AI Image Generators Grapple with Transness
Trans and non-binary people regularly face obstacles to mobility and migration, making experiences of travel and border-crossing challenging and even sometimes impossible. These challenges can include increased identity verification due to mismatches between gender presentation and sex/gender markers or photos in legal documents as well as interrogation upon passing through biometric checkpoints […]
Machine Yearning
“When it comes to sex, are there any new stories?” -Are We All Technosexuals Now? The quoted article begins with a promise, almost like a fairy tale. Your dream companion awaits. Writer Allie Rowbottom’s creation of an A.I. girlfriend may be akin to that of a little girl creating a character in […]
Emergent Intimacies in Posthuman Fiction
In Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), the sex bots that Ron Lord manufactures cater to heteronormative desires. So the bots possess a ‘20-inch waist and 40-inch boobs [legs] slightly longer than they would be if she was human’ (91). Lord admits this is a ‘fantasy’ (37). In Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), thanks […]
Digitally Queer
It is difficult to write how I think technology has changed queerness, because my only experience of queerness has been through the technoscape. I know no before, only now. I can provide no contrasting lenses or a temporal depiction of how queerness has transformed with the help of technology over the years, […]
Glass Acts: The Queer Cybernetic Heartbeat of Modern Touch
In our relentless pursuit to theorize contemporary desire, we repeatedly encounter a peculiar paradox: never have human bodies been simultaneously more connected and more isolated than in our current moment of digital intimacy. This paradox demands new theoretical frameworks that move beyond traditional binaries of presence/absence, touch/separation, real/virtual. The haptic interface […]
Seeing and Being Seen: Scrolling, Desire and Brain Fog
A raucous voice blasts from the phone screen as a hot pink kurta obfuscates the speaker—a tiny yet fiery woman behind it. She announces to her audience the features of the product on display—silk blend, anarkali, zari embroidery, perfect for an evening party. My mother, hooked onto the screen, listens […]
