Listening pleasures: Sexual health and audio fiction in a time of digital intimacy

Digital media is swiftly transforming the landscape of sexual health.

While pleasurable sexual experiences are central to global and national definitions of sexual health, research on sexual health has largely ignored pleasure.

The aim or this interdisciplinary research environment is to understand the digitalization of women’s sexual health through the rapidly growing field of sextech, focusing on the Swedish market and its concentration of app-based audio erotica for female audiences in spaces where sexual wellness meets storytelling.

We investigate how the use, content and production of erotic audio apps transforms sexual health and social norms of gender and sexuality while generating new listening cultures.

In 2020-21, three such audio apps were launched in Sweden: BLANCHEstories, AVA Stories and OhCleo, forming the basis of the study. We combine interviews with users, producers, authors and narrators with platform biographies and close listening.

Drawing on affect theory, literary studies and sound studies, we develop a theoretical framework on resonance and dissonance.

Audio fiction is currently on par with print fiction in terms of literary market shares, which makes listening key to understanding digital cultures.

By uniquely connecting questions of women’s digital sexual health to a world of audio fiction, we develop an empirically grounded, theoretically inventive framework for future research on sexual health, digital intimacy and emerging cultures of listening.