Objecting the Objectionable: Normative Obscenification of Gender and Sexuality in Digital Governance

This PhD research project investigates how Western-aligned digital governance, through a set of practices the author calls ‘obscenification,’ systematically governs and shapes feminine and feminized bodies as obscene. This process, today increasingly magnified by digital governance and its role in shaping automation and algorithms, codifies historically biased methods of obscuring nudity inherited from the tradition of heteronormative attempts at governing and censoring (so-called) obscenities. The project employs visual and digital ethnography, genealogical methods, and Carine Zaayman’s “anarchival” framework ― or “discursive and methodological means to reveal the extent of absence in archives” (2023) ― as critical tools to surface, analyze, and question arbitrary assumptions pervasive throughout Western-aligned digital governance.

Focusing on how digital corporations moderate “obscenified” bodies within their platforms, this research examines the act of removal as a gateway to make visible the unseen aspects of this system: exploited labour, silenced users, partially disclosed policies, opaque algorithms, and the murky power and market dynamics of platforms’ influence and profit. This research ultimately aims to dismantle the biased assumptions of digital governance about bodies, gender, and sexuality, exposing the dangers of automated obscenity and resisting the imposition of a singular lens on the multifaceted identities and expressions of feminized bodies online.