My therapist introduced me to a new word this week: Eustress.

It is the beneficial or motivating sort/level of stress rather than an overwhelming, constant, crushing kind. Lucky me, at the moment I’ve hit that sweet spot. I’ve got a lot on my plate for the month of March but this has helped frame and codify my dissertation writing sessions to be more focused and productive.
So it was a tremendously productive week for me, especially in the brief calm before the storm of Symposium next week. I’ve continued iterating over the most basic elements of the project in order to better establish scope and frame it as clearly and accessibly as I can without compromising my argument. In this process I’ve been reflecting on just how much content I’ve produced already! I can definitely handle a dissertation, I’ve just got to get the framing right.

Thus, my research question and critical interventions have moved again. I spent a lot of time looking into the necessary parts of a successful research question and noted that my earlier variations were perhaps too unspecific. So I have revised the question to:

How do networked sexual devices reorganize the boundaries between body, computation, and community—and what does critical making reveal about those reorganizations that discourse alone cannot?

This reorientation is more specific in several ways, it makes they claim explicit, gestures towards objects of study, and establishes the research methodology as germane. By building on this research question I’ve started to tackle what I perceive to be a substantial gap in the triangulation of teldildonics, media studies, and sexuality studies: the neglect of objects, eroticism, and network. Primarily this research paper is building on teledildonic scholarship that examines digital sexual connectivity as a becoming while also trying to account for the various interlocutors that make contemporary digital sex possible and count just as much as the people in the room.

I’ve also started rearticulating critical making projects in order to better explain their processes and purposes, and made all three projects into things that are clearly critical making, rather than stretching the definitions of the field with each chapter.

The chasitity critical making projects gamifies chastity, allowing the presentation and sharing of information to visually communicate the digital quantifications that are elaborated by the systems of power and bodily composition occurring in the practice. The pup hood uses sensory technology like gps, light level, etc to activate internal signals visible only to the wearer, denoting the variety of social positions a pup occupies in vanilla space, club space, digital space, etc. the Pishock critical making project is an app that uses data streams and coding logics to subvert user input and experience. In essence through this app the computer becomes the Dom by leveraging a corpus of data inaccessible to the human submissive or to any other human facilitator, to emphasize the role of computation in digital sexual practices.

Over the coming weeks I will be presenting on both pups and pishock at the CRDM Symposium as well as the SCMS conference in Chicago. They are great opportunities to continue developing my ideas and get a clearer sense of where these projects need to be to satisfy dissertation requirements.