Mediated Discourse Analysis in Language and Sexuality Research Rodney H. Jones University of Reading To appear in Hall, K. and Barrett, R. (Ed.) (forthcoming) Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Oxford University Press. What does a ‘dick-pic’ do? In April of 2015, on the eve of the reauthorization of the US Patriot Act, a law which makes possible a wide range of surveillance activities by the US government against private citizens, the television comedian John Oliver interviewed the famous whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose release of thousands of NSA documents brought to the world’s attention the extent of the government’s domestic espionage operations. Lamenting that the American public did not seem sufficiently engaged in the admittedly complex issue of government surveillance. Oliver attempted to get Snowdon to talk about the problem in terms that the ‘average American’ could understand by asking the question: ‘Can they see my dick?’ The point Oliver is making was that if Americans (American men, to be specific) thought that the NSA was keeping a dossier of their dick pics, they would be much more concerned about the issue of government surveillance. ‘Everything you did only matters if we have this conversation properly,’ Oliver tells Snowden, and, in his view, it is the object of the ‘dick pic’ (and the social practice of which it is a part) that can make talking about surveillance in a way people can understand possible. This example illustrates a number of important issues related to the study of language and sexuality. The first is the fact that language about sex and sexuality can pop up in all sorts of different contexts and be used for all sorts of different purposes. In this case, for example, a clearly sexual social practice, the exchange of erotic photographs, is recruited into a decidedly non-erotic context – a conversation about the complexities of government surveillance. In fact, it is the very sexual nature of this practice and the kinds of texts it results in that, in Oliver’s view, makes possible a productive conversation about the nonsexual topic. In a sense, the subject of government surveillance is ‘queered’ though it’s association with the production and distribution of dick pics. At the same time, the practice of sharing of dick pics is also ‘queered’ by being framed not just as a matter of sexuality, but a matter of national security, and even patriotism. After enumerating the different ways the US government might gain access to its citizen’s dick pics, Oliver asks Snowdon if, in light of this, it might not be a good idea for people to just stop taking pictures of their dicks, prompting the following exchange: Snowden: … you shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much. Oliver: That is a pretty inspiring answer to the question: Hey, why did you just send me a picture of your dick? Because I love America, that’s why! In other words, what this example reminds us is that sometimes what is most important about discourse about sex and sexuality – whether it comes in the form of spoken words, written texts, or images of things such as dicks – is not what these utterances, texts and images ‘mean’, but what people do with them, and the ways, through these social actions, certain kinds of social identities and social relationships – and certain kinds of ‘conversations’ -- are made possible. What Oliver’s appropriation of the dick pic also reminds us is that no cultural tool is ideologically neutral or free from the relationships of power associated with the social practices it is used to perform. The main reason his insertion of the dick pic into this seemingly incongruous context seems reasonable (albeit humorous) is the framework of masculine hegemony that underlies the practice of producing and distributing dick pics – a framework in which there is the assumption that it is some kind of ‘constitutional right’ for men to circulate their dick pics with abandon, free of government scrutiny, a right that it is difficult to imagine would be so explicitly asserted for women who wish to produce and distribute pictures of their bodily parts. Finally, perhaps the most obvious thing this example highlights is how much digital technologies have affected practices associated with sex and sexuality and how we communicate in and about those practices. Fifty years ago, the idea that a man would send a photograph of his penis to another person, or that that photograph might be intercepted by the government, though possible, would have been considered highly irregular. Today circulating dick pics is a recognized social practice, part and parcel of the way sexuality (and language about sexuality) are increasingly mediated through technologies like computers and mobile phones, and the capacity of the technologies to allow people to entextualize their bodies and to technologize their sexualities in all sorts of new ways. The purpose of this chapter is to explore ways in which language and sexuality scholars can address these issues – the issue of action: how language and other semiotic systems construct sex and sexuality not just through what they mean but through the concrete