Paasonen
Biographic Data
| ID | 20797 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paasonen |
| FAMILY NAME | Paasonen |
| SIGNATURE | PAASONEN |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Turku |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6319-9155 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 254 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Elusive Porn: Learning From Alastonsuomi
This paper explores boundary work between pornography and other sexual media among the users of Alastonsuomi (“Naked Finland”), a Finnish-language image gallery dedicated to nudity and sexual self-expression. Building on 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews, it asks how, and in connection to what kinds of content the participants evoke the notion of porn in connection with sexual self-shooting. Within this, distinctions become drawn between dif…
Sex as/and/on Social Media
Sex is central to the internet. It exists everywhere online and yet is everywhere constrained, sanitized, normalized, and invisibilized. This panel will investigate the ways in which sex seeps, spills, and oozes across boundaries, both online and off, despite efforts to control and limit its impact beyond consumer capitalism. Author 1 examines online ‘gooning’ communities, oriented around prolonged masturbation sessions to multiple streams of por…
Les « sorcières sans honte » et les « putains de la tolérance »: La résistance féministe et les circuits affectifs de la haine en ligne
Cet article se penche sur les discours et les résistances intersectionnels et affectifs de la haine en ligne en explorant l’usage réapproprié des termes « sorcières sans honte » et « putains de la tolérance ». Ces termes sont utilisés de manière péjorative par les groupes anti-immigration pour cibler les femmes blanches qui soutiennent les droits des minorités. En réappropriant ces étiquettes, les femmes transforment la honte en fierté et en rési…
Shaping pleasure, shifting boundaries: A roundtable on the future of porn studies
The roundtable, ‘Shaping Pleasure, Shifting Boundaries: A Roundtable on the Future of Porn Studies,’ took place in June 2024 via Zoom and was recorded, transcribed and then edited to cut digressions and repetitions for publication. The roundtable was intended to examine the transformative trajectory of porn studies over the last decade. With a focus on technological innovations, ethical challenges, and the labour dynamics reshaping the field, the…
Dick pics and the shifty meanings of porn
Dick pics are ubiquitous objects in social media shared for the purposes of harassment, flirtation, suggestion, amusement, and titillation alike.Starting with the question of how dick pics are, or are not classifiable as porn, this article opens up lines of inquiry on the possibilities and limitations of porn as a genre marker, content classifier, and reference point in and for understanding sexual content distributed through networked means.In t…
Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump's deselection
On 7 November 2020, strange things were happening in the comments to @realDonaldTrump's tweet erroneously arguing that he had won the US presidential election, ‘BY A LOT’. Posting quote tweets and replies in Armenian in tandem with ‘cursed images’, memes, and creepypasta, users engaged in a spam-like trollish intervention, even as Twitter kept removing the said content in real time. Exploring this online incident through various analytical techni…
Intimate Infrastructures We Depend upon: Living with Data
This essay takes on Lauren Berlant’s mapping of intimacy as ‘connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living’ in order to address attachments, dependencies, and vulnerabilities in datafied contexts where digital platforms operate as infrastructures of everyday life. Building on interview material, we explore such intimate attachments as ones rife with friction and inconvenience, asking how vulnerabilities emerge and become …
Rethinking the Social in Social Media
This paper makes an argument for the value of including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media. Building on interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi and Libertine.Center) devoted to nudity, sex, and kink, it examines the implications of defining sex platforms as social media and the analytical avenues that the inclusion of sexual sites op…
Play! A Special Issue
Sexuality, as it relates to video games in particular, has received increasing attention over the past decade in studies of games and play, even as the notion of play remains relatively underexplored within sexuality studies. This special issue asks what shift is effected when sexual representation, networked forms of connecting and relating, and the experimentation with sexual likes are approached through the notion of play. Bringing together th…
Can We Break the Horizontal Lines of Whorism
No abstract available
Kinky, Leaky, Opaque: Sexual Intimacies and Data
No abstract available
Golden era, revisited
Local flavour, film fantasies and shifting selections: Finnish sex magazines, 1972–1973
