JANUARY 2009

Controversial Images

The ‘Controversial Images’ special issue I guest edited with Sharon Lockyer for Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture was published.

This special issue acknowledges the growing importance of the controversial image in popular forms of communication. Five case studies explore controversy across the field of popular communication - in journalism, television, film and new uses of mobile technologies - where particular producers, images and audiences have become a focus for controversy.

Contents:

Controversial Images: An Introduction
Feona Attwood & Sharon Lockyer

Tele-technologies, Control and Sousveillance: Saddam Hussein – De-Deification and the Beast
Vian Bakir

US soldiers imaging the Iraq war on YouTube
Kari Andén-Papadopoulos

Dangerous Depictions: A Visual Case-Study of Contemporary Cartoon Controversies
Marion G. Müller, Esra Özcan, Ognyan Seizov

All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of “Torture Porn”
Dean Lockwood

“The Sickest Television Show Ever”: Paedogeddon and the British Press
Sharon Lockyer & Feona Attwood

Contributors:

Kari Andén-Papadopoulos is assistant professor at the Department of Journalism, Media, and Communication, Stockholm University. She specializes in the fields of photojournalism, visual theory and war journalism, and is currently working on a book about ‘image wars’ in the worlds of post-9/11. Her publications include (books in Swedish): The Camera At War. The representation of the Vietnam War in the Swedish press (2000); Hidden Camera – in the service of truth? (2003); The Propaganda War in the Rear Mirror. Four case studies of the coverage of the Iraq war 2003 in Swedish press and television (2004). Articles include: ‘The Trauma of Representation. September 11, Photography and Visual Culture’, (Nordicom Review 2002) and ‘The Abu Ghraib torture photographs: News frames, visual culture, and the power of images’, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 2008 9: 5-30.

Vian Bakir lectures in media and communication at the University of Glamorgan, offering specialisms in media and risk, and tele-visions and imagined communities, and also convening the MSc in International Communication and Global Media. She has published in the areas of risk communication, policy agenda-setting, news management, war reporting, dataveillance, grounded theory and cultural strategy. She is co-editor (with David Barlow), of Communication in the Age of Suspicion: Trust and the Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007). She is currently writing a book, provisionally titled Impact of Emergent Participatory Media on Strategic Political Communication: Iraq 2003-2008 (New York: Continuum, 2009/10).

Dean Lockwood has a D.Phil in Sociology from the University of York. He is Senior Lecturer in Media Theory, teaching on the BA (Hons) and MA programmes in Media Production and Media & Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Media, Humanities and Technology at the University of Lincoln. He has contributed papers to a number of conferences in recent years and has recently had chapters published in collections on videogame theory and the ‘spectacle of the real’. Current research interests include issues in horror and fantasy across media, avant-garde and cult cinema, videogame theory, and post-punk media culture.

Sharon Lockyer is a Lecturer in Sociology and Communications in the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University, UK. Her research interests are in the sociology of mediated culture and critical humour studies. She is co-editor, with Michael Pickering, of Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (2005) and has published in a variety of academic journals including Discourse and Society; Journalism Studies; International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice; Ethical Space; and Sociology Compass. She holds a BSc and a PhD in Communication and Media Studies, both from Loughborough University, UK. She was the recipient of the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) Emerging Scholar Award in 2004.

Marion G. Müller is Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Her work is located at the intersection of visual communication, political science and art history, applying iconology as a method of qualitative visual content analysis to questions arising in the social sciences. She has published extensively on the theory of visual communication. She is the author of Foundations of Visual Communication (Konstanz: UVK Medien/UTB, 2003) and editor of “Visual Competence – A new paradigm for studying visuals in the social sciences?” (2008), a special issue of Visual Studies journal. Her current interests are related to the role visuals play in war and conflict, particularly press photography and caricature. She is the chair of the International Communication Association’s Visual Communication Studies Division.

Esra Özcan is a PhD-student at Jacobs University Bremen, working on visual communication in Turkish print media and the role of the female in visual representations. Her previous publications include “The Political Iconography of Muhammad Cartoons” (with Marion G. Müller, 2006).

Ognyan Seizov is a PhD-student at Jacobs University Bremen, with a special interest in visual political communication, comparing presidential campaigning in the United States, Russia and Bulgaria

Intimate Adventures

My paper ‘Intimate Adventures: Sexblogs, Sexblooks and Women’s Sexual Narration’ was published in European Journal of Cultural Studies.

This paper examines women’s sexual narration in sexblogs, sexblooks and other popular representations of female sexuality. It asks how sexblogs draw on women’s association with autobiographical forms and on the connections between accounts of female sexuality, the confessional and notions of authenticity. It focuses on the popular and award winning sex blogs, http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com and www.girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com. Both have been turned into books - Belle de Jour’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (2005) and The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl (2006), and Abby Lee’s Girl with a One Track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door (2006) - and are early examples of the ‘blook’, a genre which has been described as ‘the world’s fastest-growing new kind of book’.
The paper examines these in the broader cultural context where women are increasingly presented as active and autonomous sexual narrators and as sexual adventuresses.