social actions people take with them; the issue of mediation -- the fact that, all actions, including actions associated with sex and sexuality, are mediated through cultural tools, which include both language (and other semiotic systems) and physical objects like cell phones, condoms, and various body parts; the issue of identity – how what we do with our language, our cell phones, and our body parts helps to determine what kind of person we can be and what kind of relationships we can have; and the issue of power – the fact that language and other cultural tools are unequally distributed, and so the kinds of social actions and social identities that are associated with them are also unequally distributed. The framework I will introduce to explore these issues is called mediated discourse analysis Norris and Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001), an approach that takes as its unit of analysis not discourse, but the social actions that discourse makes possible. In what follows I will briefly introduce the theoretical concepts and analytical procedures that make up this framework, explain their relevance to the study of language and sexuality, and illustrate their application by reviewing a series of studies involving people sharing pictures of their dicks and other parts of their bodies over digital networks. The main question I will attempt to answer is, ‘What does a dick pic do? By which I mean: What sorts of social actions, social practices, social identities and relationships of power does it make possible. Challenges in Language and Sexuality Research Research on language and sexuality has traditionally been concerned, as Bucholz and Hall (2004) put it, with ‘the multiplicity of ways that language constructs sexuality.’ Of course, the study of how people construct sexuality depends crucially on how the researchers who are studying them construct it. Many researchers in the field have conceived of ‘sexuality’ as broadly equivalent to ‘sexual orientation’ or ‘sexual identity’, and therefore, much of the mainstream work on language and sexuality has been concerned with the role of language in the construction of different types of ‘homosexualities’ or ‘heterosexualities’, and with the ways people who assume different sexual identities or are members of different sexual communities use language to communicate thier identities and their membership in these communities (see for example Hayes, 1976; Leap ed., 1995). At the same time, other scholars, have criticized this identity focused approach to sexuality and the kinds of research it lends itself to -- particularly studies of ‘gay and lesbian language’-- claiming this this view of sexuality is too essentializing. Among the most vocal of these critics are Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick (Cameron & Kulick 2003a, 2003b; Kulick, 2000), who have argued that scholars of language and sexuality should focus less on identity and group membership, and more on the way language is deployed in the construction of ‘desire’ and the conduct of sexual interactions. What is initially attractive about this critique is that it seems to redirect the study of language and sexuality towards a more situated, ‘action oriented’ approach that examples like the one I gave above seem to demand. The problem with it is that, with its focus on ‘desire’, it narrows rather than expands the definition of sexuality – or rather, narrows what sexuality is seen able to do. Making sexuality merely a matter of desire, for example, makes it difficult to explain what dick pics are doing in a discussion of government surveillance. At the same time, if we try to treat this conversation as not about sexuality, that is, if we ‘desexualize’ the dick pic, we miss the point that Oliver is trying to make. Most important, where this approach fails is in its proponents’ desire to usher the notion of identity out of the theoretical theater of language and sexuality studies. In many cases, it is hard to imagine how desire might operate in the absence of the discursive construction of identity. A man who sends his dick pic to a particular person in the context of a particular interaction (as I will discuss below) is not just showing what he wants – he’s showing who he is, and who he thinks the other person is, and he is (re)creating a certain relationship of power with the other person. The ability to have conversations about dick pics of the type that Oliver and Snowden engage in is also inextricably tied to their identities, not just their identities as a television comedian and a government whistleblower, but their identities as heterosexual males. In other words, by doing what they’re doing with dick pics, they are also doing things with identities and with power. The crux of this debate about desire and identity really revolves not so much around how one understands the word ‘sexuality’ – whether is refers to ‘who we are’ or ‘what we do’ or ‘how we feel’ – as it does around broader understandings of the relationship between language, identity and social action. One attempt to articulate this relationship in a way that makes room for both identity and desire is ‘queer linguistics’ (Barrett, 