The Future Sex symposia project
My colleague Stephen Maddison and I are working to put together the symposia below. We just won a 'pump prime' grant from our university today ('pump prime' is another way of saying, "Here is some internal money to get people to help you write bigger external grants so we don't have to give you any more money.") The best part about this is that I was cheeky and asked for 3x more than I was supposed to...and we got it!
So now we fly/train in a bunch of people to help us put together the symposia and brainstorm funding opportunities.
Hooray!
For those interested, more beyond the cut...
1.Description of the Proposed Research Project:
Future Sex: Sexual Materialism and the Pornographic Imaginary
This is a proposal for a series of symposia designed to draw together radical thinking on pornography, technology, new media, gender politics and sexuality. Sessions will aim to embrace complex social challenges, whilst eliding old political deadlocks. Papers will be circulated well in advance, and participants will all be scheduled to act as discussants for one anothers’ papers. Each symposium will be organized to facilitate collaboration and debate.
Academically and politically, pornography crosses a number of paradigms, including film studies, new media, cultural studies, gender studies, queer theory, politics, and sociology. Whatever one’s personal stance on porn, its increasing hold on popular culture in the UK is difficult to deny. From Job Centres offering live nude webcam gigs, to revered British band Massive Attack’s latest music video on their official web site (for the song “Paradise Circus,” featuring uncensored scenes from the 1970’s porn classic The Devil in Miss Jones) the stuff seems everywhere.
The field of what Linda Williams (2004) has described as “Porn Studies” has rapidly expanded in the last few years, with a number of international conferences, a large number of edited collections and a number of monographs. Such expansion is certainly warranted by the cultural and economic significance of pornography, which is often cited as a bigger part of the global entertainment business than US major league sports, the music industry, and the mainstream film industry (in the US, Europe and India.) The most obvious contribution pornography makes economically is through mainstream ventures such as Vivid and Wicked, who produce and distribute films. A smaller but growing portion of the porn industry comes from y small internet-based companies featuring so-called ‘amateur’ producers who traffic in the ‘myth of free exhibitionism online.’ (Senft 2008).
But porn’s economic influence doesn’t stop there: it contributes mightily to the confers of traditional entertainment sectors through the wider economy of credit card processing, hotel in-room entertainment, and corporate entertainment expenses. Of course, porn continues to drive the demand for new consumer technologies, feeding cash to internet service providers, new media companies, large and small hi-tech companies. Last (but certainly not least) is pornography’s contribution to big pharma, the biotech industry, and the so-called ‘beauty’ industry (Maddison 2004, 2010).
Despite the expansion of Porn Studies, academic debates often continue to be framed by what Jane Juffer (1998) has described as the “tired binary” of the feminist porn wars. Some branches of the expanding Porn Studies have worked to move the parameters of critical engagement beyond this feminist deadlock, and the question of pornification, or the mainstreaming of porn culture, has largely taken its place (McNair, 1996, McNair 2002, Gibson 2004, Attwood 2006, Paasonen et al 2007, Attwood 2009, McRobbie 2009). Debates about mainstreaming, however, in eschewing an engagement with this “tired binary”, often evacuate difficult political questions entirely, or over-emphasise the empowerment to be gained from some very marginal and sub-cultural forms of porn.
A recent ESRC series, Pornified: Complicating debates on the sexualization of culture, offered significant progression in pornification debates, working to bring together critics and commentators from academia, NGOs and other stakeholders, aiming thereby to complicate questions of mainstreaming. Yet sexualization, in the context of this series, remained organized around poles of autonomy and passivity, democratization and threat. Early reports back from the convenors of Pornified series indicate that they are finding it difficult to move conversations away from embracing or critiquing sexuality framed, as Leo Bersani famously stated, by a “redemptive pastoral liberalism” (1988).
Future Sex will take a broader view of the porn industry, explicitly addressing the intricate mashup of porn with biotech, new media and pharma, and foregrounding questions of economic agency, youth and ethics in our investigations. Rather than focusing on identifying links between a troubling expansion of explicit sexuality and the porn industry, we aim to provide a context in which academics and other stakeholders can explore broader political questions, and theorise beyond the limits of debates in sexuality and popular culture. Our objective is to build on the initiative of Pornified and widen out the discussions staged there, in order to think through the economic, social, technological and biotechnical materialisms of the pornography industry.
