Hannah Fitsch, can you tell me what you’re planning to do as part of your visiting professorship? What will be your main areas of focus?

As part of my visiting professorship, I’m focusing on the topic of sexuality in the digital (socialization) space, and I’ve identified three main areas of focus: First, questions of sexuality; second, the technical conditions of digitalization; and third, understanding the digital space as a space of socialization that offers people various avenues for self-identification. Within the framework of these areas of focus, we want to reflect on and discuss what we actually mean when we speak of sexuality in the digital space and what sexuality is—or can be—in the digital space today. How does sexuality take place in the digital realm, whose sexuality is expressed there, and to what extent can sexuality in the digital realm be pleasurable without the direct contact of physical bodies? How do the technical conditions of reproduction in sexual communication contribute to its formation and constitution? Since the digital space has long been structured by the economic principles of private companies, we ask ourselves to what extent sex thereby becomes a constantly available commodity and what possibilities exist for designing digital spaces in such a way that they do not pursue purely economic interests. Since the seminar was designed for students at Mainz University of Applied Sciences in the departments of Technology, Design, and Business, the focus is on the technical and aesthetic-design conditions of digital social media and the economic conditions that enable them.

Another key focus of the visiting professorship is on interdisciplinary and intersectional practice: In collaboration with Prof. Dr. Julia König from the Department of Education, we have not only designed a seminar for students from various disciplines at the University of Applied Sciences and the University, but by organizing a festival, we were also able to involve theorists, practitioners, designers, and people from the fields of counseling and mediation—as well as queer-feminist activists—into the discussion on sexuality in the digital space.

Who are you hoping to reach with the DE/LUXE Festival? Can you tell us a little about the program?

It was very important to us that the festival be open to everyone. Above all, the festival aims to appeal to those who engage with—or wish to engage with—the topic of sexuality from a critical, diversity-sensitive, and queer-feminist perspective. At the same time, the festival explicitly aims to reach students from various disciplines and fields of application—such as designers, educators, artists, programmers, and counselors—and invite them to engage in theoretical discussions and develop practical approaches together. In addition to an introductory lecture on the first evening, the festival will feature various panel discussions, film and short film screenings, a feminist programming workshop, a sex toy hackathon, and the opportunity to participate in designing an exhibition from a perspective critical of discrimination.

Today’s generations are connected to one another in different ways through technological and digital means. Is (sexual) self-perception and how others perceive us determined by technology, and in what ways do specific technological tools influence young people and their conceptions of self?

The seminar and the festival “Who Decides What Is Seen as Normal?” explore the role of the technical and aesthetic-design conditions of digital social media in shaping young people’s sexual self-concepts. The digital-social space is thus explicitly understood as a space of socialization in which a significant portion of the sexual identity development of adolescents and young adults can take place during adolescence.

Digital technologies enable a proliferation of sexual self-concepts and life plans, a phenomenon that has been widely highlighted in recent years. Even teenagers in rural areas who suffer from the gender and sexual identity labels imposed on them can use digital social media to find like-minded peers and become part of communities that, prior to the advent of the internet and digital social media, were open only to members of urban subcultures. However, these digital infrastructures also differ significantly from those of locally organized communities, because as so-called “smart” technologies—that is, digital technologies based on artificial intelligence—they are subject to a shaping logic of unambiguity. This poses a systematic and practical challenge for adolescent users of this technology, particularly with regard to sexual issues and self-concepts.

Why do you think it’s important, in light of this, to focus specifically on young people’s sexual self-concepts in the digital space, and what does all of this have to do with women’s and gender studies?

Women’s and gender studies serve here as the foundation for an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of sexuality—a topic that negotiates modes of subjectification through common forms of identification. While gender is only one of many forms of identification within the context of sexual self-concepts, it continues to play a very decisive role in young people’s experiential horizon when it comes to negotiating their bodily and desire structures.

On the one hand, sexual self-concepts are the cornerstone of adolescent identity; on the other hand, sexuality and sexual norms are subject to social dispositifs and, in the digital space, increasingly to technical conditions as well. As mentioned above, these technical conditions follow a strategy of unambiguation that can be challenging for young people. Such strategies of unambiguity can be examined on two levels as part of the digital socialization space for adolescents and young adults: First, this shaping logic lies in the technical conditions of digital media themselves, because they create categories that can be clearly distinguished from one another. When questions can be answered with either “yes” or “no,” “like” or “dislike,” and are expressed through zeros and ones, there is little room for ambiguity. Second, they are structured by the economic principles of the private companies that own the platforms. Here, in turn, it can be observed that, at the level of visual strategies, these logics rely heavily on gendered and normative representational logics. Against this backdrop, a constellation emerges for adolescents’ sexual self-concepts in digital social media in which, in particular, the technical enabling conditions and the economic structural principles in visual presentation seem to disappear, they imperceptibly contribute to a radical orientation toward the technical logics of unambiguity and the primacy of commodification. This means that while users do not (always) visually perceive the structure of digital media, it can nonetheless have a formative effect on their behavior.

The interview was conducted by Mona Takow, the gender equality officer at Mainz University of Applied Sciences.