Unravelling Queer Sexting in Italy: Playful Carnal (Dis)Embodiments

This doctoral thesis examines how self-identified queer Italian emerging adults (aged 18-35) construct their digital sexuality and (dis)embodiment through sexting experiences in relation to their understanding of queerness. The theoretical background intertwines queer studies with digital intimacy scholarship. Queerness is approached as an everyday world-making praxis, highlighting its contingent, political, and relational character. Sexting is situated within broader scholarship on mediated intimacies, where digitality functions as “infrastructures of intimacy” that blur online/offline distinctions and enable forms of relationality. Building on Paasonen’s notions of carnal resonance and play, the study conceptualises sexting as an embodied, affective, and playful practice that destabilises normative boundaries of sexuality, gender, and intimacy. The lens of digital (dis)embodiment further illuminates how bodies and desires are simultaneously materialised, fragmented, and re-imagined in sexting exchanges. Moving beyond dominant risk-based frameworks, the research employs a transformative paradigm combining critical public sociology and queer methodologies to explore sexting as a form of queer world-making. The study introduces Research Brave Space as a methodological framework for ethical engagement with sensitive topics, utilising explorative focus groups, creative zine-making workshops, and in-depth interviews with body mapping. Data analysis combines multimodal social semiotic analysis of creative outputs with reflexive thematic analysis of narratives. Findings reveal that queerness operates through three strategic modalities of everyday world-making: individual resistance and liberation, relational structural transformation, and political ontological opposition. Sexting emerges as a multivalent practice simultaneously functioning as a site of struggle between agency and constraint, a creative space for collaborative meaning-making, and a context that can both challenge and reproduce normative expectations. Participants illustrate sophisticated strategies for navigating digital corporeality through selective fragmentation, metaphorical representation, and strategic presence/absence dialectics. Sexting creates new temporalities and spatialities, enabling identity exploration through practices of carnal resonance and playful embodiment. The research demonstrates that digital intimacies construct hybrid techno-organic experiences integrating cognitive, corporeal, and technological elements. The thesis contributes theoretically by extending queer world-making into digital contexts and expanding frameworks of carnal resonance and sexual playfulness to the digital intimacies of sexting practices. From the methodological perspective, Research Brave Space offers an innovative approach for engaging research participants through creative, multimodal methods. Empirically, it provides the first comprehensive examination of queer sexting in Italian contexts, challenging heteronormative assumptions while revealing both liberatory possibilities and normative constraints within digital sexual cultures.