‘It’s not just pink, fluffy handcuffs’: Criminalised communities, anti-surveillance, and hacking sextech

Sextech is often marketed as a novel, progressive and innovative field that combats stigma, enhances pleasure and redresses health inequities. However, where it straddles aspirations for social change, business entrepreneurship and capital-raising, the visions and investments of sextech can be in conflict. In this paper, we explore tensions in sextech design as they emerged at a three-day virtual Public Interest Sextech Hackathon. The deliberations between our participants, community panellists, guest speakers, mentors and judges, echoed tensions between market demands for monetisation, profit and continuous growth, and marginalised tech users’ needs for data privacy, collective safety and sexual justice. The frictions produced by these different investments created a lively space to discuss the political contexts in which sextech is designed, used and regulated, including the increasing criminalisation of sexual and reproductive healthcare and the dominance of white feminist approaches to business. We present four key themes from our data: digital security as a form of community care, design concepts for anti-surveillance sextech, the creep of commercial start-up cultures, and practical ways to safeguard technologies and build accountability. We found that centring marginalised voices in sextech design provokes critical discussion about the political (rather than the commercial) viability of sextech. If we understand sextech as a subaltern practice of hacking and scrapping, we suggest that there is more for sextech designers to gain in building alliances with criminalised, marginalised and oppressed communities who understand the risks of policing, extraction, surveillance and co-optation, and who hold stakes in sharing tools to strategize for survival and liberation.