More-than-human, more-than-digital: Postdigital intimacies as a theoretical framework for intimate therapeutics and technology-facilitated sexual violence

In this article, we present our concept of ‘postdigital intimacies’ by developing its more-than-human and more-than-digital capacities. We argue that we have witnessed a gradual flattening out of the digital and non-digital, while institutions, regulations, laws, ethics, and policies still make distinctions between digital experiences and ‘real life’. We locate postdigital intimacies in accounts that situate intimacy as ambivalent, shaped by “the normative practices, fantasies, institutions and ideologies that organize people’s worlds” (Berlant, 1998, p.282). We draw on posthuman and new feminist materialism to argue for the interdependencies between human and non-human agencies, making intimacy something always more-than-human. In turn, we develop accounts of the postdigital that suggest the amalgamation of digital and analogue by highlighting experiences of an entangled digital and non-digital, and the practical implications of this to how we advocate approaching health, safety, wellbeing, and anti-harassment. We explore postdigital intimacies through two distinct examples: one of the intimate therapeutics of AI chatbots; and the other in how young people navigate technology-facilitated sexual violence in schools. Both examples demonstrate the importance of taking seriously the interconnectedness of the digital and non-digital in relation to regulation, policy, and research pertaining to harms, risk, and vulnerability in technologically interdependent worlds.