Proposal Title
Sexting through the Apocalypse
Submission Type
Virtual Engagement Session
Start Date
16-7-2020 1:00 PM
End Date
16-7-2020 2:00 PM
Abstract
Sexting through the Apocalypse
Queering the Digital in a time of Quarantine
Abstract:
Quarantine has transformed how most of us do sex, causing many of us to depend on digital communication technologies. Despite the increasing accessibility of digital platforms designed to house our pleasure, these largely reproduce heterosexual scripts of goal-orientation, instant gratification, and rigid gender coding. This participatory experiment in community sexting carves out space for queer experimentation by hijacking the fantasy space of the digital to cultivate a playful, collaborative poetics and queered digital erotics.
Isn’t it scintillating to discover – in that exhibitionist, blinking ellipse – the girth of your lover’s thinking process as they compose a text? When we sext, the device itself becomes a toy for our erotic pleasure: both vibrant and vibrating. We become untethered from our own materiality and can inhabit our bodies and our genders more freely. With a word, my clit can become a cock, a grapefruit seed, a 7 foot long velvety opening. Bodies merge with machine, becoming amalgams of technology and flesh.
Event Details: Building on research developed in collaboration with Kinga and Studio XX, the first half of the workshop will feature an introduction, warm up exercises and community strategy swaps in break-out rooms via Zoom. We will then enter an encrypted, anonymous community sexting experiment over Discord. Queer desire, explicit consent practices, inclusive vocabulary, voyeurism/participation, and experimentation with what is considered “erotic” lay the foundation for consensual group play. In preparation for the workshop, please download and update Zoom. You will also need to make an anonymous Discord account at https://discord.com/download, or through any app store on your phone.
Sexting through the Apocalypse
Sexting through the Apocalypse
Queering the Digital in a time of Quarantine
Abstract:
Quarantine has transformed how most of us do sex, causing many of us to depend on digital communication technologies. Despite the increasing accessibility of digital platforms designed to house our pleasure, these largely reproduce heterosexual scripts of goal-orientation, instant gratification, and rigid gender coding. This participatory experiment in community sexting carves out space for queer experimentation by hijacking the fantasy space of the digital to cultivate a playful, collaborative poetics and queered digital erotics.
Isn’t it scintillating to discover – in that exhibitionist, blinking ellipse – the girth of your lover’s thinking process as they compose a text? When we sext, the device itself becomes a toy for our erotic pleasure: both vibrant and vibrating. We become untethered from our own materiality and can inhabit our bodies and our genders more freely. With a word, my clit can become a cock, a grapefruit seed, a 7 foot long velvety opening. Bodies merge with machine, becoming amalgams of technology and flesh.
Event Details: Building on research developed in collaboration with Kinga and Studio XX, the first half of the workshop will feature an introduction, warm up exercises and community strategy swaps in break-out rooms via Zoom. We will then enter an encrypted, anonymous community sexting experiment over Discord. Queer desire, explicit consent practices, inclusive vocabulary, voyeurism/participation, and experimentation with what is considered “erotic” lay the foundation for consensual group play. In preparation for the workshop, please download and update Zoom. You will also need to make an anonymous Discord account at https://discord.com/download, or through any app store on your phone.
Bio
Hannah is a performance artist, researcher, and community organizer based in Montreal. She has developed many workshops around sexual justice and consent, through the Community Disclosures Network. Her thinking/making mobilizes playful, poetic, and interdisciplinary technologies to re-imagine writing processes. Her most recent projects imagine commemorative devices for multi-species loss in an age of ecological collapse; and processes of artistic re-writing to heal from sexualized violence. Her work and research has featured in Performance Research Journal (forthcoming), ESSE, and has been presented at the 2019 Hemispheric Institute of Politics and Performance’s biennial Encuentro; 2019 UW Madison Theatre Studies Graduate Conference, University of Toronto Comparative Literature Conference. She has been in group exhibitions for the feminist intermedia festival htmlles at Studio XX, and has facilitated an artist and thinker residency through the School of Making Thinking.