Susanna Paasonen: Infrastructures of intimacy, politics of governance
Open lecture by Professor of Media Studies Susanna Paasonen.
As networked communications have grown infrastructural in how everyday lives are managed and lived, social media have come to operate as infrastructures of intimacy that play important roles in how people come together, stay in contact, maintain distances and proximities, and possibly fall out. At the same time, the increasingly aggressive “deplatforming of sex” from social media in the name of unspecified notions of safety involves the effacement of nudity, sexual imagery and sexual communication from the palette of exchanges available to the users of social media giants such as Instagram and Facebook. Exploring the Puritan echoes inherent in social media content policies and community standards, this talk asks what kinds of bodies and bodily interactions become marked as risky and unsafe within them; what and what kinds of value (affective, political, artistic, economical) sex holds on them; and what is ultimately at stake in social media assembling platformed sociability void of sex.
About Paasonen
Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in studies of sexuality, networked media, and affect, she is the PI of the Academy of Finland research project, Sexuality and Play in Media Culture (2017-21) and the Strategic Research Council funded consortium, Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (2019-25). She is most recently the author of Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP 2021), Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (MITP 2020, with Jenny Sundén), Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism (Routledge 2020, with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer and Clarissa Smith), NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (MITP 2019, with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light) and Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018).
About the Futures Lecture Series
The Futures Series is organized by the master’s degree programmes in Choreography, Dramaturgy, and the Live Art and Performance Studies in collaboration with the Centre for Joint Studies at Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy.
The series proposes that we need to regard the future as plural futures. The futures often seem indeterminate or uncanny. It is precisely for this reason that we need to ask whether artistic practice, with its various modes of thought, has the capacity to approach such unforeseen possibilities of the emergent futures. How should we regard these futures, which ought to be an essential part of research in choreography, pedagogy and the performative capacity of art?
To ponder these capacities, we could see how the performative practices produce the visions and emergent futures and prehensions where artistic practices and thinking are not bound with ideologies, mediated truths or preconceived aesthetics. They are necessary alongside with contemporary science and theory, where prehension of futures are transversal and cross-contaminated. The proposal and experiments presented in this series aim to present how we could create space for thinking the indeterminate futures.
Paasonen’s lecture continues the Futures Series. The first one was held in spring 2019 with a lecture by Paul O’Neill.
The Futures Lecture Series is part of Visiting Experts Series.
More information to be updated. Changes may apply.
As networked communications have grown infrastructural in how everyday lives are managed and lived, social media have come to operate as infrastructures of intimacy that play important roles in how people come together, stay in contact, maintain distances and proximities, and possibly fall out. At the same time, the increasingly aggressive “deplatforming of sex” from social media in the name of unspecified notions of safety involves the effacement of nudity, sexual imagery and sexual communication from the palette of exchanges available to the users of social media giants such as Instagram and Facebook. Exploring the Puritan echoes inherent in social media content policies and community standards, this talk asks what kinds of bodies and bodily interactions become marked as risky and unsafe within them; what and what kinds of value (affective, political, artistic, economical) sex holds on them; and what is ultimately at stake in social media assembling platformed sociability void of sex.
About Paasonen
Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in studies of sexuality, networked media, and affect, she is the PI of the Academy of Finland research project, Sexuality and Play in Media Culture (2017-21) and the Strategic Research Council funded consortium, Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (2019-25). She is most recently the author of Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP 2021), Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (MITP 2020, with Jenny Sundén), Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism (Routledge 2020, with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer and Clarissa Smith), NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (MITP 2019, with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light) and Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018).
About the Futures Lecture Series
The Futures Series is organized by the master’s degree programmes in Choreography, Dramaturgy, and the Live Art and Performance Studies in collaboration with the Centre for Joint Studies at Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy.
The series proposes that we need to regard the future as plural futures. The futures often seem indeterminate or uncanny. It is precisely for this reason that we need to ask whether artistic practice, with its various modes of thought, has the capacity to approach such unforeseen possibilities of the emergent futures. How should we regard these futures, which ought to be an essential part of research in choreography, pedagogy and the performative capacity of art?
To ponder these capacities, we could see how the performative practices produce the visions and emergent futures and prehensions where artistic practices and thinking are not bound with ideologies, mediated truths or preconceived aesthetics. They are necessary alongside with contemporary science and theory, where prehension of futures are transversal and cross-contaminated. The proposal and experiments presented in this series aim to present how we could create space for thinking the indeterminate futures.
Paasonen’s lecture continues the Futures Series. The first one was held in spring 2019 with a lecture by Paul O’Neill.
The Futures Lecture Series is part of Visiting Experts Series.
More information to be updated. Changes may apply.