Beyond ‘Key Parties and ‘Wife Swapping’: The Visual Culture of Online Swinging

Swinging represents a global sexual subculture which shares the casual and episodic practices formerly most often associated with gay male sexual subcultures. Swinging websites are spaces where the relationship between sexual acts and heterosexual identities are simultaneously undone and re-established as normative. Members produce and consume sexual images; indeed the virtual display of sexuality is central to the practice of swinging online can be understood as one example of the proliferation of self authored and produced pornography on the web. This chapter examines the visual cultures of online swinging as they contribute to the emerging literature on on-line pornography. It considers the ways in which these offer a creative resource for pushing the boundaries of established sexual practices, for experimentation, sexual identity work and community formation, while simultaneously producing a stabilising logic whereby normativity is subtly yet constantly reinstated.