How HCI talks about sexuality: discursive strategies, blind spots, and opportunities for future research

The topic of sexuality has been increasingly researched inside the field of HCI. At the same time, and for many reasons, research gaps remain. In this paper, we present a critical analysis of 70 works on this topic spanning the past two decades to understand how we as an academic field talk about sexuality. We use Foucauldian discourse analysis to identify and analyze the various rules of knowledge production on this topic inside our field. By doing so, we expose not only existing gaps in current research literature, but we also gain an understanding of why some of them exist. We suggest some opportunities to make the field more amenable to this kind of research and point out future research directions on sexuality inside the field of HCI.

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