The Objectionable within the Objectionable: Normative Censorship of Gender and Sexual Expression in Online Content Moderation

ABSTRACT:
Through visual ethnographic research, genealogical methods, and an-archival work as qualitative methods of critical inquiry, I am analyzing the digital obscenification of specific nudities through the automation and hegemonic amplification of the biased revealing concealments historically employed to mark and cover obscenity in visual production/consumption in western modernity (i.e. the fig leaf). My work, focusing on the digital moderation of objectionable/obscenified bodies erased from online platforms of interaction, investigates the act of removal as the access point into a subject made of material that is rendered invisible, silenced users, partially disclosed policies, black-boxed algorithms, and blurry power networks of mutual influence/capitalization. And whose affective force results in individual expression as an increasingly normatized and privatized subject.

BIO:
After a M.A. in visual communication as an investigative method, and beginning a PhD with an MPhil at UCL’s History of Art Department, I am currently a research associate and PhD candidate at the University of Arts Berlin and Weizenbaum Institut. I am working with multidisciplinary perspectives and methodologies developed from critical theory and artistic practice, and my research traverses digital technologies, automation, gender and sexual bias, censorship, biopolitics, and visual culture studies.