Multiple Os

After a year of searching for an art-based methodology besides, abstract art and other art, that would allow the novice artist to express where they feel sensation and map their body, I found a method that is both viable and looks professional.

In their art paper, Hau, Bardzell, and Bardzell (2023) provide an embodied embroidery technique using silk gossamer textile, 300g cold press watercolor paper, and red cotton thread to help participants express their sexual experiences. The article is open-access and can be downloaded by clicking the red PDF button on the journal’s website.

It would be cool for the authors to turn this into a website or some other platform page where people of all genders can submit their somaesthetic designs. I have been wanting to see more art-based approaches used in orgasmology research. The departments are so siloed that, for instance, the psychologist or brain imager does not think include the art of their participants in their publications. The scientific journals would probably disallow this. Even so, why not include a citation with a addendum to the art? Should more sex researchers be publishing in humanities journals?

Eastern cultures have several drawings showing different conceptualizations from various spiritual frameworks. I believe this technique can be an option alongside others (e.g. dance, poetry, photovoice) for these practitioners to describe their perceived flow on energy/subtle bodies/neurologic sensations. I would like to see more art in orgasmology research. Alongside brain scans and adjectival surveys, I believe modalities like this should be used.

ABSTRACT

Though a taboo topic, women’s masturbation is the most effective technique in producing orgasms among all sexual behaviors [37]. This project explores how somaesthetic interaction design can contribute to designing for women’s sexual pleasure, challenging androcentric discourses on women’s sexuality, and also the desexualization of women with dis/abilities. In the study, the first author, who identifies as a woman with an invisible disability, experiments with other women’s masturbatory techniques using her own body as a design resource. She then articulated that intersubjective engagement using her own body as an artistic medium in the form of Embodied Embroidery, a practice inspired by women’s art-making, and which seeks to foreground the aesthetic dimensions of experiential knowledge to support theory-making in design. Guided by three key features of somaesthetic interaction—first-person perspective, intersubjectivity, and articulation—this pictorial contributes to pleasure activism in the domain of HCI and interaction design.