Hard times and rough rides: the legal and ethical impossibilities of researching 'shock' pornographies

This article explores the various ethical and legal limitations faced by researchers studying extreme or ‘ shock’ pornographies, beginning with generic and disciplinary contexts, and focusing specifically upon the assumption that textual analysis unproblematically justifies certain pornographies, while legal contexts utilize a prohibitive gaze. Are our academic freedoms of speech endangered by legislations that restrict our access to non-mainstream images, forcing them further into taboo locales? If so, is the ideological normalization of sexuality inextricable from our research methodologies? Simultaneously, can we justify researchers being allowed access to materials that are not deemed suitable for general consumption, which may further bolster normalized hierarchies of class-privilege and cultural capital

“Let’s get this thing open”: the pleasures of unboxing videos

Digital videos depicting the unboxing of new objects have become a lucrative revenue stream in the YouTube economy and are beginning to attract critical interest from media scholars. Much of this work focuses on the economic and regulatory dimensions of this new digital form, but little has been written regarding the texts themselves or the pleasures they offer viewers. In this article, I contribute to recent scholarship on YouTube genres, by performing a critical ‘unboxing’ of this digital form. Following a brief introduction to this phenomenon, in which I outline the key narrative tropes found in these videos, I unpack the affective intensities and tactile pleasures that structure these texts, in order to consider how and why unboxing has become so popular

From scene to screen: the challenges and opportunities that digital platforms pose for HIV prevention work with MSM

This article draws upon data from Reaching Out Online, a collaborative research project that explored the need for, and development of, a digital health outreach service for gay, bisexual and MSM men in London and Brighton, UK. It identifies the challenges that commercial hook-up apps and other digitally-based dating and sex services pose for conventional forms of gay men’s health promotion. It then moves to explore the opportunities that these same services offer for health promotion teams. Chiefly, the discussion highlights the potential that commercial platforms offer to peer educators in terms of reaching local cohorts of men, together with the constraints placed upon this form of outreach as a result of the commercial imperatives that underpin these digital services

Comradeship of Cock? Gay porn and the entrepreneurial voyeur

Thirty years of academic and critical scholarship on the subject of gay porn have born witness to significant changes not only in the kinds of porn produced for, and watched by, gay men, but in the modes of production and distribution of that porn, and the legal, economic and social contexts in which it has been made, sold/shared, and watched. Those thirty years have also seen a huge shift in the cultural and political position of gay men, especially in the US and UK, and other apparently ‘advanced’ democracies. Those thirty years of scholarship on the topic of gay porn have produced one striking consensus, which is that gay cultures are especially ‘pornified’: porn has arguably offered gay men not only homoerotic visibility, but a heritage culture and a radical aesthetic. However, neoliberal cultures have transformed the operation and meaning of sexuality, installing new standards of performativity and display, and new responsibilities attached to a ‘democratisation’ that offers women and men apparently expanded terms for articulating both their gender and their sexuality. Does gay porn still have the same urgency in this context? At the level of politics and cultural dissent, what’s ‘gay’ about gay porn now? This essay questions the extent to which processes of legal and social liberalization, and the emergence of networked and digital cultures, have foreclosed or expanded the apparently liberationary opportunities of gay porn. The essay attempts to map some of the political implications of the ‘pornification’ of gay culture on to ongoing debates about materiality, labour and the entrepreneurial subject by analyzing gay porn blogs

Six propositions on the sonics of pornography

Pornography (and all its contentious pleasures, contested politics and attendant problematics) is enjoying a fresh wave of academic attention. The overwhelming majority of these studies, however, focus on the visual discourses of sexually explicit material. This risks the sonic dimensions of pornography being overlooked entirely. Yet porn is anything but silent. This speculative article maps out some of the ways in which the sounds of pornography (and the pornography of sound) might be approached in the analytical context of gay male culture. Not only do the texts of porn contain assorted sounds (dialogue, soundtracks, non-verbal noises of participation, background and accidental audio), they also seek to prompt sounds (not least the non-verbal noises pornography seeks to elicit during the moments of its consumption) and sometimes depend on sound alone (telephone lines that allow access to recorded narratives or ‘live’ chat). Pornography speaks in particular accents, it mobilizes particular music, it dances to particular tunes and it relies on the pants we hear as much as the pants we see. If queer cultures have their own distinctive worlds of sound, then the sonic armouries of porn play a prominent role within them

G.P.S: Gaydar Positioning Service: mobile (and) locative technologies in gay men's digital culture

No description supplie

[Review] Ann C. Hall and Mardia J. Bishop (2007) Pop porn: pornography in American culture

No description supplie

The 'mastery' of the swipe: Smartphones, transitional objects and interstitial time

Have you ever noticed people using their smartphones while waiting for the train? Or people reaching for their phones when suddenly alone in a restaurant? Or people staring intently at their screens before a meeting begins? In this paper I seek to establish a dialogue between two critical methodologies — psychoanalysis and critical political-economy — in order to consider the role of this form of ‘distracted’ smartphone use in everyday life. The aim of this discussion is to broaden our understanding of ‘mundane’ phone use and suggest a way of conceptualising this behaviour at both an individual level and at the level of society

Dropping the H-bomb : Marriage, Language and Queering the Normative

When it comes to discussions of homonormativity, rare is it that you will read an article or book chapter that does not mention same-sex marriage. This is unsurprising given the fact that Lisa Duggan (2002) identified the right to marry as a key interest for those invested in what she termed ‘the new homonormativity’. In defining homonormativity, Duggan name-checked the likes of Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan and the Log Cabin Republicans as examples of a gay and lesbian movement politically (and financially) invested in same-sex marriage legislation - often at the expense of other social justice issues. While offering an important counter to the rhetoric of Sullivan and his kind, subsequent critiques of homonormativity have fixated on same-sex marriage as a concept, rather than as a lived practice. Yet it is only through an examination of same-sex marriage as it is practiced today that we can begin to understand the ambivalent politics of such unions. In this presentation, I draw on data from in-depth interviews with forty British men involved in a same-sex marriage or civil partnership. Focusing on their responses to the question “how do you refer to each other?”, I explore the politics of marital terminology and examine when, where and why participants choose (not) to ‘drop the H-bomb’ (‘husband’). My research illustrates the ways in which same-sex marriage in the UK represents both a privatizing force for homosexual relationships and a publicizing of queer desire. With marriage conferring a new form of visibility on gay (male) couples, I discuss how my interviewees negotiate, mitigate and celebrate this new status in public. Through this example of ‘marital language’ in action, I draw attention to the need for a more complex, nuanced and ‘grounded’ interrogation of homonormativity; one that calls into question the boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’, between ‘political’ and ‘domesticated’, and between queerness’ and ‘homonormativity’