1997; Bucholtz and Hall, 2004; Livia & Hall 1997), an approach that brings to bear theoretical insights from feminism, queer studies, and sociolinguistics to try to understand the role language plays in the construction and regulation of sex and sexuality. ‘One of the most compelling features of queer linguistics from a theoretical standpoint,’ write Bucholtz and Hall (2004: 471), ‘is that it allows us to talk about sexual ideologies, practices, and identities as inter-connected issues without losing sight of power relations’ (emphasis mine). Responding to the criticism that studies of language and sexuality that focus on sexual identity run the risk distracting scholars from issues like desire and from sex itself, Bucholtz and Hall make an argument about the centrality of social identity to the study of social action which draws on several key concepts in sociolinguistics. One concept is the concept of indexicality (Eckert, 2008; Silverstein, 2004), the idea that the relationship between the way people talk and their social groups is not a simple matter of membership, but a matter of the situated use of particular variables in ways that both signal certain kinds of identities and point to larger ideological systems. Another is the concept of performativity (Butler, 1990; Livia and Hall, 1997), the notion that identities – including sexual and gender identities -- are not so much possessed as performed, and that language plays a key role in these performances. Like indexicality, performativity is also a matter of ideology and of power: statements about gender and sexuality are never just descriptive, they are also prescriptive as they reproduce past performances that have been sanctioned by the societies in which they are enacted. Finally, another concept from sociolinguistics queer linguists rely on is the concept of practice (Eckert and McConnell- Ginet, 1992), the idea that the essence of identity is to be found in localized practices that people engage in in communities, and that identities and the ‘scripts’ people use to perform them may mean different things outside of the context of these practices and these communities. Based on their understanding of these concepts, Bucholz and Hall (2004:470) define sexuality as: the systems of mutually constituted ideologies, practices, and identities that give sociopolitical meaning to the body as an eroticized and/or reproductive site. And they define language as: a primary vehicle by which cultural ideologies circulate … a central site of social practice, and … a crucial means for producing sociocultural identities. (492). Mediated discourse analysis shares many of the goals of queer linguistics, especially its desire to understand the interrelationship between language, identity, and action (though its engagement with notions like practice and performativity), and its commitment to understanding the way power works in the reproduction and regulation of sexual practices and sexual identities. Where mediated discourse analysis differs is its focus. Whereas queer linguistics begins with language, ideologies, practices and identities and asks how they create meaning, mediated discourse analysis begins with the concrete social actions that people take in their lives, like putting on a condom or sharing a dick pic, and asks, first of all, how language, ideologies, practices, identities, and other cultural tools that people have available to them make these actions possible, and, second, how through their actions, people reproduce or ‘technologize’ these languages, ideologies, practices, identities, and other cultural tools so that they can be taken up and used in future actions. Another way mediated discourse analysis differs from other approaches to language and sexuality is that is doesn’t necessarily regard language as the ‘primary vehicle’ through which people circulate cultural ideologies and produce social identities. The social actions that that they perform to do these things also depend on other tools (such as condoms, computers, mobile phones, and dick pics). Rather than automatically privileging the role of language in every action, mediated discourse analysts are concerned with how language interacts with other tools, especially material mediational means – objects, physical texts, and the electronic media which often serve as the carriers of language. Technologies and technologization By beginning with action rather than with language (or ‘meaning’), mediated discourse analysis allows analysts to avoid the assumption that we can ‘read’ meanings from texts by studying these texts outside of their use in concrete, situated actions (Jones and Norris, 2005: 9). The danger of this assumption became evident in early work using mediated discourse analysis which attempted to address the sexual spread of HIV among men who have sex with men (MSM) in China in the 1990s (Jones, 1999, 2002, 2007). At that time, urban communities of MSM in China were experiencing a dramatic increase in the rate of HIV transmission relative to other vulnerable communities, despite the fact that many members of this community believed that they practiced ‘safe sex’. So the question the study began with was, what