Teaching Post-Pornography

This article introduces the term ‘post-pornography’, drawing on diverse texts from the last three decades. We propose that ‘post-pornography’ expands Porn Studies beyond its focus on explicit representations of sex. First, we outline the history of post-pornography as a concept that emerged in the sex-positive, anti-censorship and queer/feminist moment in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and has subsequently been taken up by a diverse group of artists, activists and scholars to describe practices that both reference and attempt to move beyond pornography. We define post-pornography as characterised by three aspects—the denaturalising of sex, the de-centring of the spectator and the recognition of media and technology as inseparable from sex. We examine the history of Porn Studies in the university, including in our own faculty at UNSW Art & Design, and the singular influence of Linda Williams in defining its place and setting out its pedagogical methods. We propose post-pornography as a framework that can confront prevailing assumptions about sex and sexuality that underpin Porn Studies and its critique of pornography, and outline a set of concepts that have emerged from the development of the second- and third-year art theory course Post-Pornographic Bodies

Should we be thinking about sex robots?

The chapter introduces the edited collection Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications. It proposes a definition of the term 'sex robot' and examines some current prototype models. It also considers the three main ethical questions one can ask about sex robots: (i) do they benefit/harm the user? (ii) do they benefit/harm society? or (iii) do they benefit/harm the robot

A Systematic Review of Online Sex Addiction and Clinical Treatments Using CONSORT Evaluation

Researchers have suggested that the advances of the Internet over the past two decades have gradually eliminated traditional offline methods of obtaining sexual material. Additionally, research on cybersex and/or online sex addictions has increased alongside the development of online technology. The present study extended the findings from Griffiths’ (2012) systematic empirical review of online sex addiction by additionally investigating empirical studies that implemented and/or documented clinical treatments for online sex addiction in adults. A total of nine studies were identified and then each underwent a CONSORT evaluation. The main findings of the present review provide some evidence to suggest that some treatments (both psychological and/or pharmacological) provide positive outcomes among those experiencing difficulties with online sex addiction. Similar to Griffiths’ original review, this study recommends that further research is warranted to establish the efficacy of empirically driven treatments for online sex addiction

"We have to be alive in order to marry": Black LGBTT Youth and Geographies of Violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This paper interrogates contradictions between (1) pro-LGBTT discourse through tourism, planning and LGBTT activism and (2) black LGBTT youth’s particular experiences with violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Despite many pro-LGBTT political gains (e.g. national anti-homophobia policies and legalized same-sex marriage), many black LGBTT youth still navigate a homophobic landscape segregated by race and class. A geographical and discursive divide emerges between spaces of gay tourism and social life—ensconced in affluent, white neighborhoods—and majority-black peripheral neighborhoods, which are both sites of gendered, anti-black violence targeting non-normative black youth. I am particularly interested in black LGBTT youth’s strategies to negotiate gendered, anti-black violence—even in places that claim to be inclusive and safe for them. Secondly, I examine where and how black LGBTT youth create sites of pleasure, kinship and support amidst this violence. Drawing on feminist, queer and black feminist engagements with human geography, I contend that black LGBTT youth in Rio de Janeiro consistently appropriate urban space in order to refashion themselves and create sites of potential through social media, performance, music and political demonstration. These ‘remappings’ explain how anti-black racism is central in ordering urban space, even when black people are not visibly present. Thus, cities’ promises of diversity and inclusion through ‘gay-friendly’ tourism and planning are often naïve in their conception and implementation, complicit with gendered, anti-black violence. Christen Smith (2016) terms this paradoxical spectacle as an “afro-paradise”, orchestrated by society and the state. NOTE: This paper serves as an exploration of relevant literature as well as an empirical analysis based on preliminary fieldwork for my MA/MS thesis. Fieldwork will continue in summer 2016 and winter 2017.Community and Regional PlanningLatin American Studie