FEBRUARY 2009

Mainstreaming Sex

My edited collection, Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture, was published by I.B Tauris.

Contents:

Introduction: The Sexualization of Culture
Feona Attwood

Section 1: Pornography and Pornographication

The New Pornographies: Representation or Reality?
Simon Hardy

Pleasing Intensities: Masochism and Affective Pleasures in Porn Short Fictions
Clarissa Smith

“Choke on it, Bitch!”: Porn Studies, Extreme Gonzo and the Mainstreaming of Hardcore
Stephen Maddison

From Porn Chic to Porn Fear: the Return of the Repressed?
Brian McNair

Section 2: Sexualization and Mainstream Media

The Mainstreaming of Masturbation: Autoeroticism and Consumer Capitalism
Greg Tuck

Supersexualize Me!: Advertising and the ‘Midriffs’
Rosalind Gill

Whatever Happened to Cathy and Claire?: Sex, Advice and the Role of the Agony Aunt
Petra Boynton

Section 3: Striptease Culture

Too Much Too Toung?: Young People, Sexual Media and Learning
Sara Bragg & David Buckingham

Some Texts Do It Better: Women, Sexually Explicit Texts and the Everyday
Dana Wilson-Kovacs

Keeping Fit in Six Inch Heels: The Mainstreaming of Pole Dancing
Samantha Holland & Feona Attwood

BUST-ing the Third Wave: Barbies, Blowjobs and Girlie Feminism
Rebecca Munford

Contributors

Feona Attwood teaches Media and Communication Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. She has published widely on sex and the media. Her research interests include new pornographies, cybersex, women and sexualization and the study of sexual media in education. She is currently working on online pornography and women’s use of online sex sites.

Petra Boynton teaches Health Services Research at University College London, specializing in research on sex and relationships. Her book, The Research Companion: A Practical Guide for the Social and Health Sciences was published in 2005. She has published widely on sex, relationships and health and also works as an agony aunt, sex editor, radio presenter and adviser to media outlets about accurate sex information.

Sara Bragg is Academic Fellow in Child and Youth Studies at the Open University. Her research interests include young people as media audiences, media education, creative research methods and young people’s participation rights in schools. Recent publications include Young People, Sex and the Media: the Facts of Life? with David Buckingham (2004).

David Buckingham is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, London University, where he directs the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media. He has directed many research projects on media education and on children’s relationships with the media, and has acted as a consultant for the British Film Institute, the Institute for Public Policy Research, UNESCO, the United Nations, the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, BBC Education and Ofcom. His previous books include Children Talking Television (1993), Moving Images (1996), The Making of Citizens (2000), After the Death of Childhood (2000) and Media Education (2003).

Rosalind Gill teaches gender studies at the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Gender-Technology Relation (with Keith Grint, 1995) and Gender and the Media (2007). Her research interests are the relationships between gender, media and new technologies. Her current research is on representations of romantic and sexual relationships in popular culture and on precarious work in the media and cultural industries. She has recently published a short book on freelancing in new media, Technobohemians or the new cybertariat? (2007)

Simon Hardy is a senior lecture in sociology and Course Leader in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Worcester. Simon’s book on pornography, men and feminism, The Reader, The Author, His Woman and Her Lover, was published in 1998. Since then he has written a number of articles on gender, eroticism and representation. His wider academic interests include the media coverage of war and the history of sexuality.

Samantha Holland is a Research Fellow at Leeds Metropolitan University, where she researches gender, ageing, non-mainstream leisure and subcultures. Her book, Alternative Femininities: Body, Age and Identity, was published in 2004. She is currently editing a collection on technology and relationships, Remote Relationships in a Small World, and is working on a study of three generations of women’s leisure within families.

Stephen Maddison is programme leader of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His research is in the areas of lesbian and gay studies, gender and popular culture. His book, Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture was published in 2000. He is currently working on a book on the cultural politics of the porn industry.

Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism and Communication at the University of Strathclyde. His books include Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture (1996), Journalism and Democracy (2000) and Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire (2002).

Rebecca Munford teaches English Literature at Cardiff University. The editor of Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts (2006) and co-editor of Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (2004), she has published on twentieth-century women’s writing, the Gothic, contemporary feminist theory and popular culture. Her forthcoming work includes Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and the European Gothic and, with Stacy Gillis, Feminism and Popular Culture: Explorations in Post-feminism.

Clarissa Smith teaches Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. Her research interests are the production and consumption of pornography, sex retailing, audiences and popular culture. Her published work has included studies of soft core pornography, readers of For Women magazine, and the erotic performers, The Chippendales. Her book, One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women’s Porn, was published in 2007.

Greg Tuck teaches Film Studies at the University of the West of England. He was awarded his PhD, Masturbation, sexual logic and capitalism: The autoerotic in contemporary American cinema and beyond, in 2005. He has published on various aspects of the representation of sexuality and is currently co-editing a book on neo-noir.

