Chris Ashford

Queer Theory, Cyber-Ethnographies and Researching Online Sex Environments

Both the act and the commission of the act of sex have been transformed by technology. This has in turn led to emerging research that seeks to consider online research methods and methodologies that take account of the new medium, with a number of studies examining specific groups and the behaviour of those groups from a socio-legal perspective. This paper will seek to consider the application of queer theory to researching so-called ‘virtual’ or online sex groups. It will examine how the virtual spaces, and the researchers who survey them, are constituted. The ethical and practical issues that emerge in surveying these groups from a queer theory perspective will also be explored.

The Only Gay in the Village: Sexuality and the Net

Abstract Just as the creation of the information society has allowed for the expansion in e-commerce and online communication, so too has it allowed for the expansion of online sites and communities that support minority sexual practices and activities. One such activity is the cottaging phenomenon, which involves men seeking sexual satisfaction in public lavatories with other men. Like many other groups, participants in this online community have embraced the emerging technology, utilising message boards and online discussion to offer advice, spread awareness of locations, arrange sexual meetings in the physical world and share cautions and warnings. Such sites can be and are additionally used for law enforcement purposes both as a surveillance tool and as a means of preventing the criminal practice of cottaging taking place. This article will seek to consider these technological and sociological developments alongside the emerging law in this area together with an exploration of how these technological developments have changed the operation of this phenomenon in the physical world.

Sex work in cyberspace: who pays the price?

In January 2006, the UK government launched its long-term prostitution strategy. The strategy aims to produce better enforcement of laws against kerb-crawling and seeks to create more opportunities for women to leave prostitution. The approach of UK government focuses on ‘street sex’, yet in the cyber age we have seen a growth in the number of escort sites and a rise in the number of commercial pages on dating and networking sites. This article will consider the strategy two years on and seek to explore the potential impact of the governments proposals on prostitution and the growing number of socio-legal issues that are emerging from the rise in cyber-prostitution.

Bareback sex, queer legal theory, and evolving socio-legal contexts:

This article seeks to explore bareback sex in the context of an evolving socio-legal landscape. The emergence of homonormativity and the intrinsic focus upon marriage and an agenda of domesticity have cemented the ‘good gay’ at the heart of contemporary society. For the ‘bad queer’, bareback as identity and bareback as act can be negotiated as points of difference, but the law continues to struggle with such difference. Instead, we increasingly see doctrinal law along with the force of law seeking to erase bareback sex, notably in the context of pornography. This piece argues for the radical power of bareback sex as a liberation-inspired concept, one that serves as point of resistance to law.

The Legal Education and Training Review: regulating socio-legal and liberal legal education?

The Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) which reported in June 2013 conceded that undergraduate law degrees are generally outside the remit of the review other than when there is a direct impact on the provision of legal services. On first glance therefore the review has few implications for those of us interested in delivering a liberal legal education and developing socio-legal approaches to law and legal study. However, on closer reading, the report contains a number of suggestions which, if taken up by the regulators, have significant potential to change law degrees, even if regulation remains “light touch”. This article explores those issues with a particular focus on the implications for liberal law degrees and socio-legal approaches to law teaching. In particular the article will explore issues around possible changes to foundation subjects; the creation of a framework of learning outcomes; the possible strengthening of legal writing and research in the curriculum and the opportunities offered for the introduction of more socio-legal material; and the trickle-down effect likely to be felt by providers of undergraduate law degrees of changes in regulation of legal services and as a result of student, employer and other stakeholder expectations.

Sexualities and the law

This special issue of Sexualities seeks to give prominence to an area that regularly features indirectly in the study and exploration of sexualities but is all too often at the periphery. This collection aims to place the law at the heart of a series of international responses to challenges and debates in the field of sexualities. The relationship between gender, sexuality, and law has a long and complex history, although our understanding of individual identity has undergone critical study in the past 30 years as academics have sought to apply the tools of postmodernist, feminist and, more recently, queer analysis. This has coincided with a range of social, political and legal developments internationally in this field. Sexualities has published numerous articles pertaining to law and sexualities in isolation but this collection seeks to display the vibrant and varied scholarship in this internationally developing field.