Our seminar series is as follows:
Session 1: Mapping the Future of Porn Studies:
In this session, we consider the future of the field of pornography studies, an academic field that is now almost thirty years old. Which arguments have we moved beyond? Which issues still need to be broached? Whose voices do we need to seek out? What more needs to be done?
Session 2: Pornotopia? Evaluating ‘Sex Positivity’ in an Era of Connectivity.
In this session, we look closely at a range of technological practices that promise to bring ‘sex positivity’ to the masses: sex blogging, text via mobile phones (sexting) and the homemade alt.porn movement. On one hand, we see the belief in tech-fueled ‘pornotopias’ as an extenuation of the historical avant-garde, particularly when we think of that movement’s belief in libidinal liberation through a ‘shock of the new.’ On the other hand, we see sex blogging, sexting and alt.porn as practices that speak to a range of people, some of whom see themselves as artists and counter-cultural critics --and many who do not. Do ideologies of ‘pornotopia’ work the same way for all people in all walks of life, or is it time to evaluate the pleasures and dangers of tech-enabled sex positivity in a more sophisticated way?
Session 3: The Economies of Future Sex:
In this session, we attempt to map the many offshoots of the tech-sex business, ranging from online porn, to webcam services, to sex tourism bulletin boards, and beyond. Just how big are these industries? Who is gaining the most financially from them? How are they compensating their workers? Should we be thinking of work in this arena as ‘immaterial labor,’ as part of the ‘care economy,’ or a mix of the two? How should we deal with current international law that splits sex workers (in and out of the tech sector) into those who are forced and those who chose, ignoring those who don’t neatly fit these distinctions? Finally how will business owners, consumers and workers in the tech-sex sector be affected by future developments in the areas of media convergence, corporate control and mass adoption of technologies?
Session 4: The Ethics of Future Sex:
Today, it is commonplace to hear people allude to their private consumption of online porn or their semi-private adventures trading sexy pictures with a lover via mobile phones. In this session, we talk about what happens when those private or semi-private activities become the stuff of the ‘super-public’-internet spaces where people find themselves surveyed, logged, discovered, and where evidence lingers in ways that transcend geography and history. We are particularly interested in discussing the ethical challenges that will be forthcoming as more young people find private and semi-private acts becoming fodder for their super-public identities, long after they may have ‘outgrown’ particular behaviours.
3. Account of Planned Outputs:
• Four day-long symposia, to include participants from the UK, EU and US. Each symposium will include papers given by participants, with a discussant for each. Our aim is to maximize debate and creative synthesis.
• A website that will archive all the papers and discussant responses, including podcasts of each, forums and social networking, and links.
• An edited collection, to include discussion of each paper, taken from the symposia and from the website
Principle Investigator Bios:
Dr. Stephen Maddison:
Stephen Maddison is Principal Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London, where his work engages questions of sexuality and culture. Stephen’s book Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Cutlure was published in London by Macmillan and in New York by St. Martin’s Press in 2000. His work on sexual materialism, pornography and biopolitics has been published in international journals such as New Formations and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and in the recent high profile collections Mainstreaming Sex (2009) and Porn.com (2010). He has given papers on pornography, big pharma and new media in conferences in Hong Kong, Brussels, Athens and Spain. He’s working on a monograph entitled uPorn: Sexual Materialism and Mythologies of Pornotopia.
Dr. Theresa Senft:
Theresa Senft, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East London, is interested in how the Internet has been changing our notions of the public, the private and the pornographic in contemporary society. For her most recent book, Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks, Terri ran a webcam out of her own home for a year and charted her experiences interacting with viewers and other camgirls in spaces like LiveJournal and Facebook. Other books by Terri include History of the Internet, 1843-Present (co-author) and a special issue of Women & Performance devoted to sexuality & cyberspace (co-editor.) Terri's work has been published in The New York Times, she has appeared on National Public Radio (U.S.), and in the documentary Webcam Girls. She recently has been invited to speak at Harvard University for the Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Project, as well as at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Forum on Relationships and the Internet.