Dana Wilson-Kovacs teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of Exeter. Her current research interests are the dynamics between the public and the private spheres, particularly in relation to gender, work and intimacy. She has published work on consumer cultures, cultural repertoires and sexuality and was recently awarded a PhD on her research on sexual intimacy as aesthetic practice.

MARCH 2009

Sexed Up

A translation of my paper, ‘Sexed Up’, was published as ‘Sexed up. Naar een theoretish begrip van de seksualisering van onze cultuur’ in Rudi Bleys et al. (eds.) Seks en relaties anders bekeken, Antwerpen: Sensoa – Garant. pp. 59-68.

APRIL 2009

Deepthroatfucker and Discerning Adonis

My paper, ‘deepthroatfucker and Discerning Adonis: Men and Cybersex’ was published in International Journal of Cultural Studies.

This paper uses interviews with male cybersex participants to examine their experiences of cybersex and considers constructions of ‘self’ and ‘sex’ in their discussions. It asks how the adoption of a cybersex persona is understood by participants and how they characterize their cybersexual practices in order to develop a clearer picture of the ways in which new forms of communication technology are implicated in producing new forms of sexual practice and how these relate to contemporary perceptions of what sex is.

MAY 2009

Good Sex/Bad Sex

I attended the ‘Good Sex/Bad Sex’ conference in Budapest, as part of a panel with Laura Agustin and Clarissa Smith.

‘Breathing New Life into Old Fears: A Panel on Prostitution, Pornography and Bad Sex’
Laura Agustin, Feona Attwood, Clarissa Smith

This panel explores continuing impulses to criminalise and prohibit forms of ‘bad’ sexual practice.
The three papers examine continuities and transformations in recent regulatory impulses to ‘protect’ the ‘innocent’ and the public from individual instances of bad sexual conduct. We ask whether fixed ethical frameworks, with concomitant laws, are appropriate in an age where diversity, autonomy and agency are prime values.

Laura Agustin, The Evil is in Paying: Sex with ‘Trafficked Women’

Prominent politicians and feminists have come to maintain that paying for sex with a ‘victim of trafficking’ is a heinous crime equivalent to violent rape. All migrant workers in the sex industry are considered subject to ‘serial rape’ and ‘sexual slavery’. The movement purposely conflates all prostitution with ‘trafficking’ and attacks those who disagree as pimps and anti-feminists. The justification is Gender Equality, a utopic vision that defines good sex as symmetrical, mutual, personally close, loving and equitable. Resulting laws criminalise the buying of sex on the grounds that introducing money creates a power relationship antithetical to the right kind of sex. This paper posits a different ethical vision in which money is not granted defining status in sexual acts.

Feona Attwood, Going to Extremes: Understanding New Online Pornographies

Online pornographies increasingly provide a focus for debates about permissible and impermissible sexual practices and about good and bad representations of sex. They have also become the focus of broader concerns with ‘extreme’ images of the body, for example in the horror subgenre which has been dubbed ‘torture porn’, in images of real violence and conflict (sometimes referred to as ‘warporn’ or ‘atrocity porn’), and in the wider set of ‘shock’ images which proliferate online. This paper considers the significance of contemporary concerns about extreme online pornographies in a cultural context where norms of sexuality and notions of obscenity are fiercely contested and where the circulation of sexual imagery is more prevalent than ever before.

Clarissa Smith, Five Dominatrices and a Thrashing: the classifications of sadomasochism

During 2008 two of the UK’s most august institutions resounded to discussion of activities involving pain and sexual pleasure: the House of Lords debated the rights of British citizens to possess images of ‘extreme’ sexual practices and the High Court was regaled with tales of supposed Nazi orgies starring Max Mosley (Formula 1 President and son of British wartime fascist Sir Oswald Mosley) and five women he had paid to beat him. The rights and wrongs of sadomasochism, consensual violence and the commodification and commercialisation of sexual desire were thoroughly aired across the media. This paper considers the multiple meanings of sadomasochism and other ‘extreme’ sexual practices in public discourse and the continuing failures of the legislature to understand such practices as anything other than evidence of deviant or irrational impulses.

Biographical Notes:

Laura Agustin has written on sex, travel and work across a variety of nongovernmental, academic and more popular or mainstream publications. She is the author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, London: Zed Books, 2007. She recently edited a special issue of the journal Sexualities focused on ‘The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex’ and which explored how the meaning of buying and selling sex changes according to the social, cultural and historical processes in which transactions are situated.

Feona Attwood teaches Media and Communication Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She has published widely on sex and the media. Her research interests include new pornographies, online sex practices, women and sexualization and the study of sexual media in education. Recent publications include articles in Sexualities, International Journal of Cultural Studies and Journal of Consumer Culture and book chapters on pornography, sexual agency and research methods. She is the editor of Mainstreaming Sex (forthcoming, 2009) and porn.com (forthcoming, 2010) and the co-editor of journal special issues on ‘Controversial Images’ (with Sharon Lockyer, Popular Communication, 2009) and ‘Researching and Teaching Sexually Explicit Media’ (with Ian Hunter, Sexualities, forthcoming, 2009).

