This chapter explores the world of Twitter bots (on the verge of Elon Musk’s rebranding and decision to charge for the platform’s API) from a particular angle: that of absurd humor. It builds on and advances discussions of absurd humor in general—and feminist and queer humor and absurdity in particular—by studying Twitter bots as part of a landscape where absurd humor is generated in algorithmic assemblages of human imagination and nonhuman repetition and randomness. It explores a strategic selection of humorous Twitter bot accounts, combined with background interviews with two of their creators, operating with slightly different logics: Gender of the day (@genderoftheday), which generated imaginative, poetic, and charmingly nonsensical takes on what the gender of the day could be when capaciously envisioned; a bookish kind of humor generated by Victorian queerbot (@queerstreet), which scoured digitized nineteenth-century novels for the terms “gay” and “queer”; and the eerie flora and fauna coined by the fabulously surrealist poetry bot British Gardens (@GardensBritish). The absurd represents the opposite of reason, rationality, and meaning, as its etymological Latin root, absurdus (“out of tune, uncouth, inappropriate, ridiculous”), suggests. Following this semantic route, absurd humor is out of harmony with reason and notions of decency. The chapter focuses on what happens to such incongruity when it involves not only people but algorithms, and what may be learned about the pleasures of repetition, randomness, and surprise and the minor mundane affective lifts this affords by studying the bots’ output.

Sexual pleasure is a question of sexual justice and sexual rights in so far as who is allowed or denied pleasure is a vital issue for queer, trans, and nonbinary people. Pleasure is also intimately a technological question as sex was always entangled with and regulated by technologies. In this article, we seek to delineate a queer politics of pleasure by exploring LGBTQ+ people's uses and experiences of sextech in Australia and Sweden with a specific focus on sex toys. Which bodies, identities, pleasures, and practices do sextexch assume and extend? And how do these sextech users play with (while being played by) such norms and assumptions? We begin by considering the cultural specificity of queer and feminist histories of sex toys, including the commodification of sex and pleasure in late capitalism and how this relates to sexual identities and ideas of sexual liberation. We then discuss norms of sex, pleasure, and sextech. But rather than distinguishing the normative from the antinormative as a way of locating a transgressive potential, we rather consider how norms are always part of their own variation, opening up a broader sexual field of perhaps more mundane practices, yet no less significant. Finally, we explore how pleasure aligns with or disrupts an attention to norms and identities. In contrast to the commodification of sexual identities in sextech, and the linear enhancement of pleasure by design, we further an understanding of pleasure as something more improvisational and unpredictable with limited space in mainstream sextech data economies.

On a stage of ubiquitous online sexism, this contribution explores feminist tacticsof resistance with a focus on refusal. We move from feminist memes trading invintage imageries steeped in heterosexual parody to jamming in social media,such as when pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift were buried by alternativecontent by her fans. We land on absurdity as a tactic not confined by suchreactivity but allowing for turning things around and eschewing the logic onoffer instead. From genderqueer comedy to the X/Twitter account “Men WriteWomen,” absurdity helps craft spaces for affective relief and shared hilarity.

This article focuses on the rapidly growing Swedish market of app-based audio erotic fiction through an analysis of two significant apps and publishers: Blanche Stories and Ava Stories. We explore audio erotica apps as devices of both literature, pleasure and intimate sonic connectivity. First, we discuss the specific affordances of the born-audio format, its flexible and mobile forms of listening and the consequences of this flexibility for audio erotica. Secondly, we move in on the content of these apps by taking a closer look at specific forms of erotization of books and literature present both in paratextual elements surrounding the stories, and in the stories themselves. Thirdly, we shift to a discussion of content regulation, marketing strategies and strategic framing of audio erotica apps as digital and sonic devices of pleasure. These apps and their content may be considered “safe” in a number of ways: They are framed as healthy and wholesome from a particular ethical, feminist standpoint by emphasising consent and disassociating with porn. They create intimate and, in a sense, private and safe spaces of listening. But they also carry interesting, queer potentials for mobile forms of sexuality and for public (or semi-public) sonic erotic experiences. 

Building on a study of three Nordic and Baltic digital sexual platforms, this article analyzes the perceptions of enjoyable sex and sexual belonging among 60 people, who self-identify as sexually liberal. In dialogue with Gayle Rubin’s formative work on sexual hierarchies and “good sex,” we explore our participants’ complex and often ambiguous sexual boundary work to delineate liberated sex. Independent of particular preferences (non-monogamy, BDSM, fetishism, and exhibitionism), liberated sex for our participants is definitionally enjoyable and articulated via an aspirational hierarchy based on willingness, diversity/variability, and self-reflexivity—partly set against national sexual imaginaries of vanilla normalcy, yet allowing vanilla some gradations and nuances.

