Dr Rebecca Saunders

Overview

Dr Rebecca Saunders researches gender and sexuality and the impact of digital technologies on sexual behaviour. Her work focuses on sex-tech such as AI sex robots and sexual consent apps, the impact of data cultures on contemporary sexual culture,  queer and feminist data studies and the emergence of ‘sexual data’, digital pornography, sex as labour, the role of data in making visible gendered sexual violence, and in her current research project, how queer data practices can be used to create consent-informed sex education resources.

Rebecca is the author of Bodies of Work: the Labour of Sex in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and editor of Special Journal Issues Sexual Datafication (Sexualities Journal, 2024) and Porn, Sex + Big Data (Journal of Porn Studies, 2023).

Rebecca has published work on sexual consent apps (Edinburgh University Press, 2025); sex tracking apps (New Media and Society, 2024); the biggest porn producer in the world, Pornhub (Convergence, 2025); the relevance of algorithms to feminist data studies (Feminist Media Studies, 2023); and received funding to conduct a research project on users of the Lioness smart vibrator (The University of Huddersfield, 2022). Her doctoral research on the impact of data economies and data cultures on digital porn performers was also fully funded (King’s College London, 2017). She has published on many topics related to the sexual body and its representation, including the medicalisation of the female sexual body (Cambridge Scholars 2016), the postfeminist grotesque (Porn Studies, 2018) and masculinity as monstrosity in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein and Jimmy Saville cases (Feminist Media Studies, 2023).

Rebecca was Co-Investigator on the Screen Industries Growth Network project which investigated experiences of exploitation by regional social media content creators in the UK (Social Media + Society, 2024). She was awarded funding to curate two art exhibitions on sex work: for the international digital arts festival Ars Electronica and for London art gallery LOW Studios (2019, 2020) and has been a guest speaker on documentaries and podcasts (The Sex and Relationships Podcast, 2021; Digital Health Diagnosed 2024, Fem’s Way 2019) to discuss the impact of datafication on people’s sexual and romantic lives. 

In 2024, Rebecca developed a new postgraduate module, ‘Gender, Sexuality and Digital Culture: Data Cultures and The History of Sexuality,’ which introduces students to urgent societal issues of sexual justice, consent, transsexuality and love as the future of digital culture.

PhD proposals in the following areas are welcome:

·      Sex-tech and fem-tech

·      Critical, queer and feminist data studies

·      Data cultures in relation to sexuality and the body, such as dating apps

·      Pornography and Sex Work

·      Feminism and Queer and Trans Culture