Sex Dolls at Sea

Investigating and reimagining the origin story of the sex doll through the tale of the sailor's dames de voyage. The sex doll and its high-tech counterpart the sex robot have gone mainstream, as both the object of consumer desire and the subject of academic study. But sex dolls, and sexual technology in general, are nothing new. Sex dolls have been around for centuries. In Sex Dolls at Sea, Bo Ruberg explores the origin story of the sex doll, investigating its cultural implications and considering who has been marginalized and who has been privileged in the narrative. Ruberg examines the generally accepted story that the first sex dolls were dames de voyage, rudimentary figures made of cloth and leather scraps by European sailors on long, lonely ocean voyages in centuries past. In search of supporting evidence for the lonesome sailor sex doll theory, Ruberg uncovers the real history of the sex doll. The earliest commercial sex dolls were not the dames de voyage but the femmes en caoutchouc: “women” made of inflatable vulcanized rubber, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Interrogating the sailor sex doll origin story, Ruberg finds beneath the surface a web of issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. What has been lost in the history of the sex doll and other sex tech, Ruberg tells us, are the stories of the sex workers, women, queer people, and people of color whose lives have been bound up with these technologies

Digital Intimacy in Real Time: Live Streaming Gender and Sexuality

This article serves as the guest editors’ introduction to the Television and New Media special issue dedicated to gender and sexuality in live streaming. Live streaming is a key part of the contemporary digital media landscape; it sits at the center of wide-reaching shifts in how culture, entertainment, and labor are expressed and experienced online today. Gender and sexuality are crucial elements of live streaming. Across live streaming’s many forms, these elements manifest in myriad ways: from gendered performances to gender-based harassment, from LGBTQ community building to real-time sex work. This special issue models an interdisciplinary approach to studying gender and sexuality in live streaming, featuring scholarship from the humanities, social sciences, and human-computer interaction. It also serves as an impassioned call to those who study technological tools and platforms like live streaming to pay attention to the crucial roles that identity, power, embodiment, and intimacy play in these technologies. There can be no full cultural understanding of live streaming that does not address its entanglements with sexuality and gender

Exploring histories of sexual technologies with Dr. Bo Ruberg (Digital and data literacies for sexual health policy and practice 2022 webinar series)

The global field of sextech is estimated to be worth up to $30 billion in the near future. From pitching competitions and hackathons to the tech press, medtech founders, marketers and journalists promise a future where technology will continuously enhance our pleasure, sexual health and wellbeing. But sextech - and sextech marketing - has a history, too. And it's complicated. In this webinar, Associate Professor Bo Ruberg discusses their book Sex Dolls At Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (MIT Press 2022), in conversation with Professor Kath Albury. Discover what the origin story of the sex doll can teach us about contemporary sextech innovations - from condoms to sex robots

PLAYING AT THE POLLS: VIDEO GAMES IN/AS PLATFORMS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

This panel explores the rise of ludic technologies as both figurative and computational “platforms” for American political participation. As COVID-19 forced many politicians to abandon massive rallies and other in-person engagement into 2020, American politicians turned to video games for alternative means of public outreach, from “Biden Island” in $2 to Twitch streams with Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders. This panel contextualizes these and other “ludopolitical” phenomena from a variety of perspectives, ranging from digital media studies to queer studies and political economy. We attend to the mass re-politicization of games and question the politics of identity, content moderation, and labour that are downloaded onto policy when party communication becomes strategically playful