Bent Street 4.1. Tiffany Jones
doodlers and alternative artists, an ear for wrathful rants and interesting interviews, an eye for raw reflections and a mouth for personal opinions’.
Bent Street is now evolving to become a bi-annual publication, with our usual end-of-year edition (The Year in Queer), and now a mid-year edition plugging into different topical areas. We are thrilled to welcome Jennifer Power, Henry von Doussa, and Timothy W. Jones as our Guest Editors for this first special edition on Intimacy Technology, seen through the frame of COVID-19. The circumstances of social distancing and the move to mostly online contact for many Australian alternative and artistic communities are partly what prompted our new publishing model. We see it as a way of keeping a community electricity alight and boosting our connectivity.
We would like to thank the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) and La Trobe University Transforming Human Societies Research Focus Area for their support for this issue. We thank all of our contributors and welcome new writers and creatives to these pages, as well as familiar names. We hope that the Bent Street model of creative collision will continue to spark possibilities through fusing together our many disparate ideas and energies.
Tiffany Jones—Editor-in-Chief, Bent Street
Gordon Thompson—Publisher, Clouds of Magellan Press
Park exercise equipment, May 2020—G Thompson
INTRODUCTION
The rise of the internet and digital technology has facilitated a new world of human connection. Never has it been so easy for people to speak across continents and timezones. Never has it been so commonplace for people to connect, often in quite intimate terms, with strangers. Phones, apps and chat rooms have facilitated new cultures of sex, dating and romance. Sex is instantly available online. Bodies are available. Love is available.
Arguably, queers were the great early adapters of digital dating. Grindr led the way on geo-locating hook up apps, extending the span of gay men’s sexual cultures across digital and physical space. Meanwhile the internet has enhanced queers’ opportunities to find their people, explore queer life and seek affirmation: perhaps before venturing into queer physical spaces, or at times when those spaces are not available.
In recent months, social lockdowns imposed by COVID-19 have made the role that new technologies play in human connection starkly obvious. In lockdown, most of us are living an ever larger part of our lives through Zoom and Facetime. People communicate more often, and more intensely, though instant text messaging. Tech and human intimacy have become more palpably entwined than ever.
However, while digital communication may now be the most conspicuous form of technology facilitating and mediating human intimacy, technology has always been a collaborator in human relations – particularly when it comes to sex and intimacy. It is not only a smartphone, computer, or a new app that links people or shapes the nature of human connection. Often human attachments are produced in conjunction with much more mundane and quotidian technologies – coffee, alcohol, the kitchen table, the design of a sofa, the layout of a restaurant, the bus that drives us across town, the ring we wear on our finger.
Our aim for Bent Street 4.1 is to cast a broad lens on the role of technologies in shaping human intimacy with a nod to the impact of COVID-19. We asked people to reflect broadly on the role that technologies, both old and new, play in mediating human intimacy and shaping queer culture. The contributions we present in this issue do, indeed, show how technologies both constitute and are constituted by relational intimacies: what, as Lauren Berlant has said, are in reality, ‘the kinds of connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living (if not “a life”)’. Many of the first-person accounts, the theoretical engagements and the visual arts in this issue, are articulations of technologies as ways out of isolation, ways of finding—or recognising—your crew and enacting belonging. The viewing of pornography for the first time on a Super 8 film among peers; the joining of two cans with string as a visual reminded that even as children we know technology can be playful and desire to mimic its connective potential; the medical technologies of the body that transform lives; the rise of sexbots and artificial intelligence in providing comfort; the excitement of building a new relationship via text message; and the use of GPS technologies in the delicate undulations of power in the dominance/submission relations of BDSM are all testament to the transformative potential of technology and desire in human becoming.
Jennifer Power, Henry von Doussa, Timothy W. Jones
July 2020
INTERVIEWS
SUZANNE FRASER
AMANDA GESSELMAN
JAMIE HAKIM
Following are edited transcripts of interviews with leading researchers in fields relating to gender, sexuality, intimacy and technologies. The interviews were conducted by Jennifer Power in the leadup to a seminar held at La Trobe University titled ‘Love from a Distance: Intimacy and Technology’. The theme for this seminar was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic in which social lockdowns and quarantine forced more people to rely on digital media to seek or maintain intimate connections.
COVID-19 has brought to the forefront the way that technology plays a central role in mediating human intimate relationships. While this is most obvious when it comes to communication technologies, other technologies also facilitate and shape the ways in which we connect and relate to other people—particularly when it comes to sex and intimacy. Historically, bicycles, for example, have been credited with introducing sweeping changes to marriage trends in Western countries, as they gave people capacity to travel further and mingle in more diverse social circles. The design of physical spaces—houses, bedrooms, neighbourhoods, offices, cafes, bars—moderate the ways we interact with the people around us. Reflecting on the form and function of a broad range of technologies, and the way that they are adopted into human action and experiences, helps us to make sense of how intimacy can be facilitated through a ‘collaboration’ between humans and non-humans (machines, devices, objects).
INTIMACY AND UNEXPECTED TECHNOLOGIES
SUZANNE FRASER
Professor Suzanne Fraser is Director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) at La Trobe University. She is also visiting Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Social Research in Health at the University of New South Wales. Suzanne’s PhD is in Gender Studies, and her research focuses on the body, gender, health and the self. Suzanne is the author of a number of books on the body and health in society and culture. Her most recent book is entitled Habits: Remaking addiction, co-authored with David Moore and Helen Keane, and her previous works cover a range of topics including cosmetic surgery, methadone maintenance treatment, the politics of hepatitis C and the politics of addiction.
Over the last few years, Suzanne’s research has focused on two Australian Research Council-funded studies, one exploring injecting practices and harm reduction needs among men who inject performance and image enhancing drugs, and the other investigating impediments to the uptake and diffusion in Australia of take-home naloxone, the opioid overdose medication known to save lives. Professor Fraser’s recent work has focused in part on technologies associated with injecting drug use. In this interview she talks about the ways in which technologies that respond to opioid overdose or support safer injecting can offer a resource for thinking about how ‘objects’ and ‘technologies’ are implicated in the shaping of human intimacy.
Jennifer