The years 1972–1973 marked a period of transformation towards both hardcore print content and centralized production within the Finnish sex press. In a national context where the distribution and accessibility of screen porn was strictly regulated, periodicals remained the key platform for sexual content, and the leading ones were published by mainstream media houses also trading in women’s magazines and comics. Through examination of 15 sex maga…
Natalie Wood Day: Sexual violence and celebrity remembrance in the #MeToo Era
This article inquires after the ethics of posthumous outing and networked forms of remembrance connected to public figures accused of, or having admitted to, sexual violence and domestic abuse. Focusing on the obituary politics surrounding the 2020 deaths of Kirk Douglas, Kobe Bryant, and Sean Connery, it explores the forms that a feminist ethics of disclosure and memorialisation might take in the #MeToo era. Contra the popular tendency of otheri…
About Sex, Open-Mindedness, and Cinnamon Buns: Exploring Sexual Social Media
General purpose social media platforms-often incited by American legislation-increasingly exclude sex from acceptable forms of sociality in the abstract name of user safety. This article analyzes interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi, and Libertine.Center) to explore what follows from including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media an…
Vanilla normies and fellow pervs: Boundary work on sexual platforms
Building on a study of three Nordic and Baltic digital sexual platforms, this article analyzes the perceptions of enjoyable sex and sexual belonging among 60 people, who self-identify as sexually liberal. In dialogue with Gayle Rubin's formative work on sexual hierarchies and "good sex," we explore our participants' complex and often ambiguous sexual boundary work to delineate liberated sex. Independent of particular preferences (non-monogamy, BD…
Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity
Short-Lived Play: Trans-European Travels in Print Sex Edutainment
Media history is still written largely from national perspectives so that the role of import and export, translations and franchises is seldom foregrounded. On geographically and linguistically limited markets, imported materials have nevertheless been crucial parts of popular print culture. This paper explores the market of ‘sex edutainment’ magazines in 1970s Finland, zooming specifically in on Leikki (‘Play’, 1976), a sex magazine for women tr…
Locating sex: Regional geographies of sexual social media
Contributing to the field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this article explores the geosocial dimensions of digital sexual cultures by analyzing three regionally operating, linguistically specific social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Drawing on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily for group sex, a Swedish platform for kink and BDSM, and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression, we ask how these contrib…
Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media
A new approach to understanding the culture of ubiquitous connectivity, arguing that our dependence on networked infrastructure does not equal addiction. In this book, Susanna Paasonen takes on a dominant narrative repeated in journalistic and academic accounts for more than a decade: that we are addicted to devices, apps, and sites designed to distract us, that drive us to boredom, with detrimental effect on our capacities to focus, relate, reme…
Space, Place and Location in Sexual Social Media
Contributing to the swiftly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this panel explores the geosocial and geopolitical dimensions of digital sexual cultures by zooming in on the connections between sexual practices, geographic imaginaries, and locally embedded social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Building on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily by those interested in group sex (LC, est. 2018), a Sw…
Isso é um absurdo! Sobre o humor feminista nas redes sociais
Nas redes sociais, o humor feminista geralmente chama a atenção pela dinâmica com que aborda o gênero binário, do qual zomba, subverte e comenta. Com foco no Tumblr “Congrats, you have an all male panel”, no perfil “Man Who Has It All” no Twitter e do Facebook e no perfil do Twitter “Men Write Women”, este artigo observa como esses projetos reexecutam o poder assimétrico de gênero binário por meio da repetição e subversão, extraindo seu apelo da …
Patterns within Grids: A review of Tom Roach, Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. Suny Press, 2021
Shameless dicks: On male privilege, dick pic scandals, and public exposure
Academic debates on shame and the involuntary networked circulation of naked pictures have largely focused on instances of hacked accounts of female celebrities, on revenge porn, and interconnected forms of slut-shaming. Meanwhile, dick pics have been predominantly examined as vehicles of sexual harassment within heterosexual contexts. Taking a somewhat different approach, this article examines leaked or otherwise involuntarily exposed dick pics …
