romantic and intimate lives linked to and constituting specific geographies. Through a series of in-depth interviews, Yuen Thompson examines how technologies orient romance, geographic travel and location.

Part II, ‘Dating and Intimacy at the Interface’, begins with the work of Stefanie Duguay on queer women’s use of the dating app Tinder and how their everyday practices shape their sense of proximity to other queer women and a queer women’s community. Her research draws on interviews with participants located in Australia, Canada and other “passport strong” countries, living in relatively large urban centres. In using the app, her respondents reported a sense that queer women were ‘scarce’, a feeling often exacerbated by constraints on search criteria, the need for anonymity and the need to evade the advances of men, heterosexual women and couples. Her research demonstrates how claims that dating apps unproblematically link people and places are called into question and undermine the sense that technologies have somehow overcome geographical constraints.

In his chapter, Sam Miles proposes we consider how apps such as Grindr and Tinder are reshaping the geographies of sexualities conceptualized as a form of “digital-physical hybridisation”. His work on the experiences of non-heterosexual men in London, UK, highlights how users are negotiating a hybridized set of experiences that reflect reconfigurations of notions of community, technology and public and private spaces. This is brought into sharp relief through a consideration of how common and established codes of conduct continue to mediate digital encounters, although not seamlessly and often in ways that require reworkings of established practices and habits.

Emiel Maliepaard and Jantine van Lisdonk’s chapter continues this exploration of the concept of hybridization in their consideration of the use of online dating apps by Dutch men who have sex with men (MSM). The authors are interested in users’ shared interpretations of various scripts that are facilitated through both social learning and intimate interaction. Their research demonstrates that despite contestations (and potential misunderstandings), scripts (and their interpretations) are grounded in both online and offline social worlds although attention needs to be paid to both embodied experiences and communications that may differ in various contexts.

Finally, Carl Bonner-Thompson’s chapter refocuses our attention on the visceral geographies of sense and sound for men who meet in public spaces after connecting through online apps such as Grindr. Drawing on interviews with men in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, he explores how various id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Making Worlds: Conceptualizing the Digital/Material Divide
• Part II. Dating and Intimacy at the Interface
• Part III. Activism, Politics and Communities
• Back Matter