m/f exclusive binarism and the implicitation of sex on digital plateforms
From an ethnography made on various digital dating and pornography platforms, I will illustrate the material and semiotic elements that frame the sexualization of browsing on these platforms,
and i will focus more specifically on how some platforms enable an implicitly sexual experience. In order to do so, I have worked on a continuum of platforms ranging from “serious” dating sites, libertine or gay sites, to porn tubes, to sexcam sites. I was thus able to observe on all of them three types of digital sexual mediations (sexual lexicons to describe oneself, policies of access to contents, and visual semiotics
associated). I have also identified two modes of sexualization : one, explicit is based on the contents. And another, implicit, is based on the sexual orientation of the navigation. In this presentation, I discuss how the 3 main digital sexual mediations participate in the implicit sexualization of the digital experience, and thus found the technical and semiotic elements of a heteronormative conjugalism