Based on an interview-driven ethnographic study of the Swedish digital BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside, this article explores digital kink expressions at a moment when kink communities are both marginalized and seemingly mainstream, navigating a tricky balance between visibility and invisibility, intelligibility and unintelligibility. Across queer, postcolonial, and digital media theorizing, "opacity" provides a way of rethinking these tensions, challenging the idea of public visibility and identification as that which legitimizes sexual otherness. Building on this work, I suggest the term "kink obscurity" as a way of conceptualizing a set of tactics for sexually marginalized groups to exist, resist, and transgress without becoming fully visible or graspable. To these ends, I foreground a "closet positive" analysis of Darkside, not primarily of shame, secrecy, and isolation, but of shared spaces of vulnerability and intensity, a temporary safe house which partly protects against normative regulation. Although the platform activist ethos speaks to the value of openness and outness for the sake of sexual justice, the users are quite invested in anonymous and pseudonymous online presence and sexual expression. Opacity implies a lack of clarity; something opaque may be both difficult to see clearly as well as to understand. Drawing on edouard Glissant's idea of opacity as a form resistance to surveillance and imperial domination, a digital sexual politics of obscurity could help provide recognition without a demand to fully understand sexual otherness, opening up for new modes of obscure and pleasurable sexual expressions and transgressions.

Contributing to the field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this article explores the geosocial dimensions of digital sexual cultures by analyzing three regionally operating, linguistically specific social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Drawing on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily for group sex, a Swedish platform for kink and BDSM, and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression, we ask how these contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. First, we focus on the platforms as tools for digital wayfinding and hooking up. Second, we consider how the platforms help to reimagine and sexualize physical locations as ones of play, and how this transforms the ways of inhabiting such spaces. Third, we analyze how the platforms operate as sexual places in their own right, designed to accommodate certain forms of display, relating, and belonging. We argue, in particular, that these platforms shape how users imagine and engage with location by negotiating notions of proximity and distance, risk and safety, making space for sexual sociability. We approach geographies of sexuality both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants' sense of comfort and investment in local spaces of sexual play. As sexual content is increasingly pushed out of large, U.S.-owned social media platforms, we argue that locally operating platforms provide a critical counterpoint, allowing for a vital re-platforming of sex on a regional level.

General purpose social media platforms—often incited by American legislation—increasingly exclude sex from acceptable forms of sociality in the abstract name of user safety. This article analyzes interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi, and Libertine.Center) to explore what follows from including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media and, by extension, in including sex in definitions of “the social” itself. We found that instead of context collapse, the users and developers of the studied sites operate with what we call context promiscuity, blending boundaries, but maintaining their structural integrity. This allows for a particular silosociality to emerge based on experiences of safety, risk, and consent. Building on this, we propose thinking of sexual expression as something not contained by, but put in motion across platforms, user cultures, content policies, and sexual norms. Rather than framing sexual social media exchanges in terms of their perceived risks and harms, we would do well to also inquire after the risks and harms involved in ousting sex from networked forms of sociality. Deplatforming of sex truncates our ways of understanding what interests, forces, and attachments drive our sociality. Yet, when analyzing social media as if the socio-sexual matters, platforms designed to support sexual displays and connections become vital nodal points in social media ecologies. 

Based on a new materialist analysis of “vibrant matter” to understand the liveliness of sexual objects in toy-based sexual play, in this article I investigate the politics of thinking digital technologies as operating partly beyond human forms of agency and control. I use as my core examples privacy breaches and data leaks in the world of networked sex toys – such as a vibrator which allegedly audio recorded its clients’ play sessions without express permission – to engage with questions of intimacy and privacy in digital networks of humans and nonhumans. In particular, the discussion focuses on the consequences of new forms of publicness for how we can understand sexual intimacy and sexual play. What does it mean to have an intimate moment when connected to a device, a medium and a network that is by definition public, corporate and leaky? And how could we imagine other ways of being sexually intimate and exposed – yet safe – in public digital networks? Drawing on discussions of queer intimacy, sexual consent and queer BDSM, I suggest that current understandings of privacy and sensitive data (as per GDPR) may need unconventional sources to further ways of knowing what consent might mean, and how it feels. © The Author(s) 2020.