Conference AgendaOverview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
STUDYING DIGITAL SEXUAL CULTURES BEYOND ANGLOCENTRISM
Time:
Saturday, 18/Oct/2025:
11:00am - 12:30pm
Location: Room 10E
Presentations
ID: 435
/ Sexual Cultures: 1
Fishbowl
Onsite - English
Topics: Method - Ethnography/Autoethnography, Method - Interviews/Focus Groups, Topic - Gender/Sexuality/Feminism/Queer Theory, Topic - Platform Studies Keywords: sexual cultures, platform governance, local platforms, anglocentrism
STUDYING DIGITAL SEXUAL CULTURES BEYOND ANGLOCENTRISM
Susanna Paasonen 1 , Eduardo Espindola Braud Martins 2 , Carolina Parreiras 3 , Jenny Sundén 4 , Katrin Tiidenberg 5
1 University of Turku, Finland; 2 Federal University of Uberlândia; 3 University of São Paulo; 4 Uppsala University; 5 Tallinn University
The impact of platformization on online sexual content production involves issues recognized at an international scale, such as the centralization of traffic around leading hubs (e.g., PornHub, OnlyFans, Chaturbate), the unequal income streams that these afford, the difficulties of sex workers to access online payment systems, and the challenges involved in content producers maintaining public social media presence due to strict content policies and tendencies to over-enforce them (e.g., Caminhas 2025; Stegeman & al. 2024; Webber & Franco 2024). This fishbowl focuses especially on the research agendas and findings in non-Anglophone contexts, asking how national legislation meets platform policies, how content producers navigate online in/visibilities, and what kinds of local platform ecologies exist parallel to centralized monopolization (Srnicek 2017, 45).
Our central aim is to shift attention to developments and concerns exceeding the power of US-based data giants and their increasingly conservative – or plain regressive – policies towards differently distributed vulnerabilities and agencies on platforms both large and small, local and markedly international. To refocus the discussion of digital sexuality also serves to challenge the Anglocentrism that cuts through much state-of-the-art inquiry on this topic. Rather than merely settling for a critique of how sexuality is governed and ousted by social media community standards and app store policies set by e.g. Meta and Alphabet, we turn to locally operating sexual platforms and media in order to learn from them and articulate alternatives. We build on the premise that studying local platforms or forms of sexual expression that may seem marginal—both geographically and culturally—allows for new ways of understanding what digital sexual cultures are, and what they could be.