Clarissa Smith teaches at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland and a member of the editorial board of the online journal for audience studies, Participations. She is the author of One for the Girls: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women’s Porn, Intellect Books, 2007. Her research interests include the production and consumption of pornography.

JUNE 2009

The Big Reveal

I attended The Big Reveal II conference in Brighton

The first international Big Reveal conference examined the phenomenon of ‘Lifestyle television’, and took place at the University of Salford, UK, two years ago, resulting in the book Exposing Lifestyle Television: The Big Reveal (Ashgate, 2008).  At that first conference, it could be claimed that despite the rapid expansion of the genre in television scheduling over the last twenty years, the area was still relatively under-explored by scholars.  In the two years since, there has been more research on the phenomenon of ‘lifestyle programming’, and the form itself has become a dominant mode in the prime time schedule.

The lifestyle television format has been used for programmes covering subjects as diverse as cooking, gardening, home and body makeovers, parenting, nutritional education, and instructions on cleaning your house.  ‘Lifestyle’ has now come to include the kind of programming that would once have been presented in documentary form.  Furthermore, the impact of digitization and a proliferation of new channels has seen lifestyle formats streamed across a multitude of platforms, inviting audience engagement on a number of levels.

This conference sets out to address the implications of this form of television and these new contexts, and asks how media and communications scholars should address the genre. What are the effects of the format on television schedules and on traditional forms of programming? How do audiences read and incorporate Lifestyle TV into their everyday lives? Do forms of television that centre on the encounter between a television ‘expert’ and ‘ordinary’ people require new forms of regulation?  Does this form raise particular ethical questions?  How have these formats been franchised and how are they delivered in different national/global contexts? To what extent is the global economic crisis reflected in the discourses of recent lifestyle programming?

The aim of the conference is to bring international academics from across the disciplines together to discuss the questions that the ‘Big Reveal II’ sets up.

Disdain, Disgust and Guilty Pleasure: Reading Trinny & Susannah
Feona Attwood

Makeover television offers the compelling yet disturbing spectacle of apparently ordinary people and their unmediated responses, a spectacle which has provoked disdainful responses of ‘sneering superiority’ from many commentators (Moseley, 2000). Yet analyses of Trinny & Susannah’s popular and controversial series, What Not to Wear (2001-2005) have focused, not on disdainful responses to the show and its feminine concerns, but on the enactment of disgust within it, mobilized through the presenters’ imposition of a ‘postfeminist’ version of middle-class femininity onto lower-class women. This has been viewed as a form of symbolic violence (McRobbie, 2004), carried out by ‘stylish bullies’ (Palmer, 2004); part of a broader shift in which class politics are brutally played out on the bodies of white working class women refigured as ‘chavs’ or ‘pramfaces’ (see Tyler, 2008). Enjoying Trinny and Susannah has become marked as a distinctly guilty pleasure, even for critics like Elaine Showalter (2007) who reads them quite differently; as experts ‘willing to expose their own flaws’ and with ‘an overall respect and affection for other women’ which transcends class, age and occupation. At the same time, Trinny and Susannah have become figures of fun and sometimes of hate in the media.

In this paper, I examine the responses of disdain, disgust and guilty pleasure evoked by Trinny and Susannah as cultural intemediaries, lifestyle gurus and stylists of femininity. I ask what is at stake in their production, what place they have in producing feminist readings of Trinny and Susannah texts, and what implications they have for readings which suggest other structures of meaning and affect, both in Trinny and Susannah texts and in the responses of their audiences and critics.

Porn Cultures

I also attended the Porn Cultures conference in Leeds as part of a panel on ‘pornification’

Complicating the debates about the ‘pornification’ or ‘sexualisation’ of culture:
A symposium convened by Rosalind Gill

This symposium brings together 5 papers that seek to pause and reflect – in different ways – on the assumption that we are seeing a ‘pornification’ or ‘sexualisation’ of culture, and what the implications of any shifts might be.

Putting pornification and the sexual commodification of girls on the UK educational policy ‘Gender Agenda’
Jessica Ringrose, Institute of Education, University of London

This paper focuses on unpacking the contradictions between the fantastical UK educational policy figure of the high achieving ‘successful girl’ (Ringrose, 2007) who is positioned as a de-sexualized, rational, ideal learner (Youdell, 2006), and the commercial, ‘post-feminist’ regime of ‘hyper-sexualized’ (Gill, 2007, 2008) and ‘pornified’ (Levy, 2005) visual, popular culture, which has intensified the sexual commodification, objectification and regulation of girls bodies. To illustrate the normative and dominant ‘pornified’ visual contexts teens must navigate on a daily basis, I draw on data from a qualitative study in two schools exploring teens’ (aged 14-16) negotiations of social networking sites (SNSs), which are increasingly mandatory affective spaces of peer relationships and intimacy (boyd, 2008).