So now we fly/train in a bunch of people to help us put together the symposia and brainstorm funding opportunities.
Hooray!
For those interested, more beyond the cut...
1.Description of the Proposed Research Project:
Future Sex: Sexual Materialism and the Pornographic Imaginary
This is a proposal for a series of symposia designed to draw together radical thinking on pornography, technology, new media, gender politics and sexuality. Sessions will aim to embrace complex social challenges, whilst eliding old political deadlocks. Papers will be circulated well in advance, and participants will all be scheduled to act as discussants for one anothers’ papers. Each symposium will be organized to facilitate collaboration and debate.
Academically and politically, pornography crosses a number of paradigms, including film studies, new media, cultural studies, gender studies, queer theory, politics, and sociology. Whatever one’s personal stance on porn, its increasing hold on popular culture in the UK is difficult to deny. From Job Centres offering live nude webcam gigs, to revered British band Massive Attack’s latest music video on their official web site (for the song “Paradise Circus,” featuring uncensored scenes from the 1970’s porn classic The Devil in Miss Jones) the stuff seems everywhere.
The field of what Linda Williams (2004) has described as “Porn Studies” has rapidly expanded in the last few years, with a number of international conferences, a large number of edited collections and a number of monographs. Such expansion is certainly warranted by the cultural and economic significance of pornography, which is often cited as a bigger part of the global entertainment business than US major league sports, the music industry, and the mainstream film industry (in the US, Europe and India.) The most obvious contribution pornography makes economically is through mainstream ventures such as Vivid and Wicked, who produce and distribute films. A smaller but growing portion of the porn industry comes from y small internet-based companies featuring so-called ‘amateur’ producers who traffic in the ‘myth of free exhibitionism online.’ (Senft 2008).
But porn’s economic influence doesn’t stop there: it contributes mightily to the confers of traditional entertainment sectors through the wider economy of credit card processing, hotel in-room entertainment, and corporate entertainment expenses. Of course, porn continues to drive the demand for new consumer technologies, feeding cash to internet service providers, new media companies, large and small hi-tech companies. Last (but certainly not least) is pornography’s contribution to big pharma, the biotech industry, and the so-called ‘beauty’ industry (Maddison 2004, 2010).
Despite the expansion of Porn Studies, academic debates often continue to be framed by what Jane Juffer (1998) has described as the “tired binary” of the feminist porn wars. Some branches of the expanding Porn Studies have worked to move the parameters of critical engagement beyond this feminist deadlock, and the question of pornification, or the mainstreaming of porn culture, has largely taken its place (McNair, 1996, McNair 2002, Gibson 2004, Attwood 2006, Paasonen et al 2007, Attwood 2009, McRobbie 2009). Debates about mainstreaming, however, in eschewing an engagement with this “tired binary”, often evacuate difficult political questions entirely, or over-emphasise the empowerment to be gained from some very marginal and sub-cultural forms of porn.
A recent ESRC series, Pornified: Complicating debates on the sexualization of culture, offered significant progression in pornification debates, working to bring together critics and commentators from academia, NGOs and other stakeholders, aiming thereby to complicate questions of mainstreaming. Yet sexualization, in the context of this series, remained organized around poles of autonomy and passivity, democratization and threat. Early reports back from the convenors of Pornified series indicate that they are finding it difficult to move conversations away from embracing or critiquing sexuality framed, as Leo Bersani famously stated, by a “redemptive pastoral liberalism” (1988).
Future Sex will take a broader view of the porn industry, explicitly addressing the intricate mashup of porn with biotech, new media and pharma, and foregrounding questions of economic agency, youth and ethics in our investigations. Rather than focusing on identifying links between a troubling expansion of explicit sexuality and the porn industry, we aim to provide a context in which academics and other stakeholders can explore broader political questions, and theorise beyond the limits of debates in sexuality and popular culture. Our objective is to build on the initiative of Pornified and widen out the discussions staged there, in order to think through the economic, social, technological and biotechnical materialisms of the pornography industry.
