Feminist and LGBTQ+ Studies

Abstract

Gender and Sexuality, and the ability to live an authentic life of our choosing greatly enhances wellbeing, including the ability to have well-functioning sexual relationships of our choice and is seen by the WHO as a basic human right (World Health Organization, n.d.). The design category of sex toys can become important sexual therapy devices as we age—yet the industry is still seen as part of the Adult Industry and not a legitimate sub-field of Product Design. To ask the question ‘how do you make a better sex toy?” is not a technological problem, sex toys being as complicated as electric toothbrushes. It is the historical socio-sexual taboos, particularly around female sexuality that hold back development (Glover, 2019, Glover, 2013). The same historical taboos that surround the sex toy industry also cross over into the medical and health fields, making innovation into areas of sexual function/ dysfunction (for all genders and sexualities) slow. Even the health field has trouble discussing ‘the bits downstairs’.  
This presentation will discuss the work of Dr Judith Glover, an Australian Industrial Designer who works in what she calls Design and Sexual Health Innovation (DaSHI). Starting her design and research career by developing a sex toy brand 20 years ago, she noticed that the same taboos around sexual wellbeing afflict the medical and health fields and developed an approach which was to bring these problems into the academy and apply rigorous research methodologies and methods to them (Cliterate Australia, n.d.). She will discuss how the domains of design can bring both social and technological innovation to an area too often deemed taboo, that products contain important messages beyond just function, and the visibility of bringing these projects into the world are important markers for sexual freedom and progress.  

Biography

Dr Judith Glover is an award-winning design researcher, educator and Industrial Design practitioner at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her PHD thesis “Taboo to Mainstream” (2013) on the sex toy industry explored the technical capabilities that Industrial Design process and methods could offer in improving manufacturing and design quality for the sex toy industry. It also explored how gender and sexuality notions are embedded within mass production to explain the lack of suitability of products for contemporary women and how Industrial Design process and methods are an important part of changing industry standards. She is currently exploring the possibilities for new design research, service and product innovation under the umbrella of Design and Sexual Health Innovation (DaSHI). This involves cross collaborative research between Design, Engineering and Health fields. In 2019 she was a finalist in the inaugural Good Design ‘Women in Design’ awards, recognised for her contribution to developing a new field of design in a taboo area. In 2024 her research team won an Australian Good Design award for ‘Cliterate’, an interactive sexual health model of the vulva, clitoris and pelvis. Her favourite t-shirt says, “I’ll be a post-feminist in a post patriarchy” and she considers herself to be a Feminist Designer. Having lived over half a century, she has been the beneficiary of so many activists who came before, who fought for gender and sexual rights in harder times. Feminism for her is about equality of access and opportunity, don’t give ground and being able to live an authentic life- whatever gender or sexuality you want to be.