I explore how girls perform and negotiate gendered/sexualized identities on the SNS Bebo, and how they discuss their SNSs in interview narratives. My findings suggest that a contemporary postfeminist, hypersexualized media culture (Gill, 2007, 2008) is dominant in the visual culture of Bebo, and I argue SNSs create new spaces for (hetero)sexism, objectification and a masculinized gaze. Theoretically I will argue girls are ‘interpellated’ and ‘subjectified’ (Butler, 1993) via ‘porno-chic’ discourses (McRobbie, 2004) on SNSs. But I also explore how girls’ appropriate, rework and “resignify” (Hey, 2006) processes of (hetero)hypersexualization, pornification and a masculinized gaze in complex ways through several case study examples.

I conclude by arguing that issues of increasing pornification and intensified sexual commodification of girls’ bodies need to be reconstituted as important gender equity issues by teachers, parents and the wider community. The ‘Gender Equality Duty’, is one policy mandate through which issues of pornification and ‘cultural harm’ (McGlynn and Rackley, 2009) at work and school, could be brought forward as a crucial issue for public debate. These issues need to also be fore-grounded in the DCSF educational policy ‘Gender Agenda.’ By bringing feminist analyses of power and sexuality back into the educational policy ‘Gender Agenda’, it may be possible to find new spaces in school curriculum to broaden the limited scope of sexual, relationship, ‘bullying’, and media literacy in schools today.

“Too young to understand”? - Children and ‘sexualised’ media
Sara Bragg, Open University

This paper looks at the responses of younger children to ‘sexualised’ media material. Drawing on empirical research with young people, it will explore how children speak back to the public debates that position them as the victims of ‘inappropriate’ media images, constructing themselves instead as competent, self-aware media consumers. The paper will discuss some of the complexities and contradictions thereby engendered, for young people themselves, for media literacy and for regulation.

altpornification: porn cultures and new online sex media
Feona Attwood, Sheffield Hallam University

The terms ‘pornographication’ or ‘pornification’ have been used to describe the proliferation of pornographic iconography, style and aesthetics in mainstream culture (McNair, 1996; Paasonen et al, 2007), part of a widespread contemporary fascination with sex and the sexually explicit. Some popular writings have seen this process as a form of cultural standardization in which sexual imitation and performance come to stand in for desire and pleasure (Levy, 2006), crowding out more positive forms of sexual expression and promoting ‘shame, humiliation, solitude, coldness, and degradation’ (Paul, 2005: 275).

This paper examines some of the new sexually explicit representations that have emerged online, for example in altporn, subcultural and countercultural erotica, and contemporary pinup sites. It asks to what extent these can be seen as forms of pornified mainstream culture, and to what extent they represent new forms of pornography. How can we understand them in relation of the traditional divisions between restricted and mainstream forms of cultural production? How do they complicate our understanding of ‘porn cultures’ and the processes of cultural sexualization?

‘The Sex Inspectors’: Porn culture and sexual failure
Laura Harvey, Open University
Debates about the sexualisation of culture have picked apart the complex processes involved in the increasing visibility and ‘mainstreaming’ of pornography in the popular media (McNair, 1996; Attwood, 2006). Part of this apparent ‘democratisation’ (McNair, 1996) of sexually explicit culture is the wider availability and consumption of materials and information about sex. Sex ‘self help’ is a fast growing industry, in which the ‘science’ of sex (Tyler, 2008) is disseminated to individuals in order to help them construct the ‘best’ sexual selves within a neoliberal discourse of ‘self-improvement and entrepreneurialism’ (Tyler, 2004).

‘The Sex Inspectors’, which aired three series in the UK on Channel 4, combined the language of the sex self help genre with the makeover genre to produce episodes in which the sexual behaviour of a new couple each week would be observed on camera, echoing the growth of ‘home made’ pornography on multimedia sites such as YouTube.

This paper examines the role of the expert in normalising discourses of ‘great sex’. Who is entitled to have ‘great sex’? How do power dynamics of class, ethnicity, disability, gender role, age and sexuality play out in the ‘soft porn’ of ‘The Sex Inspectors’? What does it mean for a sexual subject if they fail to achieve the perfect, pornified (Levy, 2005) performance for the all-seeing, all-knowing sexperts?

Speaker biographies

Feona Attwood teaches Media and Communication Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her current work focuses on controversial images and online sexualities. She is the editor of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (2009) and is currently completing a book about online pornographies.

Sara Bragg is Research Fellow in Child and Youth Studies, at the Open University, and co-author with David Buckingham of Young People Sex and the Media: the facts of life? (2004).

Rosalind Gill is Professor of Subjectivity and Cultural Analysis at The Open University. She previously worked for 10 years at the LSE’s Gender Institute. She is author of Gender and the Media (Polity, 2007), co-editor with Roisin Ryan Flood of Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections (Routledge, 2009) and is currently writing a book about mediated intimacy.