where the men in question doing when they were having ‘safe sex’, what sorts of cultural tools (such as public health slogans sexual scripts, social identities, physical places and objects) did they have available to them to engage in these actions, and how did these tools either enable or constrain their ability to avoid HIV transmission. The most obvious cultural tool these men had available to them to avoid HIV transmission, of course, was condoms, but after interviewing these men and observing their social interactions it became clear that for many of them using a condom was seen as constraining their ability to avoid HIV transmission rather than enabling it, because it was seen as interfering with their ability to form relationships of trust with their sexual partners and to establish identities as ‘civilized gay men’. Government warnings advising them: ‘when in doubt, use a condom’, made matters even worse, since the state of ‘being in doubt’ (and showing it by using a condom) was regarded as more ‘risky’ than the action of unprotected sex. The reason for this state of affairs was that the cultural tool of the condom had been technologized in a particular way within these communities so that its use resulted in claiming and imputing social identities that members felt put them at risk for HIV transmission rather than protected them from it. The identities they were able to claim by not using condoms were seen as more effective tools for the prevention of HIV. These observations serve to highlight some important characteristics of cultural tools that are central to mediated discourse analysis and its application to language and sexuality studies. i) ii) iii) All actions are mediated through cultural tools, some of which may be material (such as condoms), and some of which may be semiotic (such as public health slogans, sexual scripts, and social identities). All cultural tools make some actions easier and others more difficult. That is to say, all tools introduce affordances and constraints (Gibson, 1986) into the social situations in which they are used. The affordances and constraints of cultural tools are not just a matter of their inherent material or semiotic qualities, but are also a function of the kinds of social practices and social identities that have adhered to these tools over the course of the multiple social actions they have been appropriated into over time iv) and they ways, through their use, they become associated with other tools within larger ‘toolboxes’ which might be called ‘Discourses’ (Gee, 2011) or ‘ideologies’. This process by which the affordances and constraints of cultural tools become refined and fixed over time is called technologization (Jones, 2002, 2016; Scollon, 2001). The affordance and constraints of any cultural tool are not wholly determinative of how it can be used; social actors exercise considerable creativity in ‘bending’ and ‘blending’ tools with other tools in order to make them more suitable for accomplishing particular actions, and these creative adaptations can sometimes result in tools being technologized in new ways. A key concern of mediated discourse analysis is the ‘tension between the mediational means as provided in the sociocultural setting and the unique contextualized use of these means in carrying out particular concrete actions’ (Wertsch, 1994: 205). The most important point here -- and the point at which mediated discourse dovetails with the aspiration of queer linguistics not to ‘lose sight of power relations’-- is the fact that cultural tools are not ideologically neutral: they are ‘carriers of social, cultural, and historical formations’ (Norris and Jones, 2005: 49). Every time somebody appropriates a particular tool, they are invoking the history of its use, situating themselves within a particular Discourse, and claiming for themselves certain identities associated with that Discourse. In this way, it is through the gradual technologization of cultural tools – even ‘mundane’ tools like condoms and telephones – within particular communities and societies that the ideologies governing these communities and societies are produced and reproduced and the identities and relationships that constitute these communities and societies are formed. Thus, the action using a condom or of not using one is a crucial site at which certain ideas about ‘being gay’ (or being ‘Chinese’ or being ‘civilized’) are worked out. Whereas many other approaches to language and power are interested in how ideologies and identities operate upon speakers, and how evidence of this operation can be uncovered in people’s texts and utterances (see for example Fairclough, 1992), mediated discourse analysis is interested in how people themselves contribute to the production of ideologies and identities through their everyday actions and the ongoing technologization of cultural tools that these actions entail. It recognizes that the solution to larger problems of power, inequality and social vulnerability often lie in our attempts to grapple with more concrete, situated problems like how to get our sexual partner to use a condom, for it is through these mundane, situated actions that we build (and