Building on and expanding discussions of the value of anonymity and pseudonymity in digital cultures in general, and in queer digital cultures in particular, this presentation explores notions of opacity as modes of resistance to dominating regimes of visibility on and beyond social media platforms. Across queer, postcolonial and digital media theorizing, opacity provides a way of thinking through the tension between the visible and the invisible, challenging the idea of public visibility and identification as that which drives data cultures and legitimizes marginalized sexual practices and expressions. Suggestive of discussions on tactical, queer uses of social media in terms of disconnection and reluctance, opacity affords yet another way of thinking resistance to platform power and user control.

Based on an ethnographic study of the Swedish digital BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside, this presentation discusses opacity in two ways: first, as a way of considering tactical uses of Darkside between modes of revealing and concealing, and second, as a way of conceptualizing the platform as a borderland between intelligibility and unintelligibility. The platform provides an opening for shared vulnerabilities and collective forms of secrecy reminiscent of what Clare Birchall (2021) calls “radical secrecy,” which in the context of Darkside grants both privacy and degrees of public kink visibility to its members. Birchall imagines radical secrecy – or “postsecrecy” – as a mode of collective resistance to both neoliberal transparency and secret state surveillance in datafied societies.

Opacity implies a lack of clarity; something opaque may be both difficult to see clearly as well as to understand. Drawing on Édouard Glissant (1997) and his idea of “the right to opacity” as a form of resistance to surveillance and imperial domination, a digital sexual politics of opacity could help provide recognition without a demand to fully understand sexual otherness, opening up for new modes of obscure and pleasurable sexual expressions and transgressions on social media platforms.

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University and a Guest Professor in Gender Studies, Uppsala University in Sweden. She has been a Visiting Scholar at University of California at Berkeley; University of Surrey; Peking University, Beijing; Hunter College (CUNY), New York City; and University of Turku. She currently focuses on digital sexual cultures, sextech, audio erotica, and the politics of pleasure. She is the PI of the research projects “Digital sexual health: Designing for safety, pleasure and wellbeing in LGBTQ+ communities” funded by Forte: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (with Kath Albury and Zahra Stardust) and “Listening pleasures: Sexual health and audio fiction in a time of digital intimacy” funded by The Swedish Research Council (with Anna Hultman, Sara Tanderup Linkis and Linn Sandberg). She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2003), Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (with Malin Sveningsson, Routledge 2012,) Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (with Susanna Paasonen, MIT Press 2020) and Hot connections: Why sexual platforms matter (with Susanna Paasonen and Katrin Tiidenberg, MIT Press forthcoming 2026).

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