UC Irvine

The article seeks to grasp the potential of Chinese women as “sex hackers” able to breach the protected walls of the modern nation-state, rewrite the algorithm of international relations, and shift the hypermasculine framing of capitalist society. Rather than take the term hacking as given, I argue that the term “hack” is shot through with sexual and gendered significations that might not be immediately apparent to the casual observer of digital culture. My purpose here is two-fold: first, I demonstrate how hacking refracts (and disturbs) the exclusionary gendered logics of 21st century global capitalism; secondly, I illustrate how the sex hacker interrupts the political and aesthetic structure of the social order. Sex hacking, as I define it, denotes a micro-strategy of power, a queer hypersexual positionality that speaks to the hypothetical and literal moments when binaries are confused or cracked.