Digital Intimacies 6 Presentation: Pandemic Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men are using their smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy, December 2020

In December, Digital Intimacies PI Jamie Hakim and SRA James Cummings presented initial findings from the project at the Digital Intimacies 6 Conference hosted by the University of Technology Sydney. Specifically, we focused on the ways in which gay and bisexual men have used their smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy during the coronavirus pandemic.

In response to the pandemic, on 23 March 2020, the UK government imposed a national lockdown. At its most severe, this prohibited in-person meetings with anyone outside of one’s ‘household’. Gay and bisexual men have received contradictory advice on how to navigate their intimate lives during lockdown, though sexual health and community organisation have widely advocated digitally mediated intimacy in lieu of in-person interaction.

Taking Lauren Berlant’s (1998) definition of intimacy as ‘connections we depend on for living’, we drew on our interviews with gay and bisexual men in London and observations of the creative remediation of counter-public spaces in which gay and bisexual men ordinarily negotiate key aspects of their intimate lives to explore whether and how gay and bisexual men have been using their smartphones and other devices to negotiate their cultures of intimacy during the pandemic and to what extent these negotiations help to sustain their lives.

This paper is part of our broader research, in which we seek to understand gay and bisexual smartphone mediated intimacies ‘conjuncturally’ (Hall et. al., 1978); that is, as situated at the confluence of social, cultural, political, ideological, technological, economic and, more recently, epidemiological forces that give form to contemporary British society.

Watch the presentation here

From a distance: Sex and technology during COVID-19 Webinar, 16 July 2020

On 16 July 2020, project PI Jamie Hakim spoke at a webinar called ‘From a distance: Sex and technology during COVID-19’. Organised by the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) at LaTrobe University, the webinar explored the role of new technologies in shaping human sex and intimacy, issues that have been starkly highlighted during the restrictions on human contact imposed globally in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jamie spoke alongside Professor Suzanne Fraser director of ARCSHS and Dr Amanda Gesselman (Kinsey Institute, Indiana University). The event was chaired by Dr. Jennifer Power (ARCSHS).

Watch the full recording of the webinar

Pandemic Intimacies Roundtable, 2 July 2020

In recent months, countries around the world have introduced social distancing measures to mitigate the spread of coronavirus. These have included the injunction to not get closer than at least a metre to a person from outside your household. The Digital Intimacies project organised a Pandemic Intimacies roundtable to explore issues that this has raised for gay men’s cultures of sex and intimacy.

The event featured presentations and discussion by Jamie Hakim (Digital Intimacies Principal Investigator, University of East Anglia), Joao Florencio (University of Exeter), John Mercer (Birmingham City University), Kristian Møller (IT University of Copenhagen), Marc Thompson (BlackOut, LoveTankUK) and Charlie Witzel (Sigma Research, LSHTM) and was chaired by Ingrid Young (Digital Intimacies Co-Investigator, University of Edinburgh).

The speakers explored relationships between the coronavirus pandemic and gay men’s sexual and intimate lives, asking: how have gay men negotiated social distancing? What sexual health advice have they been receiving? What role has digital media played in all of this? How do existing inequalities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic feed into different gay men’s sexual and intimate lives? And, how has the history of HIV/AIDS informed the collective and individual responses gay men have had to coronavirus?

Watch the full recording of Pandemic Intimacies

Lewis Clarke

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Digital Intimacies

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Digital Intimacies