Bio
Zahra Stardust is a sexualities scholar at the intersections of culture, media and law. Her research focuses on the production and distribution of queer pornographies, the relationships between law and social movements, and the role of digital technologies in facilitating sexual health. Her monograph Indie Porn: Revolutionary Promises, Regulatory Fantasies, Resistance Politics will be published by Duke University Press in 2024 and her co-authored book Sextech: A Critical Introduction is under contract with Polity Books. Stardust is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society at QUT and an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard.
Sex Tech Among the Ruins
Forecast to become a US$122bn industry by 2024, the sextech industry is growing at a faster annual rate than drone manufacturing. In its popular use, ‘sextech’ is often used to describe technologies that enhance sexual pleasure, from biometric vibrators to AI chatbots to sex robots. However, sextech does not operate solely in service of pleasure or health – sex technologies have historically developed in pursuit of colonial, carceral, surveillance and biopolitical purposes. From airport body scanners to nudity classifiers to genetic screening, technologies continue to be deployed to discipline queer, disabled, fat, trans, intersex and racialised bodies and maintain oppressive socio-sexual orders.
At a time of both hype and inequity, in a dystopian landscape where apps promise that extracting personal data will improve user experience, or that partnerships with police will make users safer, this talk invites audiences to re-imagine sextech futures. It draws upon research conducted among sextech users and developers, including speculative design workshops involving the Oracle Cards for Transfeminist Tech, a Public Interest Sextech Hackathon exploring sextech for social justice, a workshop with prospective sextech entrepreneurs at the Sextech School, and interviews with LGBTQ sextech users in Australia.
Sextech design, data and governance is rife with messy tensions. But within this weedy territory, communities in the margins scrap, hustle, hack and experiment to create savvy workarounds to existing technologies, find enjoyment in off-label use, and craft means of generative resistance. Users contest the binary gender embedded in facial recognition technologies through drag, artists reverse-engineer porn detectors to create machine learning pornography, designers create reflective anti-paparazzi to refract up-skirt photographs. These kinds of anti-surveillance sextech study up rather than surveil down, they target systems rather than individual pathology, and they use the resources, relationships and ruins around them to produce new forms of life, possibility and pleasure.