WORKSHOP / PARTY | Queer Sexting Party
Artist: Kinga Michalska
DJ: Carmen Colas (LSD – Lesbian Speed Dating)
Friday, February 14, 2020
7:30 pm – 10:30 pm
At Studio XX
Entrance fee – $5 (no one will be turned away for lack of funds)
For Valentine’s Day, artist Kinga Michalska invites self-identified queers and allies to join a Queer Sexting Party! Starting with a community discussion, participants will share their sexting strategies, questions and insecurities. They will then be invited to take part in a collective sexting experiment. Queer love and desire, consent, inclusive vocabulary and desirability policies will inform the exchanges and lay the foundations for a consensual game. They will then start an encrypted online group discussion in which participants will create their own persona and anonymously send texts, photos, videos, audio recordings, GIFs and emojis. Everyone will be invited to take part in this conversation, or not—voyeurism is also a form of participation 😉
Participants will also be able to sign up for a queer blind sexting date! The evening will be spiced up by Carmen Colas’ dirty tunes.
To reserve a spot, contact ateliers@studioxx.org
You can pay your entrance online, or at the door in cash.
Kinga’s Queer Sexting Party
Despite the increasing accessibility of online dating services, platforms designed to house our digital pleasure largely reproduce the gendered, heterosexual scripts of goal-orientation, instant gratification, and gendered coding. In an effort to carve out alternative practices, Kinga’s Queer Sexting Party proposes a participatory experiment in community sexting which forays into the radical potentials of a queered digital erotics.
In technologically mediated sex, we become untethered from the cultural and spacial limitations of our materiality and can inhabit our bodies and our genders more freely. We shapeshift into whatever form we want (1). With a word, my clit can become a cock, a grapefruit seed, a 7 foot long velvety opening. Even as they text, my hands can pleasure my partner everywhere at once. In touch, every surface of contact remains a barrier that no perforation or enclosure can really dissolve. When I sext, I am porous, I can take you all at once, merging completely, my back becoming your back, my smells your smells.
Kinga’s workshop is a space to swap strategies that broaden our sexting vocabulary as we reconsider what sensoria is legible as erotic. Does an image of waves breaking get you wet? What about a soft pink or harsh yellow, lacy mycelium or velvety moss? Isn’t it scintillating to discover – in that exhibitionist, blinking ellipse – the girth of your lover’s thinking process as they compose a text? When we sext, the device itself becomes implicated in our practices of erotic pleasure. Bodies merge with machine, becoming amalgams of technology and flesh. The phone becomes a toy which mediates our erotic communication: both vibrant and vibrating. Screens become fetish objects, something our fingers tap, stroke, grope, and caress.
Digital communication technologies make it easier than ever to receive instant feedback. But what becomes of silence? In physical sex, we draw on a variety of non-verbal cues to indicate (dis)pleasure. When we sext, we’re limited to word and image. Not receiving an immediate text back can feel vulnerable – however, it’s precisely when we rush that we hurt each other inadvertently. A consensual, queer sexting re-considers our relationship to the pace of sexting to engage the communicative power of textual silence. When we take time to slow down; engage deliberately with each other; and linger, perhaps awkwardly at first, in sustained mutual pleasure, digital technologies can help us to practice our communication and establish braver, more fantastical bonds.
Hannah Kaya
(1) Jacob, Tai. “Sex over the Airwaves.” The McGill Daily, 2017, www.mcgilldaily.com/2017/11/sex-over-the-airwaves/.
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Kinga Michalska is a queer Polish artist based in Montreal. Crossing over photography, moving image and somatic practices her work is centered around themes of intimacy, gender, sexuality, memory and healing.
Hannah Kaya is an interdisciplinary writer and researcher based in Montreal. Her work is often performative, therapeutic, and ecologically minded.