This roundtable seeks to challenge and expand understandings of technology related to sex and gender by exploring new possibilities for research and design. Sextech is often understood in terms of technologies that enhance, intensify, or improve sexuality and sexual experiences in the name of sexual health and wellbeing (for example, when networked sex toys seek to measure, visualize and "optimize" orgasms).
Industry marketing narratives often focus on the opportunities for gendered empowerment afforded to sextech users and entrepreneurs alike. However, these opportunities are constrained by the chokepoints built into both global digital commerce platforms (Stardust et al 2023), and platform ‘community standards’ that restrict the marketing of products and services related to sexuality and reproductive health (Oversight Board 2023).
Participants will reflect on their own interdisciplinary research practices that have sought to reframe the ways that bodies, pleasures, and gender have been technologized and datafied via apps, platforms, devices and infrastructures. Building on recent accounts of community-based participatory research as well as theoretical discussions of sextech and a queer politics of pleasure, we invite the audience to imagine new possibilities for ethical technologies of sex and gender.
How can we envision future sextech and gender-related technologies that have space for curiosity, exploration, messiness, and indeed the elusive quality of desire? Trans people, sex workers, people of colour, and other members of marginalized and stigmatized groups often must rely on their own technological skills to address their individual and communal basic needs and challenges. What can we learn from these community-informed technologies, the people who create them, and the design processes that brought these technologies to life?
Roundtable presenters:
Kath Albury, Swinburne University of Technology (AU)
Oliver Haimson, University of Michigan (USA)
Jenny Kennedy, RMIT University (AU)
Maya Mundell, Cornell Tech/Cornell University (USA)
Jenny Sundén Södertörn University (Sweden)