transform) our social worlds moment by moment. Mediation, Entextualization and Display It should be clear from the example in the last section, that mediated discourse analysis views all sexual activity as mediated. Having sex (not to mention, ‘having sexuality) depends upon people having access to certain cultural tools. Some of these tools are material, like condoms and hotel rooms and sexy underwear, and some are semiotic, like seductive talk, sexual scripts, and sexual roles, and these tools may be appropriated into sexual interactions at strategic moments. A condom, for example, can facilitate a sexual encounter in all sorts of ways—not just in preventing STDs; It can make someone a more desirable or less desirable partner, for example, or it can signal in the ongoing course of a sexual interaction that a certain stage has been reached; it can function as a question, or an invitation, or a warning, depending on the local situational context and the broader sociocultural environment in which it is introduced. Furthermore, because all ‘mediational means’ appropriated to ‘do’ sex embody different affordances and constraints and carry the histories of their past use, sex is always a site for the technologization of social practices and social identities and for the production and reproduction of ideologies and Discourses. Nowadays, advances in information communication technologies have made available a whole new array of tools through which sex and sexuality can be mediated, and thus have made possible a whole new array of social actions that count as ‘sex’, including ‘phone sex’ (Stone, 1996), ‘sexting’ (Hasinoff, 2012), and text-based and televideo cybersex (Waskul, 1994). These new tools affect not just the way people conduct digitally mediated sexual interactions, but also how they conduct sexual interactions offline as well. Race (2015:271) goes so far as to argue that computers and mobile phones have given rise to ‘a historically distinctive way of arranging erotic and intimate life,’ a new ‘infrastructure of intimacy’ with unique ‘erotic, social and communal potentials.’ It goes without saying that understanding how these new tools affect the kinds of actions people can take around sex and sexuality, the kinds of identities they can claim, and the kinds of ideologies they can promote is of great interest to mediated discourse analysts. One of the most important characteristics of communication technologies (and one that is especially relevant when it comes to sex) is that they not only serve as mediational means in their own right, affecting who can communicate with whom, where and when, and using what semiotic modes (Jones, 2005, 2016), but they also serve as means through which other cultural tools can be ‘manufactured’ though the process of recoding and preserving people’s words and actions. Information communication technologies belong to a special class of technologies that might be called ‘technologies of entextualization’ (among which we can include pens, paint brushes, printing presses, and cameras, as well as computers and smartphones) (Jones 2009). The ‘texts’ that are produced as a result of using communication technologies can come to be used and technologized within the interactions in which they are created, or they can also be recontextualized into different interactions to take actions that may be quite foreign to the ways they were used in their original contexts. A somewhat ironic example of this is pointed out by Hasinoff (2012: 450), who observes that although consensual sex between two 17-year-olds is legal in most states, by sharing texts and images in the context of computer mediated sexting, these teenagers are violating the law against producing and distributing ‘child pornography’. The problem is not the actions they are engaged in when they are ‘sexting’; it is the entextualization of those actions that come as a byproduct of using the communication technology to perform them. One of the main consequences of new communication technologies, then, is that they allow people to entextualize their bodies and bodily actions in new ways, and then to use these representations of their bodies to take social actions, one of the most common manifestations of this affordance being the ‘dick pic’. The production and distribution of dick pics and other representations of the body is the subject of a number of studies using tools from mediated discourse analysis. One of these studies explores the exchange of images in the context of text based communication in a gay chatroom (Jones, 2005), another the regulation of access to images in the context of gay dating sites like Gaydar (Jones, 2012), and a third the way gay men who engage in televideo cybersex (or ‘cam sex’) use the affordances of the technology to regulate the way they reveal and conceal different parts of their bodies in the course of the interaction (Jones, 2008). Like the study on the use of condoms by gay men in China described above, these studies reveal that the way people use cultural tools in the course of sexual interaction can be complex and sometimes unexpected, and that these uses serve not just to perform social actions at the local level, but