Infrastructures of Intimacy and the Deplatforming of Sex

Susanna Paasonen’s feminist and queer analysis focuses on the question of online pornography and new ways of connecting via platforms and chatrooms, as in her 2011 Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Taking exception from the prevalent techno-skepticism that summarizes online communication and representation uncontestably as forms of commodification and alienation, Paasonen’s talk ‘Infrastructures of Intimacy and the Deplatforming of Sex‘ discusses the stakes of the new potentials of getting together online – aesthetically, socially, sexually, and politically. For Paasonen it is the tactile dimensions of online encounters, more so than the visual, that affect us as ‘resonance’ or ‘grasp’ us.

This lecture series takes queer theory’s conversation about intimacy as a starting point to discuss some of its cultural possibilities, mediated forms, and philosophical trajectories in the context of Corona.