Researchers agree that the predominant scripts of campus sexual culture, normalizing casual encounters with ambiguous distinctions between hookups and dating, offer contradictory risks and rewards ...for young adults, particularly young women. The arrival of the novel coronavirus in 2020, however, upended the lives of young adults just as they were shaping sexual and romantic careers. We ask, extending critical intersectional approaches, whether the global pandemic, like a natural experiment, might challenge troubling exclusionary as well as gendered aspects of contemporary sexual culture. In‐depth interviews with 40 “twenty‐somethings” completing undergraduate degrees at a selective university at two points over a year apart found that for most the pandemic offered a needed respite. We suggest: first, many young women used the disruption to prioritize their autonomy, with increased partner churn and detachment. Second, some sexual and racial minority participants, and the few with physical disabilities, reported the pandemic normalized their experience as outsiders, strengthening their self‐development. Finally, the more intentional dating practices one participant named “Covid consent” lessened gendered risks of sexual violence and modeled mutual respect for boundaries. While those without class privilege had less ability to enact such boundaries, pandemic challenges may point to healthier, more inclusive sexual scripts.
Researchers agree that the predominant scripts of campus sexual culture, normalizing casual encounters with ambiguous distinctions between hookups and dating, offer contradictory risks and rewards ...for young adults, particularly young women. The arrival of the novel coronavirus in 2020, however, upended the lives of young adults just as they were shaping sexual and romantic careers. We ask, extending critical intersectional approaches, whether the global pandemic, like a natural experiment, might challenge troubling exclusionary as well as gendered aspects of contemporary sexual culture. In‐depth interviews with 40 “twenty‐somethings” completing undergraduate degrees at a selective university at two points over a year apart found that for most the pandemic offered a needed respite. We suggest: first, many young women used the disruption to prioritize their autonomy, with increased partner churn and detachment. Second, some sexual and racial minority participants, and the few with physical disabilities, reported the pandemic normalized their experience as outsiders, strengthening their self‐development. Finally, the more intentional dating practices one participant named “Covid consent” lessened gendered risks of sexual violence and modeled mutual respect for boundaries. While those without class privilege had less ability to enact such boundaries, pandemic challenges may point to healthier, more inclusive sexual scripts.
During the past decade, the states situated on the territory of the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe have made newspaper headlines around the world for topics on gender and sexuality: it ...seems that each step towards gender equality and inclusive sexual citizenship in the region has been accompanied by counter-actions on different scales. In what way is the present day of appropriate legislation and recent backlash connected to the legacies of regulations of gender relationships, intimacies, and sexualities under state socialism? What role do economic, political, and educational changes that took place in the region in the 1990s play in these developments? And finally, can we speak about certain similarities between discourses on sexuality and intimacy in the “West,” on the one hand, and in post-Soviet and East European countries, on the other? Reflecting on current changes in post-socialist societies, the authors of this special issue give their own answers to these questions.
Desde que el ChemSex (el uso intencionado de drogas con fines sexuales entre hombres gais y bisexuales) se diera a conocer a nivel mediático, especial atención ha cobrado de parte muchos sectores. ...Recientemente se ha comenzado a mencionar, desde fuera de este colectivo, la ocurrencia de “violencia sexual” en los contextos donde se lo práctica, pero muchos hombres no entienden como tal los “actos sexuales sin consentimiento (expreso)” que pudieran darse. Este ensayo busca entender, desde una perspectiva cultural, por qué muchos hombres no se reconocen como “víctimas” o “agresores” de “violencia sexual” en contextos de ChemSex. Como el ChemSex ocurre dentro de la cultura sexual gay, la cual tiene sus propios códigos, normas, valores, lenguaje, etc. que son diferentes a los de la cultura dominante (heterosexual), los significados y entendimientos en torno al contacto físico y al sexo son diferentes. Además, partiendo que la intención es tener sexo y por las formas de contacto (p.e. virtual) y encuentro (p.e. locales de sexo), entienden que los consentimientos pueden darse de manera diferente a la verbal o que están dados de manera tácita dentro de las propias dinámicas de relacionamiento socio-sexual, por eso no se reconocen como “víctimas” ni como “agresores”.
