Many splendored things: Sexuality, playfulness and play

This article makes a theoretical argument for the productivity of the notions of playfulness and play in feminist and queer studies of sexuality. Defined as a mode of sensory openness and drive towards improvisation, playfulness can be seen as central to a range of sexual activities from fumbling, random motions to elaborate, rehearsed scenarios. Play in the realm of sexuality involves experimentations with what bodies can feel and do. As pleasurable activity practised for its own sake, play involves the exploration of different bodily capacities, appetites, orientations and connections. Understood in this vein, play is not the opposite of seriousness or simply synonymous with fun. Driven by the quest for bodily pleasure, play may just as well be strained, dark and hurtful in the forms that it takes and the sensory intensities that it engenders. This article argues that the mode of playfulness and acts of play allow for pushing previously perceived and imagined horizons of embodied potentiality in terms of sexual routines and identifications alike. It examines the productive avenues that the notions of playfulness and play open up in conceptualising the urgency of sexual pleasures, the contingency of desires and their congealment in categories of identity. Keywords Desire, fantasy, play, playfulness, pleasure</p

Email from Nancy Nutsucker

This article addresses the representational conventions and gendered forms of address in online pornography through analysis of 366 unsolicited email (spam) messages advertising porn websites. Combining content description with close reading, it considers the terminology, imagery, narrative elements and points of view employed in advertising commercial heterosexual pornography. The spam advertisements create excessive displays of gender difference. It seems that limited female agency is central, especially in messages advertising reality sites structured by gendered relations of control. Arguing that such displays of control should not be automatically translated as displays of power, this article investigates the representational logic of mainstream pornography as one based on binary differences, juxtapositions and easily recognizable types

Introduction: Mediating Presents

This introduction to a special issue of Media Theory on Mediating Presents contextualises the thematic focus and outlines the central arguments of the contributions. It suggests it is both productive and necessary to think together ‘the present’ and mediation to understand how various interlocking aspects of socio-cultural life are currently produced, organised and arranged, embodied and affectively experienced. The contributions to the special issue see time not as a neutral backdrop to, but as actively constituted by and constitutive of, (digital) media, and develop broad understandings of both media and the temporality of the present/present temporalities. The special issue develops theoretically informed and engaged understandings of digital media presents, drawing from and expanding a range of theoretical traditions, including feminist, queer and anti-racist theory, science and technology studies, media theory, philosophy and cultural theory. They similarly take seriously an array of objects, practices and processes, extending from public and academic debates and figurations, mundane and routinised activities, the affordances of specific platforms and computational and data-driven software

Time to celebrate the most disgusting video online

It is 10 years since 2Girls1Cup first went viral. This forum contextualizes the video within the attention economy of social media to examine whether this particular one-minute video, by now markedly stale in its novelty appeal, is relevant in terms of online pornography, social media or the field of porn studies.KEYWORDS: 2Girls1Cup, shock video, internet memes, ‘Not Safe for Work’, attention economy</div