The weight of images: Affect, body image and fat in the media

The Weight of Images explores the ways in which media images can train their viewers’ bodies. Proposing a shift away from an understanding of spectatorship as being constituted by acts of the mind, this book favours a theorization of relations between bodies and images as visceral, affective engagements that shape our body image - with close attention to one particularly charged bodily characteristic in contemporary western culture: fat. The first mapping of the ways in which fat, gendered bodies are represented across a variety of media forms and genres, from reality television to Hollywood movies, from TV sitcoms to documentaries, from print magazine and news media to online pornography, The Weight of Images contends that media images of fat bodies are never only about fat; rather, they are about our relation to corporeal vulnerability overall. A ground-breaking volume, engaging with a rich variety of media and cultural texts, whilst examining the possibilities of critical auto-ethnography to unravel how body images take shape affectively between bodies and images, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, media, cultural and gender studies, with interests in embodiment and affect

Sexualized Labour in Digital Culture: Instagram Influencers, Porn Chic and the Monetization of Attention

The rise of digital technologies and social media platforms has been linked to changing forms of work, as well as the mainstreaming of pornography and a ‘porn chic’ aesthetic. This article examines some of the ways in which these themes coalesce, and interrogates the conceptual boundaries of sexualized labour, extending beyond traditional organizational settings and into Web 2.0. The study explores performances of sexualized labour on social media by analysing visual and textual content from 172 female influencers on Instagram. This article contributes to the literature on sexualized labour in three ways. First, by demonstrating how sexualized labour is enacted across various forms of influencer labour, and how this relates to the attention economy and monetization. Second, by developing the extant conceptualization of sexualized labour and introducing connective labour as a required element to mobilize sexualized labour. Third, by opening up a critical analysis of what is meant by ‘sexualized’ labour within a cultural context of pornographication

Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology

This Section of Australian Feminist Studies is the product of an event that took place at King’s College London in January 2015, hosted as part of the UK-based ‘Critical Sexology’ seminar series. Participants at this event – feminist scholars working across the fields of lin- guistics, cultural studies, sociology, and psychology – were invited to reflect on their encounters with evolutionary psychology (EP). As the event organiser, I was interested to prompt a discussion about how EP shapes the contours of contemporary feminist scholarship, insofar as arguments from EP are something feminist scholars continually find ourselves coming across and coming up against both within and outside the academy. Conversely, I was interested in thinking about how encounters with EP might illuminate certain limit-points in contemporary feminist theorising

Pleasure Zones and Murder Boxes: Online Pornography and Violent Video-Games as Cultural Zones of Exception

New media formats and technologies raise questions about new-found abilities to indulge apparently limitless violent and sadistic curiosity within our culture. In this context the mainstreaming of sex and violence via mobile and screen media systems opens important questions about the degree to which these influences are harmful or indicative of deeper social problems. In this article we offer a preliminary analysis of the consequences of these new media zones, acknowledging their allure, excitement and everyday cultural position. In particular we focus on a distinctive hallmark of much online pornography and massively popular violent videogames - the offer of unchecked encounters with others who can be subordinated to violent and sexual desire. We suggest that a key implication of these zones of cultural exception, in which social rules can be more or less abandoned, is their role in further assisting denials of harm from the perspective of hyper-masculinist and militaristic social value systems

Constructions of education and resistance within popular feminist commentary on girls and sexualisation

We are currently witnessing a renewed vigour to ongoing concerns about the sexualisation of young women and girls in western popular culture. This paper takes up Angela McRobbie’s concerns that the commercial sphere has become a primary site for talking about, and educating, girls and young women (McRobbie, 2008). I first explore the growth in ‘expert’ commentary, on girls and sexualisation, drawing on the work of a number of commentators and authors from the USA, the UK and Australia, who have become ubiquitous media commentators on issues facing girls, including sexualisation. I then draw on feminist and education theory to explore the possible limitations of how education is conceived within this cultural site, particularly with respect to constructions of girls’ resistance. In the final part of the paper I show how girls’ resistance is complicated in postfeminist, neoliberal societies and I propose that education scholarship and practice must confront the ways in which girls’ resistance is bound up in their developing classed and raced identities