New Technologies, New Frontiers: Modern Challenges in the Cyber Age

Perhaps more so than any other legal discipline, information technology law has been the subject of considerable development in the last two decades. Many of the innovations in information technology, some by now familiar to us all, others, such as warchalking for example, still emergent, have had accompanying legal difficulties and presented issues which have wide ramifications; these problems and their solutions sometimes not immediately apparent. The refereed articles in this special edition of Information & Communications Technology Law, although derived from seemingly diverse areas, are bound by one common theme; that of the challenges which exist within the Information Technology & Communications Law field as a consequence of the introduction and application of new technologies. At a later stage in this editorial, we will examine further some of the newest and most visible legal challenges to arise in this field, and assess the nature and extent of the opportunites and problems that these present. In this first stage, though, we will examine some of the important issues raised in each of the papers, which the authors first presented in an earlier form at the 2003 Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference, and comment upon how these contributors evaluate the relevant impact upon their respective fields.

Privacy and the public/private divide

This special edition of Information & Communications Technology Law draws upon the annual Information Technology Law & Cyberspace Stream of the Socio-Legal Studies Association held at Kent University in April 2007. Once again, the stream brought together a range of papers seeking to examine the challenges that the evolving information society presents for law and some of the problems law presents for our society in this sphere. This issue focuses upon the prevalent theme of the conference sessions – that of privacy and the public/private divide. Fenwick (2007: 73) has noted that the concept of ‘private life’ appears ‘to encompass a widening range of protected interests’ particularly with regard to what the state regards as the boundaries to private life. A casual observer of the British media can be in no doubt that the issue of privacy is one that has gained a prominent role in the United Kingdom’s political debate, as it has in other countries. The ongoing ID cards and biometrics debate is one such example, whilst recent controversies surrounding the National Health Service (NHS) database is another, together with the loss of disks containing the personal details – including bank account information – of 25 million British citizens. Each debate and controversy has cast the State as an Orwellian Big Brother seeking ever greater amounts of data though, unlike Big Brother, commentators have bestowed the trait of incompetence to this. Bainbridge (2008: 635) has observed that within the information society, the individual’s rights are very vulnerable. He comments that ‘all manner of personal information is stored about us’ on a variety of electronic systems. As the would-be NHS doctors caught in the NHS computer scandal discovered, much of that data can be sensitive and potentially hurtful or damaging if placed in the hands of unintended recipients. This special issue explores the scope of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ as they relate to some of the opportunities for new types of communication that have resulted from the information revolution. In ‘Blogging: A privacy perspective’, Karen McCullagh explores privacy in the context of the ‘blogging’ phenomenon. She initially highlights one of the

Virtual lives: relationships between the citizen and society

The relationship between communications and information technologies and society is a dynamic one, encompassing often unexpected change. One important aspect of such technological development is its capacity for impacting upon the individual. This special issue of Information and Communications Technology Law, derived from papers presented in the Information Technology Law and Cyberspace stream at the 2008 Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference, explores four different visions of how such change could impact upon society and the conduct of our ‘virtual lives’ in cyberspace.

Editorial: Internet rights, Internet wrongs

One of the most enduring and interesting aspects of the information revolution has been the way that the information and Internet environments have developed, in turn highlighting the role of these ‘new’ environments both in facilitating the development of harmful activity and also challenging the understanding of rights. The new and complex nature of the Internet environment has widely been highlighted; Giddens (1990) argued that the detachment of time and space in the context of the Internet had led to the creation of new types of criminal (and indeed other, non-criminal) endeavour (such as the theft of and alteration to pictures, music or software), as well as providing new and fruitful chances for existing criminal and harmful enterprise, such as forms of fraudulent activity, child abuse and theft, and providing a new medium for the communication of extreme sentiment, such as race-hate and homophobic speech or the support of terrorist and other activities (Wall, 2002). This special issue of Information & Communications Technology Law, consisting of five articles derived from the presentations of participants in the Information Law and Cyberspace Stream of the Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference, highlights a number of important contemporary developments in the spheres of information technology law and the information society in relation to the evolution of rights in this context as well as some activities viewed potentially as harmful.