feona attwood

JANUARY 2010

porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography

My edited collection, porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography , was published by Peter Lang.

Contents:

Introduction: Porn Studies - From Social Problem to Cultural Practice
Feona Attwood

Part 1: Porn Practices

Online Obcenity and Myths of Freedom: Dangerous Images, Child Porn, and Neoliberalism
Stephen Maddison

Child Pornography: Classifications and Conceptualizations
Adam Stapleton

Debbie Does Dallas Again and Again: Pornography, Technology and Market Innovation
David Slayden

Technology, Social Practice, and the New Online Porn Industry
Sharif Mowlabocus

'Younger, paler, decidedly less straight': The New Porn Professionals
Feona Attwood

Part 2: Porn Styles

Behind the Scenes of Straight Pleasure
Sanna Härmä & Joakim Stolpe

Horrorporn/Pornhorror: The Problematic Communities and Contexts of Online Shock Imagery
Steven Jones

Good Amateurs: Erotica Writing and Notions of Quality
Susanna Paasonen
Gay for Pay, Gay For(e)play: The Politics of Taxonomy and Authenticity in LGBTQ Online Porn
Jennifer Moorman
Part 3: Porn Cultures

Widening the Glory Hole: The Discourse of Online Porn Fandom
Simon Lindgren

The New World Dream and the Female Itch: Sex Blogging and Lolita Costume Play in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China
Katrien Jacobs

‘How Do I Rate?’: Web Sites and Gendered Erotic Looking Glasses
Dennis D. Waskul & Cheryl L. Radeloff

Beyond ‘Key Parties’ and ‘Wife Swapping’: The Visual Culture of Online Swinging
Alison Rooke & Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

Contributors

Feona Attwood is a principal lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her research focuses
on controversial images, online sexualities and mediated intimacy. Recent publications include articles in Sexualities, International
Journal of Cultural Studies and Journal of Gender Studies and book chapters on pornography, sexual agency and research methods.
She is the editor of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (2009).

Sanna Härmä is a Media Studies postgraduate student where? Her dissertation examines mainstream pornography within the context of cultural and media studies, feminist and queer theory, and the 'pornification of popular culture'. Her recent publications include a chapter in Pornoakatemia (Harri Kalha ed., 2007) and an article in Feminist Media Studies.

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 organized netporn conferences with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam in 2005 and 2007. Her publications include Libi_doc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art (2005), C'lick Me: A Netporn Reader (2007) and Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (2007).

Steve Jones teaches in the department of Film and Media at the University of Sussex, UK. His research centers upon the disruptions to selfhood and moralities of victimization posed by horror film and literature. Other research interests include pornography, gender studies, feminism, post-structuralism, discourses of the body, and existential philosophy.

Simon Lindgren is associate professor of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests include the sociology of culture, media studies, discourse analysis, popular culture, semiotics, web studies and critical theory. His publications include two textbooks within these fields in Swedish Populärkultur: Teorier, metoder och analyser (2005) and Sociologi 2.0: Samhällsteori och samtidskultur (2007), as well as a number of articles in international journals. He is currently leading two research projects about media discourses on crime victims and online piracy.

Stephen Maddison is principal lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London, UK. He is the author of Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture (2000), and has written widely about questions of gender identity and gay culture. His recent work has been concerned with the political and economic infrastructure of porn, and he is currently working on a book, The Myth of Porn. He co-runs a website, OpenGender.org, that publishes work on sexuality, gender and new technologies.

Jennifer Moorman is a doctoral candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, tentatively titled 'The Softer Side of Hardcore? Women Filmmakers, Pornography, and Sexperimental Film', is an industrial and contextual analysis, as well as an alternative historiography of US pornographic film and video production, focusing on the above-the-line and behind-the-camera contributions of women. Her other publications include articles in Televising Queer Women: A Reader (Rebecca Beirne ed., 2007) and A Dragon Wrecked My Prom: Teen Wizards, Mutants, and Heroes (Jes Battis ed., forthcoming).

Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. Her research is concerned with contemporary practices of racism in relation to mestizaje (racial mixing), visibility, and emotions, with a specific focus on Mexico. Her work has appeared in journals such as History of the Human Sciences and the Journal of Intercultural Studies, as well as Raza, Etnicidad y Sexualidades: Ciudadanía y Multiculturalismo en América (Peter Wade et al., eds., 2008).

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, UK. His research explores sexual representation and sexual subcultures, 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 in 2010.

Susanna Paasonen is research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, 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), and 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.