Sex in the shadows of celebrity
Shadowbanning is a light censorship technique used by social media platforms to limit the reach of potentially objectionable content without deleting it altogether. Such content does not go directly against community standards so that it, or the accounts in question, would be outright removed. Rather, these are borderline cases – often ones involving visual displays of nudity and sex. As the deplatforming of sex in social media has accelerated in…
Labors of love: Netporn, Web 2.0 and the meanings of amateurism
The blurred boundaries between producers and consumers and the increased centrality of user-generated content have been seen as characteristic of Web 2.0 and contemporary media culture at large. In the context of online pornography, this has been manifested in the popularity of amateur pornography and alt porn sites that encourage user interaction. Netporn criticism has recently formed an arena for thinking through such transformations. Aiming to…
Risk and Utopia
The utopian promise of porn is one of carnal intensity, sexual abundance, and pleasure. Building on Richard Dyer's discussion of the utopian aspects of entertainment, this article expands his conceptualization to contemporary pornography and the gay bareback subculture in particular. Structured as a dialogue between a gay bareback porn producer and a media studies scholar, it explores the sexual politics of barebacking, the notion of risk in gay …
Nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure: NSFW critique of Tumblr censorship
In November 2018, after being suspended from Apple’s App Store for hosting child pornography, Tumblr announced its decision to ban all NSFW (not safe/suitable for work) content with the aid of machine-learning classification. The decision to opt for strict terms of use governing nudity and sexual depiction was as fast as it was drastic, leading to the quick erasure of subcultural networks developed over a decade. This article maps out platform cr…
Shameless hags and tolerance whores: Feminist resistance and the affective circuits of online hate
This article explores shamelessness as a feminist tactic of resistance to online misogyny, hate and shaming within a Nordic context. In our Swedish examples, this involves affective reclaiming of the term “hagga” (hag), which has come to embody shameless femininity and feminist solidarity, as well as the Facebook event “Skamlös utsläckning” (shameless extinction), which extends the solidarity or the hag to a collective of non-men. Our Finnish exa…
Revisiting cyberfeminism
In the early 1990s, cyberfeminism surfaced as an arena for critical analyses of the inter-connections of gender and new technology - especially so in the context of the internet, which was then emerging as something of a "mass-medium". Scholars, activists and artists interested in media technology and its gendered underpinnings formed networks and groups. Consequently, they attached altering sets of meaning to the term cyberfeminism that ranged i…
As Networks Fail: Affect, Technology, and the Notion of the User
Network connections failing, logins not functioning, and servers not responding evoke both affective sharpness and disturbing itchiness that cannot be easily smoothed out. This article draws on forty-five student essays describing the sensations evoked by technological failure and explores them as vignettes into the affective dynamics evoked by constant connectivity to, and dependency on, network media. By asking how the essays articulate and con…
Healthy Sex and Pop Porn: Pornography, Feminism and the Finnish Context
Objections to pornography as the commercialization of the intimate, as sexist or as generally harmful are voiced internationally, yet their investments and dynamics cannot be reduced to those expressed in the US in the wake of the sex wars. Addressing Finnish traditions of porn regulation, consumption and research, as well as the Nordic discourses of 'good sex', this article argues for the centrality of local histories in making sense of pornogra…
Between meaning and mattering: On affect and porn studies
Affect has recently become something of an academic buzzword and a 'turn to affect' has been posed as an alternative to the investigations of meaning, representation and identity that have dominated media studies for the past decades. This article explores the implications, motivations and possibilities of such a turn within the framework of porn studies. It asks what may be gained from accounting for affect in studies of pornography, what limita…
Email from Nancy Nutsucker: Representation and gendered address in online pornography
This article addresses the representational conventions and gendered forms of address in online pornography through analysis of 366 unsolicited email (spam) messages advertising porn websites. Combining content description with close reading, it considers the terminology, imagery, narrative elements and points of view employed in advertising commercial heterosexual pornography. The spam advertisements create excessive displays of gender differenc…
