Sextech devices offer new opportunities for sexual exploration, learning, and play. In Cindy Gallop’s (2015) influential definition of sextech as technologies ‘designed to enhance, innovate and disrupt in every area of human sexuality and human sexual experience’, an almost revolutionary power to transform sex is at the forefront. But sextech is also inherently glitchy as apps, platforms, and connections are bound to fail or break, making interruption and stuckness an inevitable part of the intimate infrastructures of networked toys. While not unique to technologies of sex, this fragility of digital technologies is especially interesting in a context where technological and sexual norms and vulnerabilities intersect. Interweaving research on intimate infrastructures and queer theory, and especially focusing on discussions of failure and glitch, we explore how neoliberal norms of success have become entangled with sexual norms in sextech configurations. Using marketing language by leading companies for networked sex toys as an analytical backdrop, we build on 25 interviews with sexual and gender diverse sextech users in Australia and Sweden to discuss what it means to integrate less than seamless, stable, and user-friendly devices into sexual lives and routines. We understand networked sextoys as infrastructural in how they prop up, extend, but also reorganise intimate lives. The discussion of technological failure in science and technology studies has moved from a focus on failure as exception or accident which reveals underlying norms and structures, to an understanding of failure as one of the key conditions of neoliberal capitalism, embedded in everyday media habits. What can we learn about sex and tech by paying attention to how digital technologies are always fragile and unreliable? And what does a focus on networked sextech add to discussions of intimate digital infrastructures more broadly, including a queer and decolonial critique?
This paper argues for and demonstrates how outdoor municipal pools in Australia provide unique and vital contributions to social infrastructure and sometimes, anti-social infrastructure. Most of these outdoor pools are more than 50 years old and require some degree of physical infrastructure renewal. There are frequent closures and threats of closure with media discussion of ‘budget blow-outs’ and funding sustainability. The lens of social infrastructure allows us to see what is at stake if these pools are written off as unaffordable and ‘replaced’ by indoor pools in multi-purpose leisure centres. This argument will take us away from what a pool is and what it costs, to what a pool does and what it affords. Outdoor municipal pools become social infrastructure through the novel experiences of moving, dwelling, and relating they afford. They work as ‘gathering places’ vivified by the bodies that move, rest, and work there, entwined with other bodies and more-than-human elements that include the physical infrastructure, water, other animals, the natural environment, and the weather as lived. Elaboration of these interactions reveals the need for, and qualities of, a more expansive definition of sociality than is typically used in discussions of social infrastructure.
This article conceptualises research as an act of hope, framing inquiry as a creative and liminal space where meaning is continually negotiated. Drawing on Ernst Bloch's philosophy, I understand this liminality as a refusal of closure, a generative site where the unfinished and the possible are allowed to take form. Within this space, non-identities emerge, destabilising normative categories and expanding the imagination toward what has not yet been realised. By situating this liminal space through autobiographical memory, I interrogate the complexities of selfhood and the inner-discursive processes that shape and complicate immigrant subjectivity. Through the interplay of inner and outer worlds, autoethnographic writing becomes a mode of inquiry that allows me to interpret the ordinary body as a site of memory, rupture, and potential. This process of re-remembering – of stitching together fragments of past and present – constitutes new forms of knowledge. In this context, hopefulness becomes an ontological force, an affective orientation that resists the finality of singular meaning and opens a transformative space for reimagining the self. It is an imaginative response to the contradictions of the present, carrying anticipatory elements that challenge dominant narratives and invite collective reflection. In embracing autoethnography as a method of critique, this article offers a politically charged vision of research as both resistance and possibility. It foregrounds the transformative power of imagination, narrative, and symbolic form to reconfigure how we understand ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Research as hope – demanding reflexive ethics – affirms the necessity of the indefinable, the spaciousness required for becoming, and the radical openness of living with uncertainty. Research, in this sense, is not merely a reflection of the world as it is but a utopian impulse that gestures toward alternative futures. It is an enduring act of writing against erasure and the invisible forms of rejection that shape our everyday lives.
The breakdown of ecocidal and discriminatory capitalism requires the death of the possessive, individualist subject and this subject's corresponding transformation into something other. However, insofar as this transformation is compelled by an impersonal and ungovernable death drive, it eludes the agency of political subjects and cannot be placed in service of an intentionally mapped ethico-political project. Through analysis of Jenny Hval's novel Paradise Rot (2024), this article investigates eco-horror's capacity to libidinise the anarchic transformation in question, which is characterised by the absence of formal and teleological determination. I argue that, in Paradise Rot, this transformation is enacted by an intractable, unpossessable nature that decomposes recognisable subject- and object-forms. This nature embodies a wildness that aimlessly infests and mutates both the infrastructure of human domesticity and subjectivity itself. Moreover, I argue that Paradise Rot effects the libidinisation of this rewilding through the construction of a queer eco-pornography. In this pornography, queerness is correlated not only with a movement beyond binary, hierarchical gender dynamics, but with a subsumption of the human body by an impersonal nature that is absolutely external to human meaning, agency, ethics, and purposes. Thus, in Hval's novel, the human body's entanglement with nonhuman life is foreign to ideas of harmonious interspecies co-existence and repair. The novel moves beyond the limits of redemptive ecocriticism and queer theory, to develop a vision of queer ecology commensurate with Afro-pessimism and Black nihilism's call for ontological breakdown or unworlding. However, the novel ultimately lapses into a phobic narrative surrounding the transformative effects of wildness. While this undermines the potential of the novel's erotic, libidinising aspects, Paradise Rot nonetheless provides the model for an erotic embrace of material and ontological decay whose capabilities and potential effects have yet to be fully realised.