Cheryl L. Radeloff is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Minnesota State University, USA. Her published work examines feminist curriculum initiatives in the geosciences, safer sex and feminist methodology. Her teaching and research interests are prostitution, sex work, pornography and sexualities. She is currently studying gender and work issues within the sex and body industry and preparing her PhD dissertation on HIV testing laws and policies in Nevada's sex industry for publication.

Alison Rooke is a lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths University, UK. Her work explores the philosophical underpinnings of sociological representation, and the ways that understandings of representation inform the epistemology of ethnographic social research. Her PhD research used photo elicitation to explore the everyday temporality and spatiality of the London as experienced by lesbian and bisexual women. More recently her research has included developing ways of using visual sociology in the evaluation of social and arts policy.

Adam Stapleton is a PhD student at the University of Western Sydney, Australia where he is a lecturer and research assistant in the School of Communication Arts and also a member of the Centre for Cultural Research and the Writing and Society Group. His research interests include erotica, pornography and obscenity; and particularly specifically the emergence as child pornography. His other research interests involve fan communities, the contemporary horror film genre and emotional contagion.

David Slayden is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. He has worked as an editor, scriptwriter, creative director, and professor of communication arts. He is the author of Hate Speech (1995) and Soundbite Culture (1999), and winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America (1995).

Joakim Stolpe is a Philosophy postgraduate student and lecturer at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His dissertation focuses on the understanding of human actions in their (f)actual surroundings. Through his involvement with Women´s Studies at the University of Turku he also has a long-standing interest in media studies and feminist ontology focusing mostly on pornography, music, class & cleanliness. He is a contributor to the quarterly philosophical publication Ikaros and to the www.filosofia.fi philosophical archives.

Dennis D. Waskul is an associate professor of Sociology at Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA. He is the production editor for Symbolic Interaction journal. He is author of Self-Games and Body-Play: Personhood in Online Chat and Cybersex (2003), editor of Net.seXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography, and the Internet (2004) and, with Phillip Vannini, editor of Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body (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.

‘Investigating Young People's Cultures’ Symposium

Investigating Young People's Sexual Cultures A One-Day Symposium A British Academy Funded Project
Co-ordinated by Dr Feona Attwood (Sheffield Hallam) and Dr Clarissa Smith (Sunderland)
Monday 18 January 2010 10am-6pm University of London Union, 1 Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY

Sessions and Speakers: Young People and Sexual Health
Petra Boynton (UCL, London)
Roger Ingham (University of Southampton)
Clare Bale (University of Sheffield)

Investigating Young People's Sexual Cultures: Methods and Ethics
Sara Bragg (Open University)
Mary Jane Kehily (Open University)
Mark Limmer (Teenage Pregnancy Co-ordinator, Rochdale/Lancaster University)

Young People and Sexualized Culture
Rosalind Gill (Open University)
Jessica Ringrose (Institute of Education)
Emma Renold (Cardiff University)

This symposium examines ways of developing research on young people's sexual cultures, building on existing work on young people, sex and relationships within the context of a 'sexualized' and media-saturated culture. Sex education and media literacy emerge as important factors in the way young people develop sexual knowledge and form mature sexual identities.

Academic work and governmental policies highlight both as crucial for the development of cultural citizenship and for personal, social and health education, and for participation in society. Media literacy and sex education both remain undeveloped in the UK, and the study of young people's engagements with sexual issues remains a relatively unexplored area. The symposium will explore the theoretical, ethical and methodological issues at stake in this area of work, reviewing existing knowledge and discussing the possibilities for innovative research across disciplinary and professional boundaries.

'The Sexualization Debates’

I gave a paper, ‘The Sexualization Debates’ at the first seminar in the ESRC Seminar Series: 'Complicating the Debate about Pornification', at the Institute of Education, London.

February 5 2010

Introductions from organizers, Rosalind Gill, Kings College London, Emma Renold, Cardiff University and Jessica Ringrose, Institute of Education, University of London

Linda Papadopoulous, Psychologist and author of forthcoming UK Home Office Report "The sexualization of young people"

Feona Attwood Sheffield Hallam University, Author of Mainstreaming Sex

Sue Golden Independent Artist, `Candy Broke' Exhibition

Anna Vanheeswijk Founder/Director OBJECT, NGO

Susanna Paasonen University of Helsinki, Finland, Author of Pornification

FEBRUARY 2010

Call Girl Diaries

My short commentary on Tracy Quan's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and Belle de Jour's Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl appeared in Feminist Media Studies.

