[ecrea] CFP: Sexual Politics and Digital Media Infrastructures: Challenges for Diversity

Sexual Politics and Digital Media Infrastructures: Challenges for Diversity

Call for papers for a special issue of DiGeSt (JOURNAL OF DIVERSITY AND 
GENDER STUDIES)

Editors: Sander De Ridder and Frederik Dhaenens

Deadline abstracts (500 words): 15 May 2018

The breadth of what it means to study sexuality in the context of media 
has changed significantly in recent years because of current 
technological, social, and cultural changes. The shift from one-to-many 
to many-to-many communication infrastructures has multiplied the 
institutional, technological, and symbolic dimensions that need to be 
taken into account when inquiring into sexualities and media, cultures 
and communications. The digitization of sexuality – which refers to 
changing attitudes, experiences, and practices to sexualities because of 
digital media – demands that scholars look beyond the well-established 
frameworks to study sexuality and media, expanding their methodological 
and theoretical perspectives in order to fully comprehend sexual 
life-worlds and the digital.

This special issue seeks to advance the understanding of sexual politics 
and diversity in the context of the materiality of digital media 
(including affordances, algorithms, and the politics of social media 
platforms and data). It wants to make a theoretical, conceptual, and 
empirical contribution to the field of gender and diversity studies by 
exploring how techno-cultural and socioeconomic aspects of digital media 
infrastructures are intertwined with sexualities.

We suggest a number of ways in which this could be done.

1. The transformation of sexualities because of digital media 
infrastructures is traditionally valued in either positive or negative 
terms. Examples of distinctly positive claims are presumed increases in 
digital safe spaces where sexual minorities can interact (e.g., on 
dating apps such as Grindr), and ideas that digital media are providing 
new and more opportunities for voicing sexual difference (e.g., on 
sharing platforms such as YouTube). An example of a negative claim is 
that the Internet also increases sexual risks, particularly for children 
and young people. The special issue wants to move beyond anecdotal 
evidence and moral claims by developing analytical approaches that 
understand the material complexities of digital media in relation to 
sexual diversity. This means exposing the often unseen digital media 
infrastructures that run underneath, through, and in the background of 
sexualities. By conceptualizing the emerging struggles that are inherent 
to the accelerating digitization of sexuality, we want to explore what 
is changing/continuing in people’s sexual life-worlds because of digital 
media infrastructures.

2. If digital media infrastructures are important to people’s 
sexualities, there is a need to engage with the question of how and why 
they matter. How do the techno-cultural and socioeconomic aspects of 
digital media create flourishing and diverse sexual life-worlds? How are 
diverse sexual life-worlds protested, controlled, managed or strictly 
regulated on different platforms? How and why are some sexualities 
valued, while others are stigmatized?

3. Digital media infrastructures are generating many unseen sexual 
geographies that go beyond national contexts. Research into the sexual 
politics of digital media, therefore, needs to engage with the profound 
cosmopolitan contexts of sexual diversity, reflexive intimacies, and the 
emerging role of human and sexual rights in the digital sphere. To this 
end, we welcome submissions that challenge, map ,and highlight the 
sexual politics of diversity in relation to the spatiality of digital 
media infrastructures.

Please submit abstracts for papers by 30 March to both editors – Sander 
De Ridder ((Sander.DeRidder /at/ UGent.be)) and Frederik Dhaenens 
((Frederik.Dhaenens /at/ UGent.be)).

The editors will invite full papers on the basis of selected abstracts 
by early May 2018, with full papers to be submitted for independent peer 
review by 1 October 2018. The special issue will be published in the 
fall of 2019. All volumes of the journal are made available in Open 
Access after an embargo period of two years.

For more information on the CfP and DiGeSt, please visit: 
http://upers.kuleuven.be/en/digest-call-papers

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