Laura Harvey is a doctoral student at the Open University. Her work examines the relationship between sexual behaviours, attitudes and media representations.

Jessica Ringrose is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Education and has written extensively about girls, young people, and sexualised culture.

JULY 2009

Researching Media Sexualization

My book review of Patrice Oppliger’s Girls Gone Skank, ‘Researching Media Sexualization’, was published in Sex Roles Vol. 61(3/4). 2009. pp. 288-289.

SEPTEMBER 2009

Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network Conference: The Academy and Activism

I attended this as a discussant

Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network Third Annual Conference
The Academy & Activism
24 September 2009

Panel 1 Extreme Backlash

Chair: Olu Jenzen (University of Sussex)
Discussant: Feona Attwood (Sheffield Hallam University)
Alex Dymock (Backlash): From Pressure Group to Consultation Body: The Changing Role of Backlash and Its Role in UK BDSM Activism
John Ozimek: Fighting the Spin Monster: How Government Bamboozles the Public through Sexual Panic

Panel 2 Crossings Contexts

Chair: Shamira Meghani (University of Sussex)
Discussant: Feona Attwood (Sheffield Hallam University)
Johanna Samuelson (University of Sussex): Queer as...?
Thoughts and Experiences on Academic Research on Queer Activism and Activists
Akhil Katyal (SOAS): Lets Provincialize this Homosexual:
Contemporary Sexuality-Based Rights Activism in India

Panel 3 The Politics of Sex Work: Academics, Ethics and Activism: A Round Table Discussion

Chair: Kath Browne (University of Brighton)
Belinda Brookes-Gordon (Birkbeck, University of London)
Carrie Hamilton (x:talk – English Classes for Migrant Sex Workers)
Nick Mai (London Metropolitan University)
Justin Gaffney (SohoBoyz)
Thierry Schauffhauser (International Union of Sex Workers)
Allen Taylor (South Bank University)
Kate Hardy (Queen Mary, University of London)

Panel 4 Identity and Politics

Chair: Olu Jenzen (University of Sussex)
Discussant: Kath Browne (University of Brighton)
Laetitia Zeeman (University of Brighton): Standing Up for Justice – Claiming a Preferred Identity
Emily Williams: Can Academic Sexualities Research and Sexual Activism Work Together?
Joanna Dawson: How Did Attitudes towards Trans-Women Highlight Tensions in the Women’s Liberation Movement Between 1970 and 1980?

Panel 5 Visibility and Voice
Chair: Irmi Karl (University of Brighton)
Discussant: Catherine Harper (University of Brighton)
Karen Oughton: Dance or Demonstrate? The Tension between, and Reunion of, LGBTQ Politics and Pleasure
Aristea Fotopoulou (University of Sussex): A Code for Eccentricity and Home-made Cookies: Researching Brighton Queer Cultural Activism
Louise Tondeur: The Awkward Lesbian Body and ‘The Caricature of the Ugly Feminist’

Open Session
Chair: Shamira Meghani (University of Sussex)
Discussant: William Spurlin (University of Sussex)

‘Investigating young people’s sexual cultures: an exploratory project with researchers, agencies and educators’, a British Academy Project

This workshop was organized by myself and Clarissa Smith as part of our British Academy project on investigating young people’s sexual cultures and was attended by academics and members of practitioner organizers:

Clare Bale, University of Sheffield
Lisa Bartlett, Brook
Kev Cody, THT
Lucy Emmerson, SEF/NCB
Eleanor Formby, Sheffield Hallam University
Lesley Hoggart, Policy Studies Institute
Roger Ingham, University of Southampton
Tricia Jessiman and Peter Keogh, NATCEN
Suzanne Johnson, BPAS
Tony Kerridge, Marie Stopes
Terri Ryland, FPA
Liz Wilson, Centre for Sexual Health and HIV

OCTOBER 2009

Teaching and Researching the Sexually Explicit

The special issue of Sexualities, ‘Teaching and Researching the Sexually Explicit’, which I co-edited with I.Q, Hunter was published.

The special issue emerged from a day school in May 2007, organized by the editors and hosted jointly by De Montfort University and Sheffield Hallam University, on ‘Researching and Teaching the Sexually Explicit: Ethics, Methodology and Pedagogy’. Featuring presentations by Martin Barker, Brian McNair and Clarissa Smith, the day provoked valuable discussion about the challenges of academic work in this area at a time of media panics about ‘pornification’ and restrictive legislation about sexually extreme material. The resulting special issue brings together contributions from the UK, Australia, the USA, Finland and Hong Kong to reflect on shared concerns in a field transformed by new paradigms for understanding sexuality, in a context where the media seem increasingly important in the construction of sex and ‘discourse around sexuality at many social levels has focused more and more on visual representations’ (Kleinhans, 2004: 71).