‘Call Girl Diaries: New Representations of Cosmopolitan Sex Work’, Feminist Media Studies. Vol. 10(1). 2010. pp. 109-112.

MARCH 2010

‘Extreme Concern: Regulating “dangerous pictures” in the UK’

This is an article that I wrote with Clarissa Smith, for the Journal of Law and Society special issue and book on Regulating Sex/Work: From Crime Control to Neo-liberalism?, edited by Jane Scoular and Teela Sanders.

Recent years have borne witness to an unprecedented rise in – and an increased visibility of – sexual commerce and consumption, with a corresponding growth in associated forms of regulation. Regulating Sex/Work: From Crime Control to Neo–liberalism? works on addressing these trends by challenging the traditional responses and offering a fresh approach to sex industry regulation. By documenting changes in regulations relating to a range of sex markets from the UK, France, USA, Australia, and India, this volume reveals an apparent paradox: that the increase in oppressive and punitive approaches to regulating the sex industry comes at a time when evidence suggests that the supply and demand that fuels the sex markets, the diversification of sex markets, and their embedded nature in socioeconomic infrastructures is more intense than ever. Each chapter in this book addresses contemporary empirical examples of the regulation of the sex industry in a specific country and reveals theoretical connections between the implications of regulation and sexuality, gender and control. While many common themes run throughout the collection, consideration of the wide diversity of sex markets challenges traditional academic concentration on narrow forms of prostitution and allows for a more complex portrait of sex industry regulation to emerge.

Contents:

Introduction: The Changing Social and Legal Context of Sexual Commerce: Why Regulation Matters
Jane Scoular & Teela Sanders

What′s Law Got To Do With It? How and Why Law Matters in the Regulation of Sex Work
Jane Scoular

Mainstreaming the Sex Industry: Economic Inclusion and Social Ambivalence
Barbara G. Brents & Teela Sanders

The Movement to Criminalise Sex Work in the United States
Ronald Weitzer

When (Some) Prostitution is Legal: The Impact of Law Reform on Sex Work in Australia
Barbara Sullivan

Labours in Vice or Virtue? Neo–Liberalism, Sexual Commerce, and the Case of Indian Bar Dancing
Prabha Kotiswaran

Male Sex Work: Exploring Regulation in England and Wales
Mary Whowell

Bellwether Citizens: The Regulation of Male Clients of Sex Workers
Belinda Brooks–Gordon

Extreme Concern: Regulating `Dangerous Pictures′ in the United Kingdom
Feona Attwood & Clarissa Smith

Consuming Sex: Socio–legal Shifts in the Space and Place of Sex Shops
Baptiste Coulmont & Phil Hubbard

Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action Research (PAR)
Maggie O′Neill

‘Extreme Concern: Regulating “dangerous pictures” in the UK’, Journal of Law and Society Vol. 37(1). 2010. pp. 171-188.
This article begins with an exploration of section 5 of the recent Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, otherwise known as the `Dangerous Pictures Act' which outlaws the possession of `extreme images', and the Rapid Evidence Assessment belatedly used to justify the legislation. We then examine the claims of the growth, dissemination, and widespread availability of material which `glories in sexual violence' and its putative `effects'. This current crisis over the meanings of pornography highlights the rhetorical function of the conceptual discourse of `pornographication', its links to problematic figurations of the consumer or viewer of explicit materials, and how the identification of `extreme' pornography has given voice to a range of anxieties about media spectacularization of the body. We end by arguing that opposition to the legislation is not just a matter of protecting personal freedoms or refusing to recognize the existence of harms; instead, we propose that academics will need to question the very parameters on which the impulses to legislate are based.

APRIL 2010

Mediated Sexualities, Media and Cultural Research Symposium, University of Sunderland

Jane Arthurs, University of West of England, Conflicting Cultures in MTV's Sex-Trafficking Awareness Campaign
Chris Ashford, University of Sunderland, Notes for a Porn Island: Barebacking Bloggers and the Utopian Pirates of San Francisco
Feona Attwood, Sheffield Hallam University, Cougars and Tweens: Gender, Age and Sexualization
Julie Bradford, University of Sunderland, Rewriting the Script: Women, Sex and Web 2.0

I gave the following paper at this event:

Cougars and Tweens: Gender, Age and Sexualization

In 2009, Richard Prince’s work, ‘Spiritual America’, featuring a naked and heavily made up ten-year-old Brooke Shields, was removed from the Pop Life exhibition at Tate Modern, London after a visit by the Obscene Publications unit of the Metropolitan police. It was swiftly replaced by another of Prince’s works, ‘Spiritual America IV’, again featuring Brooke Shields in the same pose as the original, though this time aged forty and dressed in a bikini. This incident, in which female bodies typically represented as outside the age range of sexual desirability came under scrutiny, needs to be understood as part of a broader concern about ‘sexualization’ evident in a range of policy reports, popular and academic books and press report, and most often presented as a new and negative phenomenon impacting on the bodies of girls and women. This paper focuses on the apparent proliferation of visual texts in which increasingly younger and older women are presented as figures of sexual desire, display and activity, and sets this and the debate surrounding it in the context of academic work on makeover culture, the pharmaceutical imagination, age and class.

MAY 2010

ESRC Seminar Series: 'Complicating the Debate about Pornification' Seminar 2:Intimacy, Mediation and Power May 21, King’s College, London

Introduction and welcome (Rosalind Gill, Meg Barker, Jessica Ringrose, Emma Renold)

Rachel O’Neill (Independent researcher) Products of a sexed-up culture: Contextualising 'pickup' and the Seduction Community.

Noor Al-Qasimi (SOAS) Ladies and Gentlemen, Boyahs and Girls: Uploading Transnational Queer Subjectivities in the United Arab Emirates

Mehita Iqani (King’sCollege) Sex on the shelf: The everyday spectacle of London’s magazine newsstands

Alex Brew (Artist) ‘Asking for it’ ? Photographer and activist Alex Brew will discuss her latest project.

Teresa Senft (UEL) Love in the time of Snuff: Social Media, Intimacy, & the Death of Neda Agha-Soltan

BOOK LAUNCH and WINE RECEPTION, with Angela McRobbie and Christina Scharff We are delighted to celebrate the launch of two new feminist books: Carolyn Pedwell: Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, May 2010) Rebecca Coleman: The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Image, Experience (Manchester UP, May 2009)

JUNE 2010

ACS Crossroads Conference, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Panel 7.07 Sexual Subjectivities

Organizer: Clarissa Smith, University of Sunderland

Panelists:

Feona Attwood, Sheffield Hallam University: Girls Gone Skank: The Monstrous Body of the ‘Sexualized’ Girl

Katrien Jacobs, City University of Hong Kong: Lizzy Kinsey and the Adult FriendFinders: An Ethnographic Case Study about Internet Sex and Pornographic Self-Display in Hong Kong

Fiona Peters, Bath Spa University: Contemporary Representations of Female Sexuality: Liberation or Culturally Acceptable Pornography?

Clarissa Smith, University of Sunderland: Filled with Excitement: Eva and Her Pornographic Performances

Girls Gone Skank: The Monstrous Body of the ‘Sexualized’ Girl

This paper examines concerns about young people's relationships with sexualized media, expressed forcefully in policy documents, press reporting and popular literature in many cultures. It explores the ways that new figures of the sexualized child-consumer reconfigure notions of male and female sexuality, based around a fascination with the porn performer as an image, rather than a person or laborer. It argues that in particular the figure of the sexualized girl is part of a broader range of horrified responses to ‘Generation 2.0’, evident in public debates about social networking, virtual worlds, pro-ana sites, ‘online suicide cults’ and ‘sexting’; and represents a horror of bodies and desires which do not appear to correlate with dominant views of age-appropriate behaviour.

REPRESENTATIONS OF SEX AND VIOLENCE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A CCPR seminar in the Basque Fellowship series Gilmorehill Centre, 25 June

Welcome Philip Schlesinger (Academic Director, CCPR)

Introduction Santiago Urrutia (Basque Visiting Fellow, University of the Basque Country)

The definition of violence: values, moral authority and the making of policy by research/Presenter David Morrison (University of Leeds)/Discussant Christine Geraghty (TFTS, University of Glasgow)

The regulation of extreme sexual representation: contemporary tensions in art, pop and porn/Presenter Brian McNair (University of Strathclyde)/Discussant Feona Attwood (Sheffield Hallam University)

Critical reflections on children and traumatic news/Presenter Cynthia Carter (University of Cardiff)/Discussant Karen Lury (TFTS, University of Glasgow)

JULY 2010

Onscenity Research Network Launched

Onscenity: Sex, Commerce, Media and Technology in Contemporary Society

This research network, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, draws together international experts in order to respond to the new visibility or 'onscenity' of sex in commerce, culture and everyday life. It responds to public concerns about a range of issues including the new accessibility of pornography, the mainstreaming and normalization of sexually explicit representation, the commercialization of sex, the role of the internet in circulating 'extreme' images, and the use of communication technologies, often by young people, for sexual purposes. It is supported by leading academics in the field and will draw together scholars from Europe, the US, Hong Kong and Australia at a series of workshops, seminars and symposia.

