“Digital kink obscurity

A sexual politics beyond visibility and comprehension”

Bibliographic Data

ID19005489
AuthorsJenny Sundén (0000-0002-6047-4369, Södertörn University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume27
Issue8
Pages1461-1475
Publication date2023-01-09
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSexualities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1363-4607 • E-ISSN: 1461-7382
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/13634607221124401
OpenAlexW4313827655
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited29

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 Édouard 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

Aesthetics · Human sexuality · Invisibility · Queer · Sociology · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Philosophy · Sex work and related issues · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

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