Contents:

Introduction:
Feona Attwood & I.Q. Hunter ‘Not Safe for Work?: Teaching and Researching the Sexually Explicit’

Brian McNair ‘Teaching Porn’

Clarissa Smith ‘Pleasure and Distance: Exploring Sexual Cultures in the Classroom’

Susanna Paasonen ‘Healthy Sex and Pop Porn: Pornography, Feminism and the
Finnish Context’

Katrien Jacobs ‘Sex Scandal Science in Hong Kong’

Steve Jones & Sharif Mowlabocus ‘Hard Times and Rough Rides: The Legal and Ethical Impossibilities of Researching “shock” Pornographies’

Alan McKee ‘Social Scientists Don’t Say “Titwank”’

Kath Albury ‘Reading Porn Reparatively’

Dennis D. Waskul “My boyfriend Loves it when I Come Home from this Class”:
Pedagogy, Titillation, and New Media Technologies’

Contributors:

Kath Albury is an Australian Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow at theJournalism and Media Research Council, University of NSW. She is currently working on an ARC Linkage collaboration with the Australian National RugbyLeague and the Rape Crisis Centre, NSW, developing a sexual ethics mentoring program for professional athletes.

Feona Attwood teaches Media and Communication Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. She has published widely on sex and the media. Her research interests include new pornographies, cybersex, women and sexualization and the study of sexual media in education. She is currently working on online pornography and women’s use of online sex sites.

Ian Hunter, who publishes as I.Q. Hunter, is Principal Lecturer and Subject Leader in Film Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester. He edited British Science Fiction Cinema (Routledge, 1999) and co-edited Pulping Fictions (1996), Trash Aesthetics (1997), Sisterhoods (1998), Alien Identities (1999), Classics (2000), Retrovisions (2001) and Brit-Invaders! (2005). He has published widely on exploitation, horror and cult films and is currently writing a British Film Guide to A Clockwork Orange for IB Tauris. He is reviews editor of 2 forthcoming journals, Adaptations (Oxford UP), and IDeoGRAMS.

Katrien Jacobs is a scholar, curator and artist in the field of new media and sexuality and works as assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong. She has organized netporn conferences in recent years with the Institute of Network Cultures http:://www.networkcultures.com. She is the author of Libi_doc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art (2005), http://www.libidot.org. Her new book Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (2007) analyzes DIY porn on the Internet.

Steve Jones currently teaches within the department of Film and Media at the University of Sussex. His research centres upon the disruptions to selfhood and moralities of victimisation posed by Horror film and literature. Other research interests include pornography, gender studies, feminism, post-structuralism, discourses of the body, and existential philosophy.

Sharif Mowlabocus is a Lecturer in Media and Digital Media and a member of the research centre for Material Digital Culture at the University of Sussex. His research explores sexual representation and sexual sub-cultures primarily within digital environments. He has written on a variety of subjects including amateur pornography, dating/sex websites, barebacking and cyber-cruising. His book Gaydar Culture is due to be published by Ashgate in 2010.

Alan McKee is Associate Professor in Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has written six books on media culture, including Australian Television (2001) and Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (2006). His research on pornography with Catharine Lumby and Kath Albury was published in The Porn Book in 2008.

Clarissa Smith teaches Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. Her research interests are the production and consumption of pornography, sex retailing, audiences and popular culture. Her published work has included studies of soft-core pornography, readers of For Women magazine, and the erotic performers, The Chippendales. Her book, One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women’s Porn, was published in 2007.

Susanna Paasonen is research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki where she is currently preparing a book on online pornography, affect, and feminist methodology. She is the author of Figures of Fantasy: Internet, Women and Cyberdiscourse (2005) and co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency & Identity (2002), Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (2007), as well as the forthcoming Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. Susanna’s research on pornography has appeared in Feminist Theory, European Journal of Cultural Studies and the Velvet Light Trap.

Brian McNair took degrees in sociology at the university of Glasgow between 1977 and 1985. He has held academic posts at the universities of Ulster and Stirling, and is currently Professor of Journalism and Communication at the University of Strathclyde. His books include Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture (1996), Journalism and Democracy (2000) and Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire (2002).

Dennis D. Waskul is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is the production editor for Symbolic Interaction. He is author of Self-Games and Body-Play: Personhood in Online Chat and Cybersex (Peter Lang, 2003). Editor of net.seXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography, and the Internet (Peter Lang, 2004) and, with Phillip Vannini, editor of Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body (Ashgate, 2006). His published research has explored internet sex, sexual embodiment, sociology of the body, sociology of the senses, fantasy role-playing games, and chronic illness.

Dirty Work

My chapter, ‘Dirty Work: Researching Women and Sexual Representation’,
in Roisin Ryan Flood & Rosalind Gill (eds.) Secrets and Silences in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, was published. Routledge. 2009. pp. 177-187.

