On the 10th Feb at 2pm our very own Rocío Palomeque Recio will be talking about her fascinating research on 'Sugar dating' in a talk titled Blurred Lines: Technologies of Heterosexual Coercion in ‘Sugar Dating’ - all welcome and please share widely!!
Abstract: ‘Sugar dating’ is how a commodified relationship between an older, affluent male –Sugar Daddy– and a younger, financially disempowered female –Sugar Baby– is known. Among the numerous sugar dating websites that have mushroomed in the last decades in Britain to foster this type of encounters, Seeking.com stands out for not only providing an online meet-up place for Sugar Daddies and Babies, but also for acting as the matrix where the ‘sugar’ discourse is constructed. The site functions as a discursive producer of the subject inasmuch as Sugar Babies and Daddies are subjected and subjugated -through a process of assujettissement- by its discursive power. Interviews conducted with four women who had recently acted as Sugar Babies showed how Seeking.com’s discourse permeates the subjects and acts as a ‘technology of coercion’ (Gavey, 1992) that perpetuates hegemonic notions of heterosexuality, undermines the participants’ agency to refuse to engage in sexual intercourse, and effectively ‘blurres the lines’ of sexual consent.
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