ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the impact of technology, and especially of life in cyberspace, on the development of sexual identity during adolescence. The Internet as a 'queer' space with the potential for negotiating and performing one's identity has not delivered its promise despite seducing many along the way. Instead of casting off these shackles and becoming free-floating entities in cyberspace, the body and its unconscious identifications as they manifest in our conscious relationship to our sexuality remains a psychically organising principle even when the body is effectively disintermediated in cyberspace. Virtual bodies are always necessarily embedded in pre-virtual internal and external material relationships. Sexual identity reflects the outcome – the psychic compromise – of the individual's attempts at integration of infantile sexuality and pubertal sexuality. The black mirror not only differs from previous media in terms of the unprecedented range of the sexual content it screens, but also in the very distinctive way that it operates.