also to link these actions to broader ideologies about sex and sexuality. Just as a condom is never just a condom, a dick pic is never just at dick pic. When gay men exchange photos of themselves in text based chatrooms, for example, whether these be photos of their penises, their torsos, their faces, or any other part of their bodies, they use these images to accomplish a range of different social actions. One of the most important, of course, is managing the negotiation of mutual attraction: they want to see what their partner looks like before meeting up. At the same time, the images they exchange also serve as a means for them to manage difficult issues of disclosure and anonymity when chatting with strangers: one reason a man might choose to send a dick pic might be to avoid (or delay) sending a picture of his face, which, obviously entails much more risk. In this regard, one of the key affordances of the dick pic in this context is that it allows for an incremental disclosure of identity: men these contexts often offer their bodies ‘a piece at a time’ as they gradually negotiate their relationships. Finally, in the course of these negotiations, the exchange of pictures serves as means of regulating a ‘code of reciprocity’ whereby the offer of a particular kind of picture opens a slot for the exchange of a similar kind of picture from the other party, and the kind of picture offered (whether it be a ‘dick pic’ or a ‘face pic’) can signal the direction in which the relationship is headed. In many of these encounters, then, a key site for the establishment of mutual trust and the exercise of power is on the micro level of conversational management as men vie to avoid being the first to offer a picture or work to ensure that their offer of a picture will be reciprocated. A similar phenomenon is seen in televideo cybersex, where pointing one’s camera at different parts of one’s body acts as a way not just to entice and stimulate one’s partner, but also to manage one’s identity and regulate locally produced power dynamics. Participants in such encounters, for example, often take pains to make sure that when they offer a display of a particular body part (their penis or their face) that their interlocutor offers a reciprocal display (see excerpts 1-3). Excerpt 1 Excerpt 3 A: show dick? Wow nice B: show yours mmm A: wanna show face (displaying torso) B: together (displaying torso) A: ok B: ready? (moving camera slowly upwards) A: (moves camera upward to reveal face) ok thanks (quickly moves camera downward to display torso) B: (moves camera downward to display torso) ur cute A: really? B: yeah Excerpt 2 A: you hard down there? B: LIKE A ROCK A: lemme c B: u hard? From Jones 2008: 465 Looking so closely at the way people negotiate the moment by moment exchange of images of their penis online may, on one level, seem trivial given the important issues of maginalization and institutional discrimination that scholars of language and sexuality need to deal with. It is, however, through these careful negotiations of discourse identities (Scollon, 1996) that broader social identities and social relationships are constituted. When and how one displays one’s penis in such interactions serves to construct the owners of those penises having certain moral characteristics (like trustworthiness), of being qualified to take on certain techologized sex roles (like ‘top’ or ‘bottom’), and of being the kinds of people you might imagine having a certain kind of relationship with. As one of the participants in Jones (2005) put it: I like to see the person’s face when I chat on cam. If we get along, we might meet up for real later on. On the other hand, I would never show my face if I am having cybersex. It’s too embarrassing. And I won’t meet up with someone who is willing to do that kind of thing on cam. (88) Often in studies of language and sexuality when we speak of power, we think of it on the macro level, in terms of things like institutional discrimination or gender based hegemony, Examining sex and sexuality at the level of the situated social action, on the other hand, allows us to observe how power manifests in the moment by moment claims and imputations of identity that people engage in when they appropriate cultural tools. Since these tools (and the identities claimed through them) always index larger ‘toolkits’ (Discourses), mediated discourse analysis give us a way of seeing how micro operations of power are always related to macro (societal, institutional) relations of power. This relationship between the deployment of digital images and the management of social identities has also been observed in more recent studies of mobile ‘hookup apps’ like Grindr, and although these studies do not make explicit use of mediated discourse analysis, many of them share a similar perspective on the importance of examining how mediational means make particular kinds of social interactions, social relationships and social identities possible. Race (2015), for example, focuses on ‘how electronic devices and software …mediate the sexual encounter in new ways; making certain activities, relations, and practices possible while obviating others.’ The way people deploy photos using ‘hookup apps’, he observes, serves not just to attract certain kinds of sexual partners, but also helps to construct the infrastructure for sexual encounters people have once they meet up in ‘real life’. Similarly, Blackwell and her colleagues (2014) examine how users of gay hookup apps use photos as cues to signal particular interactional intentions, and Tazallis (2015) describes how pictures sometimes operate as conversational moves in ‘gamified’ interactions that facilitate not just hookups but also a kind of ‘pornified’ identity play in which ‘deeply inscribed (racial, bodily, gender, class) hierarchies within the gay male community’ are rehearsed and reinscribed (767). Nowhere, however, is the power dimension of image sharing more obvious than in studies of how heterosexual adolescents exchange pictures of themselves while ‘sexting’. The most important thing these studies reveal is that ‘sexing’ is not just about sex, and that, like the gay men in the studies described above, teenagers accomplish a range of social actions through producing and exchanging sexy pictures of themselves. Hasinoff (2012), for example, regards sexting as a form of ‘media production’ through which adolescent girls manage their social relationships with peers of both genders and engage in often creative forms of identity play, which sometimes serve to challenge or critiques media portrayals of women. Examining the sharing of sexy images on the more micro level, Ringrose and her colleagues (Ringrose, 2011; Ringrose and Harvey, 2015) describe how the management of requests by boys of images of girls’ breasts involves complex claims and imputations of identity through which girls need to negotiate the fine line between being seen as desirable and being seen as a ‘slut’, and how, in such contexts, the identity of ‘slut’ itself can take on a new ‘exchange value’, signaling sexually confidence, experience and knowingness. So, while girls in these interactions are, as Ringrose (2011:111), citing Gill (2008), puts it ‘under pressures to visually display and perform a new “compulsory” “disciplinary technology of sexy” (Gill, 2008), the material technologies of mobile phones seem to give them opportunities to, to some degree, disrupt this discipline and the relationships of power it entails. At the same time, in nearly all studies of adolescent sexting there is overwhelming evidence that the way images of different body parts are regarded reproduces well established gender based stereotypes and hierarchies. As Salter (2015) observes, images of the exposed female body almost always expose their producers to ‘pejorative ascriptions of sexual promiscuity’, regardless of the contexts in which these images are produced and exchanged, while images of the male body are rarely subject to such ascription; at the same time, males use images of their bodies (and images of the female bodies they have gained access to) in more aggressive ways, for example as tools for sexual harassment or as emblems of conquest. Ringrose and her colleagues (Ringrose et al., 2013), for example, observe how images of girls’ bodies function in a competitive system of peer ‘ratings’ in which boys could gain value by tagging, collecting and showing images they claimed were sent to them by the girl. Rogue Tools, Revenge Porn and Masculinity What this last point makes clear is that the most dangerous thing about the entextualization of the body that digital media make possible is that once these images have been produced and exchanged, producers often lose control over the way the way they are distributed, the contexts into which they are introduced, and the social actions they are used to take. This is the point often made by educational materials that warn girls against sexting, lest the images they produce ‘go viral’ and ruin their reputations (see for example Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, 2011). This is also the point that Oliver makes in his humorous tirade about the NSA keeping dossiers of citizen’s dick pics (though the social consequences of this for producers of such images are much less clear). The most dramatic example of sexy images being used for purposes for which they were not originally intended is revenge porn, the practice of people distributing – often via websites dedicated to this purpose -- intimate images and videos of other people, usually former lovers, without their consent, in order to exact vengeance for perceived wrongs. On such sites photos and videos are generally posted with the full names of the person pictured along with a short narrative about why that person has been exposed, accounts which usually attempt to position the poster as the true victim. Excepts 4 and 5, show two such narratives from the website Myex.com. Excerpt 4 I considered her a friend and we hooked up a few times. Long story short....whore took a couple hundred from my wallet and my HSA card. Haven't seen her since. Everything she told me was a lie. From Myex.com, quoted in Jones, 2016 Excerpt 5 When she was my girlfriend, I didn't knew she had 4 other boyfriends. I wish she is dead. I really, really loved her, like I've never loved anyone else in this