Sexuality in the age of fiber optics

In this dissertation, I argue that the unprecedented re-mapping of public and private spaces brought about by fiber optic networks is experienced as, and explained through, sexuality. Sexuality elucidates this increasing contamination between self and other for theoretical and empirical reasons. From psychoanalysis through philosophy, sexuality has been privileged as a “key” to understanding the individual. From ubiquitous male-to-female connectors to debates over censorship, sexuality has emerged as the master trope for online contact, identity, and communication. This dissertation also attempts to think theory and enlightenment after fiber optics: rather than arguing that the Internet exemplifies poststructuralist or psychoanalytic theories, or embodies the bourgeois public sphere, it examines the ways in which the Internet transmogrifies representation, language, enlightenment and intercourse. The Internet fulfills and thus explodes man; of the promises and tenets of enlightenment: words and images, travelling as light, enable interactions that blind and expose the subject whom they were once supposed to bathe in the soft light of rational discourse. In each chapter, I analyze a model for high-speed telecommunications networks in conjunction with deployments of sexuality. In “Chapter One: First Contact,” I argue that the Internet itself has been construed as pornographic (rather than as purveying pornography—except when it is properly dimmed so that it enlightens, rather than exposes its users. In “Chapter Two: Pornocracy” I take exception to this exception and contend that legal and commercial constructions of the Internet as a public sphere also rely on a rhetoric of pornotroping. In “Chapter Three: High Tech Orientalism,” I analyze the ways in which cyberspace as frontier of the mind depends on Orientalist sexual exploration. In the last chapter, “Stroking Keys,” I argue that, through a virtual jouissance, cybersex makes the self unfindable to disciplinary power, but only by shattering the self and dispensing its shards in a system that is findable and visible. Thus, breaking with studies that privilege self-empowerment, I engage the rich philosophical traditions of light as a figure for clarification and surveillance, and sexuality as a figure for self-knowledge and uncontrollable contact to theorize the explosion and erosion of intersubjectivity.