Sex, Feminism & the Internet: Creating Generative Spaces
by Eliza Bacon
Junior Producer & Editor Global Digital Futures
“Just because you’re having a bad experience on the internet it doesn’t mean everybody’s having a bad experience on the internet. For a large number of people its a place where they can articulate themselves in a way that they wouldn’t be able to do elsewhere.”
In this week’s, podcast Multiple Feminisms, Multiple Internets, we are thrilled to introduce you to Paromita Vohra, and her organisation Agents of Ishq, where the motto is: ‘We believe sex is nice and pleasure is good for you’. Seems simple enough. Agents of Ishq is an online platform for frank and fun conversations about sex and desire. It is a wonderful space. In fact, it embodies so much of what the internet first promised us: wacky, edgeland places for escape and connection. Olia Lialina describes the early internet as ‘bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction […] a web of sudden connections and personal links’. Agents of Ishq evokes this joyful, web 1.0 aesthetic. And it offers true escape from the shame and moral policing that surround sex: ’We have no uniform. Actually, we are not into anything uniform. Or telling people what’s good, bad, wrong, normal, abnormal, gross, evil. We are not into telling people what to think or feel. At all. There’s too much of that going around.’
Some early, utopian visions of the internet, and especially some feminist ones, were excited about the idea of a space where we could exist anonymously, leaving our bodies and identities behind. I see the appeal, and safeguarding anonymity is paramount. But this approach doesn’t take into account how all the structures of gender, class, race and ability define peoples’ experiences of both online and offline life (ie. the disproportionate amount of trolling, women, people of colour, disabled people and queer people are subject to), nor does it help anyone explore and express the realities of living in their body. Agents of Ishq is all about celebrating bodies, being rooted in bodies, and exploring desire with no judgement. Revival Disability Magazine has a similar philosophy: in its instagram bio it declares ‘In our free time, we call out ableists and marvel at our hot, disabled bodies in the mirror.’ And HOLAA Africa was created to respond to the lack of online content for the African queer woman: ‘This is a space where women and gender non-conforming people of all sexualities can come together and engage with each other and the world.’ In response to our conversation with Paromita, we talked to Nu from Revival and Tiffany from HOLAA, with Tanvi Kanchan in our YouTube ThinkTank series. The conversation was amazing! It will be released on Thursday 23rd September. Stay tuned.
It’s so inspiring to talk to people who are re-imagining the internet. Right now, capital controls the internet. We have moved away from Web 1.0 to more manicured online grids: most of our online interactions now take place over platforms that belong to huge multinational corporations. And our behavioural data is being constantly extracted in pursuit of other peoples’ profit. Online spaces that centre women and marginalized identities can reframe the possibilities of the internet; away from the individualism and profit, and towards freedom, sharing, collaboration and resistance. On this, read an interview with Chido Musodza, a Zimbabwean woman who translates open source applications from English to Shona. Also, read into the Feminist principles of the internet: Access, Information, Usage, Resistance, Movement Building, Governance, Economy and Open Source. These principles have transformed the way I look at the internet; they’ve reminded me that it is something we can express dissatisfaction with, and demand more control over. On this, Take Back The Tech! is a brilliant online campaign: a call to everyone, especially women and girls, to take control of technology to end violence against women.
The word that keeps coming up this week, first in our conversation with Paromita, and then with Nu, Tiffany and Tanvi is generative. Creating generative spaces online means creating spaces that create, imagine and expand, rather than police, enforce and decide. It overlaps with queer, which Eve Sedgwick famously defined as ‘a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant’. All of these online spaces - Agents of Ishq, HOLAA Africa, Revival - rest on generative, queer principles. These beautiful spaces actively build on the imaginative possibilities of a world free from patriarchy, ableism, heteronormativity, racism… They don’t define themselves in combative opposition to those forces; the content is simply rooted in exploring and celebrating the experiences of people and bodies whose very existence and desires resist them. Listen to The Feminist Internet’s podcast about the importance of Queer Spaces, here.
I do hope you check out these wonderful online spaces and enjoy them as much as I do. And stay tuned for our ThinkTank episode with Nu, Tiffany and Tanvi.
Eliza is studying the Global Media & Communications MA at SOAS, and holds a BA in English Literature from Cambridge. Eliza worked as a Communications Intern at UNICEF's South Asia office in Kathmandu, and hopes to become a writer on tech and global internet cultures.