miserable worl. She obliderated my heart. In such contexts, the most obvious social action that these images are being used to perform is what Tannenbaum (2015) calls ‘slut shaming’. This action is made possible, however, not just through the exposure of intimate photographs, but through the technologization of the identity of the ‘slut’ using an array of discursive tools, including master narratives of moral turpitude which stories like those cited above invoke, and a collection of gendered terms of abuse. For example, in a corpus of 500 revenge porn stories collected about women whose pictures had been uploaded to Myex.com (Jones, 2016), the most frequent words used to describe these women were ‘bitch’, ‘slut’, and ‘whore’. At the same time, a similar corpus from the (much smaller) section of the site where pictures of men were uploaded, contained few specific terms of abuse. Instead, stories about men focused on what they had done -- like ‘lie’ and ‘cheat’ and ‘fuck’. When they were labeled, it was with more innocuous terms like ‘guy’, ‘cheater’, ‘player’, or, at worst, ‘asshole’. Of course this double standard should not be surprising, reflecting as it does broader discursive practices of gendered labeling. The important point here is that these images themselves are not intrinsically ‘shameful’, and indeed, in contexts in which they were originally produced made very different kinds of social actions and different kinds of social identities possible both for the people depicted in them and the people that they shared them with. When they are reappropriated into Myex.com, therefore, they are not just recontextualied, they are also retechnologized, brought into a relationship with a new set of cultural tools and becoming part of a different Discourse. It would be a mistake, however, to think that people who upload pictures of their ex-lovers on revenge porn sites are just ‘taking revenge’, just as it is a mistake to think that adolescent sexing is just about sex. Within the context of these sites, these images are used to accomplish a variety of social actions among the users of the site, including claiming identities for themselves as both victims and ‘victors’, performing masculinity, competing for social status, and engaging in homosocial bonding through sexual storytelling and the sharing of pornography (Flood, 2008). The range these of activities becomes clear when one examines the comments sections of Myex.com, where visitors discuss the images that have been uploaded and the stories attached to them. What is interesting about these discussions is that, while they are replete with (mostly abusive) assessments of the people depicted in the images, they are also full of (mostly abusive) assessments of the original posters of these images, assessments regarding the quality of their images, their choice of sexual partners, and their own role in bringing about their alleged victimhood. Most of these assessments involve the same degree of name calling to which the women in the images are subjected, comments such as: ‘op [original poster] is a fucktard,’ ‘op is an asshole,’ ‘op is a dick sucking homo,’ and ‘op should jump off the nearest cliff.’ One of the ironies of ‘taking revenge’ though exposing sexy images of a former partner is that often such images also depict the poster himself, and so by exposing their victims, posters also end up exposing themselves, and it is these acts of exposure that are among the most frequent targets of abuse from commenters, abuse which takes the form of remarks like ‘aw you got a baby dick son how do you manage to sleep with anyone with that? and small pathetic cock?’ and ‘hahahaha first thing I saw was your cock and it’s small.’ And so, even in the context of shaming their ex-girlfriends and trading porn, these men are also engaged in the action of exchanging dick pics, and subject to the claims and imputation of social identity, and to the invocations of broader Discourses of masculinity this entails. Conclusion: Sexuality and the Technologization of the Body Sexuality emerges through a process of making our bodies (and parts of our bodies) meaningful in the ongoing negotiation of social interaction. This process is made possible by the range of cultural tools that our societies make available to us, which include both semiotic tools like narratives, forms of address, terms of abuse and conversational gambits, and material tools like condoms, computers and dick pics. The way we use these tools to take actions ends up both determining the kinds of identities we can claim for ourselves and impute on others, identities like ‘gay man’ and ‘slut’, and recreating broader social values and expectations about what kinds of people ought to be able to take what kinds of actions in particular social contexts. In a recent article in First Monday, Nishant Shah (2015) claims that on the internet we are all sluts, that there is something inherent in the affordances of digital technologies for ‘exposure, repetition, sharing, replication, and uncontrolled proliferation’ that reconfigures our bodies and our genders. ‘To be digital’, she says, ‘is to be slutty’. 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