Since the release of sex robots in 2017 by RealDoll, they have been marketed as companions and sexual fantasies. Social media platforms provide RealDoll and its affiliates the opportunity to justify and celebrate the creation of a responsive sex robot directly to the public and potential consumers. To expand the fourth level of abstraction of mass media within the social construction of technology theory, this paper investigates the Instagram and Twitter pages of the technological segment of RealDoll, Realbotix, and the most prevalent RealDoll affiliate, Brickdollbanger. Framed by Fairclough’s (2012) perspective of critical discourse analysis, I reviewed a combined 1,016 Tweets and Instagram posts to analyze the process of enrollment by key actors in relation to the design of sex robots and the sex robot industry. Results indicate humor and explicit images are utilized to market the sexual capabilities of the sex robots versus ideas of love and companionship. This paper adds to human-machine communication literature on the design of sex robots by exploring the sex-forward messaging not fully present in other marketing materials of Realbotix.

”Edge-ball reaction videos“ are newly popularized digital content on Chinese video-sharing platforms that feature creators reacting to sexually explicit digital content, or “edge-balls”. In mainland China, the production and dissemination of pornography is criminalized and subjected to strict censorships by the state-platform, with said censorship heavily reliant on mobilizing peer surveillance. Rooted in such political and historical context, edge-ball reaction videos show characteristics of surveillance cultural practice in the digital age. Drawing the frameworks of surveillance culture and platform governance, this study qualitatively examines edge-ball reaction videos and ask: what role does this form of cultural production play in the state-platform-sanctioned surveillance of sexual content and gendered bodies? What does it mean for the public sex culture in Chinese digital spaces? With preliminary analysis, I argue that: firstly, most edge-ball reaction videos comply with the state-platform-centered surveillance culture targeting sexual content through reinforcing the state-sanctioned surveillance imaginaries, encouraging surveillance practices, and adding the layer of affect to surveillance; Secondly, surveillance practice is commodified as entertainment in these videos through dramatizing and creators’ partaking in the platform visibility game; Finally, by positioning women as desiring subjects who freely express their sexuality, some edge-ball reaction videos show feminist sensibility and subversive potentials. This project sheds light on the sexual expression and reproduction of gendered and sexualized bodies in platformized Chinese cultural production. In addition, it also complicates our understanding of contemporary surveillance systems by examining the actual practices of the surveillance subjects and their interactions with the state-platform configuration.

This paper makes an argument for the value of including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media. Building on interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi and Libertine.Center) devoted to nudity, sex, and kink, it examines the implications of defining sex platforms as social media and the analytical avenues that the inclusion of sexual sites opens up for understanding forms of sociability within them.

We start by mapping the studied platforms as built infrastructures that shape and constrain sociality, with a particular focus on developer dialogue with the broader social media ecosystem. We then discuss how these built spaces are used and experienced as “socio-sexual silos” with a particular focus on notions of safety. Finally, we consider what this means for sociality on social media and propose “context promiscuity” as a conceptual aid for unpacking this.

This project examines the emergence of the virtual sexual cultures of disabled people. I theorize the virtual as a condition of possibility for disabled sexuality by engaging a textual and discourse analysis of an emblematic case study—Andrew Gurza’s podcast Disability After Dark, as well as his pornographic persona and social media presence to understand the political and cultural ramifications, affordances, and limitations of expressing virtual sexual culture of disability on the internet. There is no singular sexual culture of disability. Rather, I argue that by attending to the discourses of desire embedded in Gurza’s virtual milieu as a queer, nonbinary, power wheelchair user with Cerebral Palsy, we might imagine more emancipatory futures for all.

Moreover, I am interested in the tactics that disabled people like Andrew Gurza use to enunciate their sexualities in virtual spaces as a politics and a mode of being in the world. Additionally, Gurza’s pornographic performance adds a compelling dimension to this discussion of the “real.”

In claiming disabled sexual cultures as “revolutionary,” I mean to suggest that discourses of desirable disability are resistant tactics to oppressive sociopolitical regimes that work to surveil, curtail, and litigate disabled lives, and especially to a medical model of disability which seeks to “cure” disability, sometimes violently, and to erase or otherwise elide vibrant epistemological cultures of sexual expression. Gurza is one such figure. However, he is far from the only one. Ultimately, to paraphrase Neil Marcus, “Disability is not tragedy… it is a [virtually] ingenious way to live.”