The aim of the network is to investigate the ways in which sex is increasingly intertwined with commerce, the media and new technology in our lives. We live in a changing landscape surrounded by media, where our use of technologies is changing the way we live and offering new opportunities and new risks. Sex is presented as central to our experiences of identity and relationships, and it is increasingly a part of the lifestyle and leisure practices of a consumer culture where many forms of commercial sex have experienced unprecedented and global growth. Media and communication technologies are widely used as information resources about sex, to access pornography and other sex-entertainment materials, and increasingly to fashion home made sexual representations and experience new types of sexual encounter in virtual environments.

The network will work towards developing new approaches to the relationships between sex, commerce, media and technology. Drawing on the work of leading scholars from around the world, it will map a transformed landscape of sexual practices and co-ordinate a new wave of research.

Onscenity Research Network Launch Event

July 5, Birkbeck College, London

Speakers:

David Buckingham is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, London University, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media. His research focuses on children's and young people's interactions with electronic media, and on media education. He is currently working on two major projects, one on the role of the internet in promoting young people’s civic participation, and the other on learning and progression in media education. His publications include Children Talking Television (1993), Moving Images (1996), Media Education (2003), Young People, Sex and the Media (with Sara Bragg, 2004), Beyond Technology: Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Media (2007), and Young People, Identity and Digital Media (2007).

Catharine Lumby is the Director of the Journalism and Media Research at the University of NSW, Australia. She is a well-known public commentator who has worked as a news reporter, feature writer and columnist. Her research interests include the representation of gender in the media, popular culture and advertising; censorship, public policy and the production and consumption of pornography in Australia; the production and consumption of children's media culture; and contemporary debates around the sexualisation of children. Her publications include Bad Girls: The Media, Sex and Feminism in the 90s, (1997), Gotcha: Life In A Tabloid World (1999), Why TV Is Good For Kids: Raising 21st Century Children (with Duncan Fine, 2006), and The Porn Report (with Alan McKee and Kath Albury, 2008), and Alvin Purple (2008).

Susanna Paasonen is research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, where she is currently preparing a book on online pornography, affect, and feminist methodology. Susanna’s research on pornography has appeared in Feminist Theory, European Journal of Cultural Studies and the Velvet Light Trap. 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 (with Mia Consalvo, 2002), Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (with Kaarina Nikunen and Laura Saarenmaa, 2007), and Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (with Marianne Liljeström, 2010).

Clarissa Smith is Programme Leader of the MA Media and Cultural Studies and MA Film & Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK. Her research and publications focus on the expanding sexual sphere for heterosexual women: its institutional practices, representational strategies, uses and meanings. She is the author of One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Pornography for Women (2007), co-editor (with Michael Higgins and John Storey) of Cambridge Companion to Contemporary British Culture (2010), co-author (with Niall Richardson and Angela Werndly) of Studies in Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Practices, and co-editor (with Feona Attwood) of the Sex Education special issue on ‘Investigating Young People’s Sexual Cultures’.

SEPTEMBER 2010

Sex and the Law: Criminalization? Protection? Rights?

I gave a presentation at this conference in Sheffield on September 23, 2010

Chair: Roger Ingham, Centre for Sexual Health Research, University of Southampton

Presenters:

Peter Tatchell - Age of Consent Debates

Yusuf Azad, NAT - Criminalization of HIV Transmission

Feona Attwood - Pornography and the Law

Kim Stephenson - Real Rape, Real Consent

Parminder Sekhon - BME Communities, Sex and the Law

OCTOBER 2010

Panel: Pro-Am Pornography: New Economies of Sex Production and Consumption Feona Attwood, Simon Lindgren, Sharif Mowlabocus and Susanna Paasonen
Association of Internet Researchers 11.0, Gothenberg, Sweden, October 2010.

This panel draws on a cultural studies approach that aims to investigate online pornographies as a set of cultural practices revealing new patterns of media and technology use and shifts in the significance of sexual representation and practice across real and virtual environments. These are located within a broader ‘striptease culture’ (McNair, 2002) of public and mediated intimacy where the significance of sex, communication technology and media representation is shifting. Like other branches of the entertainment industry, established forms of porn production have faced a number of challenges in recent years; especially those related to the rise of the amateur and to new forms of production, distribution and consumption in an era of Web 2.0 technologies. Amateur porn has proliferated, along with independent and alternative porn genres and texts, as part of the broader emergence of user-generated content and of participatory online cultures (see Jenkins, 2006); indeed it has been argued that some porn producers have been ‘way ahead of the game’ (Lehman, 2007:109) in this respect.