: This article discusses the use of the past in regard to the gay sexual culture of the 1970s in three AIDS plays: Robert Chesley’s Jerker (1986), Victor Bumbalo’s Tell (1993) and Michael Kearns’s ...intimacies (1989). The themes explored—celebrating the sexual freedom of the past against contemporary criticism, commemorating places where gay men could meet for sexual encounters, and a sex continuum joining the busy nightlife of the past to the stern “here and now” of AIDS—stem from memory. Sex is only possible as a past activity and narrated as such in these plays, making them at the same time “obituary plays,” because they mourn sexual culture along with specific people, but also “memory plays,” because the memory that permeates them also omits some details, all the while magnifying others, in ways different from the plays of Tennessee Williams, who invented the term.
Some argue that sexual field theory is the most promising approach to developing a comprehensive theory of collective sexual life. Yet, it remains underdeveloped. Pointing to a narrow empirical ...foundation, I use collegiate hookup cultures to reveal the potential of extended case study. I present the first comprehensive consideration of hookup cultures from a field theory perspective and show how these cases can both answer existing questions and provoke new ones. These include questions about the relationship between structures of desire and complex, contradictory, and untapped personal desires; the role of aversion and trauma in shaping the habitus; the dynamics of power, from the micro to the macrosociological; the bounds and reach of a field’s force; and sexual fields’ embeddedness in organizations. Given these potential theoretical advances, I argue that a wider range of cases will allow sexual field theory to fulfill its promise to sexualities scholarship.
This article is one of the first to consider the digital phenomenon of computer-generated imagery (CGI) pornography, a highly significant site of convergence that combines the technologies, cultures ...and aesthetics of digital animation, video games and pornographic film. As much of this controversial new content is produced through the hacking of licensed video game franchises, CGI pornography typifies the democratic possibilities of the digital economy. However, this bizarre digital subculture exemplifies too the tension between ludic and labour-intensive digital practises: its production is embedded simultaneously in the anti-productive play of gaming, hacking and pornography, and in the intensive, neo-liberal labour practises associated with free labour and the video game industry. This article explores CGI porn as a specific site of convergence that fundamentally alters the aesthetics and function of digital pornography and relatedly the libidinal subject that is interpolated in this crucial aspect of digital culture. The filmic genre of pornography has a long tradition of producing affective engagement through vicarious access to the material body; its evocations of veracious materiality and presence are only amplified in a digital culture of virtuality and dematerialization. This article analyses how the technological construction of CGI porn is foregrounded in its images and films, highlighting the codes and patterns of the genre and blending them with a stark revelation of the restrictions and capabilities of CGI technology. The article explores how multiple instances of hypermediacy and hypersignification in CGI porn expose and affectively engage with the fact of convergence itself: that is, revealing technological capacities and limitations of digital animation and eroticizing its interpenetration with the films’ diegeses, aesthetics and representations of movement become the central function of this new cultural output. The libidinal focus of this type of digital pornography fundamentally shifts, then, away from the human body and the attempt to gain vicarious imagistic access to it through digital technologies. Instead, the labour of the animator, and the coding and characters they borrow from video game designs, become the libidinal focus of computer-generated pornography. As this new digital phenomenon uncovers and eroticizes the workings of CGI, so it dismantles the veracity and materiality promised by ‘real body’ digital pornography: CGI porn’s stark foregrounding of its technological constructedness clarifies the artificiality of its ‘real body’ counterpart. This article posits, then, an important new site of convergence. Pornography is a central node in the culture, politics and economics of digital technology, and the ways in which its convergence with CGI practises and video game culture has produced not just an entirely new digital phenomenon, but has fundamentally altered digital pornography's conception of the desirous subject and the material body, are crucial.
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