Despite the much-discussed incitement to speak about sex in modern and late modern societies, particular commentators, forms of sexual knowledge and ways of speaking about sex are clearly privileged over others. Although research processes might be thought to legitimate speech about sexuality, sex is a problematic area of speech for academics too. This is particularly true of despised forms of sexual representation such as pornography - itself a despised form of speech, and a difficult object of speech, towards which, as Linda Williams writes, ‘it is difficult to strike a proper attitude’ (1991:xi). This difficulty may account for the many gaps in our knowledge about women’s relationship to sexual representations. That an interest in sex may still signify awkwardly in relation to norms of femininity, and that feminism is popularly associated with an ‘anti-sex’ stance, may also contribute to the reticence of women to speak about these issues – whether as researchers or researched.
 
This chapter raises a number of questions about speech and silence in feminist theory and research on sexual representation. It asks how feminist work has framed the investigation of women’s relationships to sexual representation and how successfully issues of sexuality, class, race, generation and taste have been addressed in this work. It considers the implications of these framings for feminist researchers and their personal, political and professional identities, and for the way we design and conduct feminist research on sexual representation.

The Sexualization of Culture?
I gave a talk as part of the ‘The Sexualization of Culture?’ panel at MediaFest 09: Women in the Media, National Media Museum, Bradford, October 2009.

NOVEMBER 2009

Talking Dirty
I attended the Talking Dirty: Sex and Cinema conference at the University of Leeds, November 2009 as part of a panel on porn style, form and performance.

Panel: Porn Style, Form and Performance

This panel focuses on some of the issues too often obscured in discussions of pornography, namely, style, form and performance. In our distinct but linked approaches we examine the particular presentations of sex in individual pornographic forms.

Extreme Style and Sensation
Feona Attwood
Pornographic styles have proliferated in recent years, problematizing established views of what porn looks like, and in some quarters at least, offering a challenge to porn’s lack of respectability and acceptability. In this context, ‘extreme porn’ has become a new yardstick to mark the acceptable from the unacceptable. Concerns about extreme porn are part of a broader disquiet about what the BBFC has called ‘an increasingly popular category of “extreme reality” material which has many of the characteristics of extreme pornography but does not appear to have been produced for the purpose of sexual arousal’, also evident in the use of the term, ‘pornography’ in discussions of some horror films (‘torture porn’), and images of real violence (‘war porn’ or ‘atrocity porn’). This paper asks what is at stake in the notion of ‘extreme’ porn and what concerns about pornographic styles and the sensations they evoke in their viewers suggest about the shifting construction of bodily pleasure, experience and performance.

Erotic Inferno: British Sex Films in the 1970s
I.Q. Hunter
The British sexploitation comedy, which sustained the industry in the doldrums of the 1970s, has attracted some academic interest in recent years. Less discussed are the various, scattered and often forlorn attempts to make ‘serious’ exploitation films on erotic themes. Ranging from ‘permissive dramas’ documenting changing sexual mores (Groupie Girl, Permissive), to literary adaptations (Fanny Hill, Cruel Passion) and outright softcore erotica cashing in on the success of Emmanuelle (Emily, Erotic Inferno), these films attempted to develop a distinctive market for British sex films despite stringent censorship and competition from American and mainland European product. Focusing on Erotic Inferno and Cruel Passion this paper explores British erotic cinema of the 1970s, comparing its representation of sex with both mainstream films (Don’t Look Now) and indigenous hardcore production (the films of John Lindsay). The paper complements my earlier work on the British sex comedy and documentary in ‘Take an easy ride: sexploitation in the 1970s’ in Seventies British Cinema, ed. Robert Shail (London: BFI, 2008).

Do Porn Stars Act?
Clarissa Smith
This paper argues that presentations of actual sexual interactions in pornography signal an alternative logic of filmic production centred on the body and addresses questions of acting, performance and presentation of ‘real’ sex in the work of two popular porn actresses. Rather than view sex as an inert property of the filmic process this paper will examine the sex scene as an interaction between actors, exploring the properties of performed sex as ‘carrying dense and significant meaning’ (Baron and Carnicke, 2008) even if it is performed for that most graphically realist of genres, pornography. By focusing on the performance styles of Eva Angelina and Allie Sin I suggest that there may be more to a porn actor’s performance than simply being there and doing sex for the camera to record.

Shock and Horror

I gave a paper, ‘Shock and Horror: New Extreme Images Online’, as part of the Media Research Seminar Series, at the University of Brighton, November 2009.

Shock and Horror: New Extreme Images Online
Feona Attwood

Online pornographies increasingly provide a focus for debates about good and bad sexual representations and sexual practices. Some of these have become associated with wider concerns about ‘extreme’ images of the body elsewhere, for example in ‘torture porn’ films, real life ‘warporn’ or ‘atrocity porn’, online ‘shock’ sites and images, and what the BBFC has called ‘an increasingly popular category of “extreme reality” material which has many of the characteristics of extreme pornography but does not appear to have been produced for the purpose of sexual arousal’. This paper asks what is at stake in the notion of the ‘extreme’ image and what concerns about extreme porn signify in a context where the circulation of sexual imagery is more prevalent than ever before.