[Commlist] Digital Bodies Seminar Series

As part of our Feminist Media & Cultural Studies Summer School, the 
Centre for Gender Studies at Lancaster University is hosting a series of 
online seminars on ‘Digital Bodies’. Free and open to all!

*Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry*

*Prof Angela Jones*

*26^th April 2022, 4pm BST *Book here 
<https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/camming-money-power-and-pleasure-in-the-sex-work-industry-tickets-300880911907>

Through the erotic webcam industry—"camming”—millions of people from all 
over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, 
empowerment, and pleasure. Cam models, like all sex workers, must 
grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and 
stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones is attentive to how 
the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, 
patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ 
experiences in this new global sex industry. In their book, Camming: 
Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry, Jones pioneers an 
entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure.

**

**

*Algorithmic Gay Sexualities on Douyin*

*Dr Oscar Tianyang Zhou*

*3^rd May 2022, 4pm BST *Book here 
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/algorithmic-gay-sexualities-on-douyin-tickets-261095943997?aff=odcleoeventsincollection&keep_tld=1>

Short videos featuring same-sex romance on Douyin, the Chinese domestic 
version of TikTok, have generated lively discussions in recent years. 
Drawing upon algorithmic ethnography, this study enrols algorithms to 
gather qualitative data to examine how Chinese social media platforms 
and their algorithms intersect with gay sexualities. It aims to answer 
the following questions: how do gay men experience algorithms as part of 
their everyday lives? How do recommendation algorithms give rise to gay 
visibility in the mainstream where it is hard to obtain due to China’s 
media censorship? What does this algorithmic visibility promise Chinese 
gay men? By critically looking into the ways that gay romance contents 
are generated on Douyin, the algorithmic gay visibility arguably becomes 
a profitable convenience for corporate social media platforms and 
operates with an exclusion mechanism.

This research project is part of the research initiative in algorithmic 
gay sexualities established by Dr Shuaishuai Wang (Xi’an Jiaotong - 
Liverpool University).

*Vulnerability and Control: queer men, smartphones & cultures of intimacy*

*Dr Jamie Hakim*

*20^th May 2022, 2pm BST *Book here 
<https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/vulnerability-and-control-queer-men-smartphones-cultures-of-intimacy-tickets-269589287817>

In this presentation I will discuss the major findings of the ESRC 
funded project, ‘Digital Intimacies: how queer men use their smartphones 
to negotiate their cultures of intimacy.’ These are that i) a striking 
number of the 43 UK-based queer men we interviewed defined intimacy 
primarily in terms of vulnerability and ii) they used their smartphones 
to gain a sense of control over the areas of their intimate lives where 
they felt most vulnerable.

To understand these smartphone mediated intimacies, we approached them 
‘conjuncturally’ (Hall et, al. 1978), situating them as fully as 
possible in the historical contexts in which they were practiced. In so 
doing, I argue their emergence makes sense when we think of how 
vulnerable so many of us feel during an historical conjuncture consumed 
by ‘poly-crisis’ (Tooze, 2021) and in which the desire for ‘control’ has 
become a defining feature. We need only think of the political slogans: 
‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Control the Virus’.

In this talk I will give an overview of the specific ways that these 
conjunctural dynamics have been brought to bear on queer men’s 
smartphone mediated intimacies: primarily in how neoliberalism’s waning 
hegemony has resulted in a series of political struggles over questions 
of sex, race and gender (the ‘culture wars’); the privatisation of queer 
counter-public space; and what intimacies were practicable during the 
coronavirus pandemic. In this fraught context, where different forms of 
queer life have become more vulnerable, it seems that the affordances of 
our participant’s smartphones gave them the feeling they could exercise 
control over one of the few domains where this still felt possible – 
their intimate lives.

I conclude by considering the politics and ethics of this desire for 
control and arguing that both conjunctural analysis and research on 
digital intimacies are mutually enriched when put in conversation with 
each other.


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