Platformed intimacy - drugged intimacy
Activity: Talk or presentation types › Lecture and oral contribution
Links
- Video of presentation
- Over the past few months various countries around the world have introduced social distancing measures to mitigate the spread of coronavirus. Part of these measures has been the injunction to not get closer than at least a metre to a person from outside your household. What issues has this raised for gay men’s cultures of sex and intimacy? How have gay men negotiated social distancing in relation to their sexual and intimate lives? What sexual health advice have they been receiving? What role has digital media played in all of this? How do the existing inequalities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic feed into different gay men’s sexual and intimate lives? How has the history of HIV/AIDS informed the collective and individual responses gay men have had to coronavirus?
Kristian Møller - Speaker
It is clear that current pandemic intimacies depend on digital media, and that those intimate publics or scenes that already deeply mediated are well-positioned to keep their intimate practices intact.
An issue then is that adapting to mediated forms of intimacy requires work, and requires the practice and the physical engagement to change according to what the media infrastructure allows for or offers.
This talk draws from critical drug studies, conceptualizing how our bodies are able to feel and do as something we may experiment with, and enhance. The body is always-already technical, or somatechnical.
I present data from my research into digital engagements with sexualized drug use, anchored in counterpublics of "transgressive” practice. I show that drug-using mediated intimate publics or scenes experiment with how chemical interventions can change our bodily capacities. This, I argue, makes them better attuned to the specific opportunities of mediated encounters.
An issue then is that adapting to mediated forms of intimacy requires work, and requires the practice and the physical engagement to change according to what the media infrastructure allows for or offers.
This talk draws from critical drug studies, conceptualizing how our bodies are able to feel and do as something we may experiment with, and enhance. The body is always-already technical, or somatechnical.
I present data from my research into digital engagements with sexualized drug use, anchored in counterpublics of "transgressive” practice. I show that drug-using mediated intimate publics or scenes experiment with how chemical interventions can change our bodily capacities. This, I argue, makes them better attuned to the specific opportunities of mediated encounters.
2 Jul 2020
Event (Seminar)
Title | Pandemic Intimacies |
---|---|
Abbreviated title | Pandemic Intimacies |
Date | 02/07/2020 → 02/07/2020 |
Website | |
Location | University of East Anglia |
City | Norfolk |
Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
Degree of recognition | International event |
- intimacy, pandemy, covid-19, corona, sexuality, gay
Research areas
ID: 85206320