Our seminar series is as follows:
Session 1: Mapping the Future of Porn Studies:
In this session, we consider the future of the field of pornography studies, an academic field that is now almost thirty years old. Which arguments have we moved beyond? Which issues still need to be broached? Whose voices do we need to seek out? What more needs to be done?
Session 2: Pornotopia? Evaluating ‘Sex Positivity’ in an Era of Connectivity.
In this session, we look closely at a range of technological practices that promise to bring ‘sex positivity’ to the masses: sex blogging, text via mobile phones (sexting) and the homemade alt.porn movement. On one hand, we see the belief in tech-fueled ‘pornotopias’ as an extenuation of the historical avant-garde, particularly when we think of that movement’s belief in libidinal liberation through a ‘shock of the new.’ On the other hand, we see sex blogging, sexting and alt.porn as practices that speak to a range of people, some of whom see themselves as artists and counter-cultural critics --and many who do not. Do ideologies of ‘pornotopia’ work the same way for all people in all walks of life, or is it time to evaluate the pleasures and dangers of tech-enabled sex positivity in a more sophisticated way?
Session 3: The Economies of Future Sex:
In this session, we attempt to map the many offshoots of the tech-sex business, ranging from online porn, to webcam services, to sex tourism bulletin boards, and beyond. Just how big are these industries? Who is gaining the most financially from them? How are they compensating their workers? Should we be thinking of work in this arena as ‘immaterial labor,’ as part of the ‘care economy,’ or a mix of the two? How should we deal with current international law that splits sex workers (in and out of the tech sector) into those who are forced and those who chose, ignoring those who don’t neatly fit these distinctions? Finally how will business owners, consumers and workers in the tech-sex sector be affected by future developments in the areas of media convergence, corporate control and mass adoption of technologies?
Session 4: The Ethics of Future Sex:
Today, it is commonplace to hear people allude to their private consumption of online porn or their semi-private adventures trading sexy pictures with a lover via mobile phones. In this session, we talk about what happens when those private or semi-private activities become the stuff of the ‘super-public’-internet spaces where people find themselves surveyed, logged, discovered, and where evidence lingers in ways that transcend geography and history. We are particularly interested in discussing the ethical challenges that will be forthcoming as more young people find private and semi-private acts becoming fodder for their super-public identities, long after they may have ‘outgrown’ particular behaviours.
3. Account of Planned Outputs:
• Four day-long symposia, to include participants from the UK, EU and US. Each symposium will include papers given by participants, with a discussant for each. Our aim is to maximize debate and creative synthesis.
• A website that will archive all the papers and discussant responses, including podcasts of each, forums and social networking, and links.
• An edited collection, to include discussion of each paper, taken from the symposia and from the website
Principle Investigator Bios:
Dr. Stephen Maddison:
Stephen Maddison is Principal Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London, where his work engages questions of sexuality and culture. Stephen’s book Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Cutlure was published in London by Macmillan and in New York by St. Martin’s Press in 2000. His work on sexual materialism, pornography and biopolitics has been published in international journals such as New Formations and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and in the recent high profile collections Mainstreaming Sex (2009) and Porn.com (2010). He has given papers on pornography, big pharma and new media in conferences in Hong Kong, Brussels, Athens and Spain. He’s working on a monograph entitled uPorn: Sexual Materialism and Mythologies of Pornotopia.
Dr. Theresa Senft:
Theresa Senft, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East London, is interested in how the Internet has been changing our notions of the public, the private and the pornographic in contemporary society. For her most recent book, Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks, Terri ran a webcam out of her own home for a year and charted her experiences interacting with viewers and other camgirls in spaces like LiveJournal and Facebook. Other books by Terri include History of the Internet, 1843-Present (co-author) and a special issue of Women & Performance devoted to sexuality & cyberspace (co-editor.) Terri's work has been published in The New York Times, she has appeared on National Public Radio (U.S.), and in the documentary Webcam Girls. She recently has been invited to speak at Harvard University for the Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Project, as well as at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Forum on Relationships and the Internet.