The production of independent and alternative pornographies with a countercultural or queer bent (Magnet, 2007; Attwood, 2007; Levin Russo, 2007) has been of particular interest in the context of ongoing debates about pornography’s representation of sexuality and gender. Associated with artistic, technological and political innovation, and sometimes with the development of new porn aesthetics, ethics and business practices, these porn forms have been seen by some as part of a ‘reclaiming of porn culture and sex education’ (Jacobs, 2007: 77). The emergence of younger, sophisticated producers and consumers may also be understood as an aspect of what has been characterized as the pornification of mainstream culture (Paasonen et al., 2007), and of a move towards new forms of ‘smart sex culture’ in which some forms of cultural production and consumption around sex shake off their earlier sleazy connotations and appear as chic or hip.

Emerging forms of amateur and independent production have also been accompanied by a shift in modes of porn distribution online, further challenging the existing commercial structures within which much porn production has traditionally operated. In particular, the growth of the pornographic ‘tubes’ such as YouPorn and XTube, as platforms for hosting and streaming both amateur and commercial material, has presented new opportunities and risks for porn production and consumption. Elsewhere, sex bloggers, erotica writers and porn communities have created new spaces for engaging with pornography.

These developments are part of the broader transformations in the economy and in culture in which the relations between production and consumption, work and leisure, public and private are being redrawn according to a paradigm of service work and flexible labour, of recombinant families and isolable individuals, and of a sexual ethic in which commerce and intimacy coexist (Bernstein, 2007: 173). The notion of the pro-am; ‘a new social hybrid’, disrupting categories of work and leisure, and professional and amateur (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004: 20) is interesting in this context, and helps to further locate new cultural practices as part of the broader growth in forms of creative labour that foreground ways of living and working which are flexible, autonomous, and individually fulfilling, but also highly insecure (Ross, 2008; Gill & Pratt, 2008). These practices have made possible the emergence of new economies of sex and new relations of labour and leisure: smart sex professionals form networks linking together artistic production, education and political activism; amateur performers negotiate the freedom and control of 2.0 technologies; previously isolated porn fans congregate to discuss the conventions and pleasures of their collections; and amateur writers and readers engage in interactions which are both mutually arousing and culturally appreciative.

The panel focuses on the emergence of a pornographic pro-am culture that can be glimpsed in the casual work performed by amateurs on tube sites, the articulation of viewer positions on porn fan sites, the critical exchanges of writers on erotica sites, and the precarious erotic labour of smart sex culture producers.

‘Get Paid for Showing Your Naughty Bits’: amateur pornography and the rhetoric of social media

Sharif Mowlabocus

The relationship between media technologies and sexual representation is both well-established and well-documented (McNair, 1996; O’Toole, 1999; Attwood, 2007; Hardy, 2008). Developments in communication technology (printing press, photography, cinema, telephony, television, VHS, DVD, internet) run parallel with shifts in the production, consumption, format and aesthetics of pornographic material. This relationship continues today as technologies of social and participatory media are becoming utilized in the manufacturing, distribution and accessing of sexually explicit objects.

This paper considers the (continuing) rise of online amateur pornography and critically engages with the politics of what might best be termed ‘porn 2.0’. Focusing on issues of labour and subjectivity it discusses the promise of a new pornographic economy, in which digital spaces provide for the articulation of a diverse range of desires, tastes, bodies and practices. This economy is marked by an increasing porosity between the established categories of ‘consumer’, ‘producer’, ‘performer’ and ‘distributor’ and by the establishment of new ludic interstices that allow amateur producers to play along the boundaries between such categories.

While acknowledging the political potential that this new economy offers users, the paper utilizes the work of Graham (2000), Lazzarato (2001) and Coté & Pybus (2007) to temper claims of pornographic emancipation and suggests that new forms of amateur pornography are framed by older mechanisms of production and consumption. Through an examination of XTube - a distribution site for amateur porn - the paper identifies the tension that exists between the rhetoric of freedom, control and play found in many of the site’s amateur homepages and the capitalist imperative found elsewhere on the site, which urges amateurs to become productive and efficient labourers by privileging the desires of their consumers over and above their own. The paper concludes by identifying how and why questions of agency and objectification must remain central to discussions of sexual representation, not least in contexts where amateurs are being offered the ‘freedom’ to engage in precarious labour, through the rhetoric of Web 2.0.

