Dr Chloé Locatelli completed her PhD at King’s College London Digital Humanities department in 2023. Her research explores the intersections of sex work and digital constructions of femininity in heterosexual men's sextech. She is interested in sextech, ‘sex robots’, affinity with digital characters and other places where sex, intimacy and digital technologies meet. Her doctoral research was enriched by fieldwork in Tokyo and partnership with the University of Tokyo's Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, funded by the Sasakawa Foundation. She has taught and lectured across the Digital Humanities and Culture, Media and Creative Industries department at King's as well as at University of Westminster. Prior to her PhD, she completed her Gender Studies Masters at the University of Granada, Spain and University of Bologna, Italy.

Research

• Sex, intimacy and technology
• Technological constructions of femininity
• Sexual commerce and sex work online
• Embodiment and HRI
• Posthuman theory

Expertise and public engagement

Chloé has carried out numerous public engagement activities, notably the "Build Your Dream Girlfriend" workshops at Manchester Science and Industry Museum (2022) and London Science Museum (2024).

She has presented her work at Goldsmiths University "Games, Love and Sex" Colloquium, as well as Queer@King's and Digital Futures Institute's Centre for Technology and the Body. She has also been interviewed about her research for media publications, most recently The Sunday Times.

Selected publications

• Amundsen, R., Azbel, L., Frankovitch, A., Hakim, J., Klitgård, M., & Locatelli, C. (2025). Interrogating consent roundtable. Journal of Gender Studies. [Online] 1–17. 
• Hanson, K. R. & Locatelli, C. (2024) “Naughty Japanese Babe:” An analysis of racialized sex tech designs. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. [Online] 2 (2), 1–9.
• Locatelli, C. (2022) Rethinking ‘Sex Robots’: Gender, Desire, and Embodiment in Posthuman Sextech. Journal of Digital Social Research. [Online] 4 (3), 10–33.
• Hanson, K. R. & Locatelli, C. (2022) From Sex Dolls to Sex Robots and Beyond: A Narrative Review of Theoretical and Empirical Research on Human‑like and Personified Sex Tech N Döring & P Renaud (eds.). Current Sexual Health Reports. [Online] 161–12.
• Devlin, K. & Locatelli, C. (2020) ‘Guys and Dolls: Sex Robot Creators and Consumers’, in Oliver Bendel (ed.) Maschinenliebe. Springer Gabler. pp. 79–92.