Jenny Sundén

Short presentation

I’m a Professor of Gender Studies. Situated in gender and sexuality studies specifically, my work explores digital media technologies through feminist and queer theory and affect theory. My current research examines digital transformations of bodies and desire, the governance of marginalized bodies and sexualities under platform capitalism, and the politics of pleasure, including an investigation of audio erotica platforms as sites where sexuality, literature, sound, and listening converge.

Keywords

• digital media studies
• science and technology studies
• gender and sexuality studies
• sound studies
• feminist theory
• queer theory
• posthumanist theory
• affect theory
• ethnography

Biography

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Uppsala University and Södertörn University in Sweden, and was also a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Karlstad University (2020-2021). She received her Ph.D. 2002 from the Department of Communication Studies, Linköping University. She has been a visiting scholar at: UC Berkeley English Department (1998-1999); INCITE (Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography), University of Surrey (2003); School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University (2006, 2008); Department of Film and Media Studies, Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY, 2011); Department of Media Studies, University of Turku (2018-2019), and Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University (2024-2025).

Sundén is a queer and feminist media and technology researcher whose work has examined digital media and cultures since the 1990s, including text-based digital worlds and hypertext fiction, retro-futurist steampunk cultures, and queer communities in the online game World of Warcraft. In recent years, her research has focused on two primary areas. One examines feminist activism on social media platforms, with particular attention to humor as a form of resistance to sexism and misogyny. The other investigates digital sexual cultures and networked lives, exploring new forms of connectivity, intimacy, and desire, especially within LGBTQ and kink communities.

She is the author of Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter (MIT Press, forthcoming 2026, MIT Press, with Susanna Paasonen och Katrin Tiidenberg), Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (MIT Press, 2020, with Susanna Paasonen), Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (Routledge, 2012, with Malin Sveningsson) and Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2003). Her articles appear in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology; Configurations; European Journal of Cultural Studies; Feminist Media Studies; First Monday; Games and Culture; Gender, Place & Culture; Lambda Nordica; Qualitative Research Journal; Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters; Sexualities; Social Media + Society; Somatechnics; Sound Studies; Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap och Transformations.

Research

Listening pleasures: Sexual health and audio fiction in a time of digital intimacy (2024-2028)

This interdisciplinary research environment – funded by the Swedish Research Council and including Senior Lecturer Anna Hultman (Comparative Literature, Lund University), Associate Professor Sara Linkis Tanderup (Digital Cultures, Lund University) and Professor Linn Sandberg (Gender Studies, Södertörn University) – examines digital transformations of sex and intimacy, but also of practices of listening. Zooming in on apps and platforms for audio erotica specifically in Scandinavian and U.S. contexts (such as Dipsea, Quinn, Blanche Stories, and OhCleo), we investigate sonic spaces where sexual pleasure, health, literature, and storytelling converge. These services position themselves as producing sex-positive content in a feminist framework that emphasizes diversity, sexual agency, and the value of pleasure. We interrogate how these platforms negotiate feminist and sexual politics, commercial logics, and normative assumptions about gender, sexuality, and desire. Combining interviews with audio erotica producers (from publishers, editors, and sound producers to authors and voice actors) and users with platform analyses and practices of “close listening,” we examine how erotic audio and storytelling is produced, circulated, and experienced. Drawing on digital media studies, literary studies, sound studies, and queer and feminist theory, we further a discussion of how the specific affordances of sound reorganize relations between voice, body, and imagination, and how listening itself becomes a site where sexual norms are reproduced, contested, and reworked in everyday life.

Digital sexual health: Designing for safety, pleasure and wellbeing in LGBTQ+ communities (2022-2025)

A Swedish-Australian research collaboration funded by Forte: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, with Professor Kath Albury (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne) and Doctor Zahra Stardust (Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane). Sexual pleasure is a question of sexual health and sexual rights in so far as who is allowed or denied pleasure is a vital issue for queer, trans, and nonbinary people. Pleasure is also quite intimately a technological question as sex was in a sense always entangled with and regulated by technologies. In this project, we outline a queer politics of pleasure by exploring sexual and gender diverse sextech users in Australia and Sweden and their experiences of sextech. In contrast to the commodification of sexual identities in sextech, and the linear enhancement of pleasure by design, we further an understanding of pleasure as something more improvisational and unpredictable with limited space in mainstream sextech data economies and their privileging of power, efficiency, and quantification.

Rethinking sexuality: A geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden and Finland (2020-2023)

A Swedish-Finnish-Estonian research collaboration Funded by The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen), with Professor Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku) and Professor Katrin Tiidenberg (Tallinn University). What can we learn from including sexual platforms in definitions of social media and, by extension, from including sex in definitions of “the social” itself? In an age when sexuality is increasingly deplatformed by social media community standards and app store policies set by globally operating data giants, we turn to locally operating platforms devoted to nudity and kink. Sexual social media affords freedom of worldmaking, belonging, and a right to sexually exist. At the same time, what inspires some users to come together may rub others the wrong way. In exploring why and how sexual platforms matter, and for whom, we set out to make an intervention in debates on the value of social media, one mindful of the granularities of lived experience and the deep ambiguities that networked sexual lives entail.