Smart Sex Culture: the rise of the new porn professionals

Feona Attwood

In an interview with altporn director Eon McKai, Violet Blue (2007) documents the emergence of a group of new porn professionals – ‘intellectuals, directors, performers and bloggers’ who are ‘younger, paler, decidedly less straight’ than the norm, at least as represented by the ‘circus of porn stereotypes’ at the AVN porn convention where Blue and McKai met to talk. This new type of producer is cosmopolitan, ‘real’, and focused on the production of ‘smart sex culture’ for a young, sophisticated, media-savvy audience previously neglected by mainstream porn producers. They are also characterized by a reflexivity that marks them as thoughtful practitioners, indicating an overlap between critical, artistic, and activist interventions in the production of sex media.

The emergence of this group of practitioners coincides both with the pornification of mainstream culture (see Paasonen et al., 2007) and the development of participatory online cultures, challenging stereotypes of porn production and performance, as well as established ideas about what ‘porn’ and ‘professional’ signify. This paper considers the emergence of new types of porn professionalism and examples of new porn professionals in the context of debates about celebrities and ‘ordinary people’; professionalism and amateurism, representation and real life. It examines the rise of smart sex culture and the notion of ‘sex as medium’ and explores their significance in relation to a variety of cultural trends; a global growth in sex work, creative labour, pro-amateur production, participatory cultures and the postmodernization of sex.

Widening the glory hole: the discourse of online porn fandom

Simon Lindgren

The traditional image of the porn consumer has been that of the perverted and shamed loner. In pre-internet times such an image was probably adequate, and even today, when pornographic materials are widely available online, it is still a qualified guess that most porn consumption takes place in individualized and private situations. The porn audience, thus described, becomes an archetype of late modern man; part of a global media and consumer culture, yet detached and left to himself, blasé and numb from visual overload, yet constantly looking for new sensations. In this view of the user, pornography becomes an expression of ‘episodic sexuality’ and the will to sexual control - an urge that becomes increasingly compulsive as traditional roles and structures are liquefied in late modernity.

But what happens to the audience when porn goes online? The anonymous masturbatory onlooker certainly remains, but porn inevitably also reaches new audiences. The internet has brought pornography closer to the mainstream of popular culture, and in so doing connected it to audiences more like those of popular culture in general. The aim of this paper is to analyze how porn fans collectively construct their viewer positions in the online community, FreeOnes (http://board.freeones.com/). The discussion of empirical material gathered from conversations on the FreeOnes bulletin board takes current research on participatory culture and fandom as its point of departure when approaching how audience members consume, use and integrate pornography in their everyday lives.

Good amateurs: erotica writing and notions of quality

Susanna Paasonen

This paper focuses on Literotica, a massive online archive of erotic stories archive established in 1998, investigating the aesthetic and affective criteria of a ‘good story’ at play on the site. On Literotica, stories are evaluated through peer rating, competitions, feedback and comments. Through analysis of (select) competition winners, all-time top rated stories, most read stories, stories with low ratings, and author guides, as well as reader comments and feedback, the paper addresses the collective creation of value as a process that involves both notions of literary merit (in terms of style, grammar, vocabulary, character construction or narrative) and affective appeal (the power of stories to move their readers). In doing so, the paper bridges some of the current knowledge gaps concerning erotica writing, criteria of quality and amateur production.

The erotic fiction available on Literotica, along with the feedback, interaction possibilities and contests, provide a distinctive space for collaborative and collective negotiations over value that are not in any direct way conditioned either by the principles of commercial publishing or by the value and genre norms of literary critique. Carnal proximities with, and sensuous pleasures derived from the stories are a central criterion of value that does not foreclose considerations of language, style or grammar, but is intrinsically bound to them. Rather than debilitating their value, the power of texts to move the reading bodies is an end in itself. I argue that in this framework, the divisions of erotica and pornography are ultimately blurred, and to a degree even irrelevant when defining a ‘good story’: readers may be moved by the sexual tension gradually building up between the protagonists; by the detailed depiction of sexual acts between characters only sketchily drawn; by gestures of tenderness and affection; or by elaborate scenes of theatrical BDSM performance. In all these cases, the affective dynamics involve experiences of arousal, fleshy pulsations, and movements of desire as some of the intensity of the text attaches itself to the reading body. As a community platform, Literotica renders such movements of desire articulate, hence broadening the experience of reading into social negotiations over the meaning and value of texts. These kinds of platforms open novel spaces for addressing the appeal and experiences of the erotic and the pornographic: ones based on affective movement rather than hierarchical judgment.

