Between commodified and improvisational pleasures: Uses and experiences of sextech by queer, trans, and nonbinary people in Sweden and Australia

Sexual pleasure is a question of sexual justice and sexual rights in so far as who is allowed or denied pleasure is a vital issue for queer, trans, and nonbinary people. Pleasure is also intimately a technological question as sex was always entangled with and regulated by technologies. In this article, we seek to delineate a queer politics of pleasure by exploring LGBTQ+ people’s uses and experiences of sextech in Australia and Sweden with a specific focus on sex toys. Which bodies, identities, pleasures, and practices do sextexch assume and extend? And how do these sextech users play with (while being played by) such norms and assumptions? We begin by considering the cultural specificity of queer and feminist histories of sex toys, including the commodification of sex and pleasure in late capitalism and how this relates to sexual identities and ideas of sexual liberation. We then discuss norms of sex, pleasure, and sextech. But rather than distinguishing the normative from the antinormative as a way of locating a transgressive potential, we rather consider how norms are always part of their own variation, opening up a broader sexual field of perhaps more mundane practices, yet no less significant. Finally, we explore how pleasure aligns with or disrupts an attention to norms and identities. In contrast to the commodification of sexual identities in sextech, and the linear enhancement of pleasure by design, we further an understanding of pleasure as something more improvisational and unpredictable with limited space in mainstream sextech data economies.