Masturbations that Matter: Telling Silence, Voice, and Women Doing Sex

Masturbations that Matter: Telling Silence, Voice, and Women Doing Sex

Abstract:

For many centuries in Western discourse, women’s sexuality has been understood as either fulfilling men’s sexual desire or procreation. Despite a growing body of research exploring technologies’ role in human sexuality in HCI, women’s masturbation as an essential source of pleasure as well as a political act of sexual independence remains under-explored in HCI. In this talk, I leverage the feminist theory of the body, which emphasizes the social construction of the body and its implications for gender, to unpack a design case of women’s masturbation from a somesthetic perspective. 

The design process unfolds when a woman with an invisible disability experiments with other women’s masturbatory techniques using her own body as a design resource. She then articulates that intersubjective engagement using her own body as an artistic medium in the form of embodied embroidery, a practice inspired by women’s artmaking that seeks to foreground the aesthetic dimensions of experiential knowledge to support theory-making in design. This process nourishes an embodied understanding of the experience of women’s sexuality by foregrounding the construction of body positions, aesthetic touch, erotic sensation, and sexual geography of women’s bodies.

The embroidery is an act of speaking out, a voice that challenges the legitimacy of secrecy and silence when it comes to female sexuality and a form of resistance to the androcentric discourse of women’s sexual pleasure and the sociocultural de-sexualization of women with dis/abilities.

The work—integrating empirical, design, and theoretical moves—advances a deliberate discourse about HCI’s roles and responsibilities in contributing to new paradigms of pleasure activism in HCI, defined by black feminist scholar adrienne maree brown as “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”

Bio: Shaowen Bardzell is a Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing, where she is also the School Chair. Bardzell holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University and pursues a humanistic research agenda within the research and practice of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Throughout her work she augments contributions of feminism, design, and social science to support technology’s role in social change. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and is co-author of Humanistic HCI (Morgan Claypool, 2015) and co-editor of Critical Theory and Interaction Design (MIT Press, 2018). She is a recipient of the SIGCHI Societal Impact Award (2023) and a member of the SIGCHI Academy (2024).