Feona Attwood is a principal lecturer in Communication at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her research focuses on controversial images, online sexualities and mediated intimacy. Recent publications include articles in Sexualities, International Journal of Cultural Studies and Journal of Gender Studies and book chapters on pornography, sexual agency and research methods. She is the editor of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (2009) and porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography (2010).

Simon Lindgren is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests include the sociology of culture, media studies, discourse analysis, popular culture, semiotics, Web studies, and critical theory. His publications include two textbooks within these fields, Populärkultur: Teorier, metoder och analyser (2005), and Sociologi 2.0: Samhällsteori och samtidskultur (2007), as well as a number of articles in international journals. He is currently leading two research projects about media discourses on crime victims and online piracy.

Susanna Paasonen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, 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), and 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 Velvet Light Trap.

NOVEMBER 2010

'Sex and the Citizens: Erotic Play and the New Leisure Culture', in Peter Bramham & Stephen Wagg (eds.)The New Politics of Leisure and Pleasure. Palgrave. 2010. pp. 82-96.

This chapter of mine appeared in a collection on leisure:

The chapter examines how in late modern societies, sex is increasingly part of the world of leisure. While sex is still seen as a means of reproduction and of relationship-forming, it is also a sphere of recreation, focused on the individual and on self-pleasure. Sexual representations, performances and services have become part of a ‘reconfiguration of erotic life’ in which sex and commerce are combined (Bernstein, 2001:397). Technologies have also played a role in developing the way that sex is articulated and experienced; expanding the range of material and media sources of self-pleasure and making possible new forms of sexual encounter. The chapter examines some of the key changes in the way sex signifies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In particular it focuses on the mainstreaming and gentrification of some aspects of the sex industry, on the rise of new sex-cultural intermediaries, on the growing significance of sex as ‘play’, and on the development of participatory cultures which take sex as the departure point for individual expression and community building.

‘The Spectre of Sex: Sexualization, the Media, and the Academy’, Sociology Departmental Seminar Series, University of Essex, November 2010.

Sexualization has become a focus of intense debate, both in contemporary policy documents and popular literature. Discussions in Australia and the U.S of ‘corporate paedophilia’ (Rush & La Nauze, 2006) and the sexualization of girls (American Psychological Association, 2007), have been joined by British reports by the Object campaign group (2008 and 2009), the Fawcett Society (2009) and, most recently, the Home Office (Papadopoulos, 2010) A rash of popular books - Female Chauvinist Pigs (Levy, 2005); Pornified (Paul, 2005); The Lolita Effect (Durham, 2008); Girls Gone Skank (Oppliger, 2008), The Porning of America (Sarracino & Scott, 2008) - have decried the impact of sexualization on girls and women. This paper examines how sexualization is constructed in these discussions and the implications for academic work on sex, sexuality and the media.

DECEMBER 2010

‘Sexualization, Sex and Manners’, Sexualities. Vol.13(6). 2010. pp.742-745.

A short response to Cas Wouters' discussion of sexualization in the same issue.

‘Obscenity, Onscenity and Contemporary Panics around Sex’, Moral Panics in the Contemporary World, Brunel, London, December 2010.

This paper examines the usefulness of work on moral panics for understanding expressions of concern about contemporary sexual representations and practices and recent developments in their regulation. A number of examples are considered: the sexualization of young people and women, ‘extreme’ pornographies of various types, sex trafficking, and the gentrification or glamorization of sex work. The paper considers how debates about areas of current concern are shaped, what kinds of approach are privileged, and what their implications are for framing contemporary discourses of sexuality. It traces two persistent and related areas of focus in contemporary forms of ‘sex panic’ – one that stresses the alien, deviant, marginal and abhorrent nature of its object, broadly related to notions of ‘obscenity’, and another that is concerned with the troubling nature of increasingly mainstream phenomena, broadly related to the notion of ‘onscenity’. It examines these as distinct though related areas of moral regulation that are sometimes separated out to demarcate acceptable and unacceptable forms of contemporary sex and sometimes collapsed together to demonstrate a general deterioration of sexual morality. It asks how the concept of ‘panic’ might help to distinguish how these areas of focus are conceptualized, how particular kinds of effect and affect are attributed to them, and how the impulse for their regulation is imagined and enacted.