Strange bedfellows: Pornography, affect and feminist reading
Feminist debates on pornography have relied on articulations of affect, from anti-pornography rhetoric of grief, anger and disgust to anti-anti-pornography claims to enjoyment and pleasure. The complexity of reading, the interpenetration of affect and analysis, experience and interpretation tend to become effaced in arguments both for and against pornography. This article argues for the necessity of moving beyond the affective range of disgust ve…
Glimmers of the forbidden fruit: Reminiscing pornography, conceptualizing the archive
The article explores theoretical and methodological understandings of the archive, drawing on a research project that investigates reminiscences of using and encountering pornography in Finland. The contributors’ reminiscences of what they have done with porn can be seen as forming an archive of feelings, which sheds light on attachments and practices often considered ephemeral and hidden, and focuses attention on the queer significance of those …
The Dick Pic: Harassment, Curation, and Desire
The combined rise of digital photography and social media has expanded what might be considered photo worthy. Among the pouting selfies and food stuffs of the day exists the ubiquitous dick pic. The mainstream media generally focuses on dick pics of the unsolicited kind, which, negatively positioned, are commonly associated with heterosexual harassment. Considering the ubiquity of dick pics across apps and platforms, research on the topic neverth…
Locating sex: Regional geographies of sexual social media
Contributing to the field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this article explores the geosocial dimensions of digital sexual cultures by analyzing three regionally operating, linguistically specific social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Drawing on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily for group sex, a Swedish platform for kink and BDSM, and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression, we ask how these contrib…
Littles: Affects and Aesthetics in Sexual Age-Play
This article explores the experiences and practices of self-identifying female sexual age-players. Based on interviews and observation of the age players’ blogged content, the article suggests that, rather than being fixed in one single position, our study participants move between a range of roles varying across their different scenes. In examining accounts of sexual play, we argue that the notion of play characterizes not only their specific ro…
Dick pics and the shifty meanings of porn
Dick pics are ubiquitous objects in social media shared for the purposes of harassment, flirtation, suggestion, amusement, and titillation alike.Starting with the question of how dick pics are, or are not classifiable as porn, this article opens up lines of inquiry on the possibilities and limitations of porn as a genre marker, content classifier, and reference point in and for understanding sexual content distributed through networked means.In t…
Sex in the shadows of celebrity
Shadowbanning is a light censorship technique used by social media platforms to limit the reach of potentially objectionable content without deleting it altogether. Such content does not go directly against community standards so that it, or the accounts in question, would be outright removed. Rather, these are borderline cases – often ones involving visual displays of nudity and sex. As the deplatforming of sex in social media has accelerated in…
We watch porn for the fucking, not for romantic tiptoeing’: Extremity, fantasy and women’s porn use
This article examines the appeal of extreme imageries through a 2017 journalistic survey of 2438 participants on Finnish women’s approaches to, opinions on and preferences in porn, with a specific emphasis on responses addressing preferences deemed extreme. The respondents regularly positioned these pornographic fantasies in relation to the assumed tastes of other women while also addressing the complex and ambivalent roles that porn played in th…
About Sex, Open-Mindedness, and Cinnamon Buns: Exploring Sexual Social Media
General purpose social media platforms-often incited by American legislation-increasingly exclude sex from acceptable forms of sociality in the abstract name of user safety. This article analyzes interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi, and Libertine.Center) to explore what follows from including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media an…
Vanilla normies and fellow pervs: Boundary work on sexual platforms
Building on a study of three Nordic and Baltic digital sexual platforms, this article analyzes the perceptions of enjoyable sex and sexual belonging among 60 people, who self-identify as sexually liberal. In dialogue with Gayle Rubin's formative work on sexual hierarchies and "good sex," we explore our participants' complex and often ambiguous sexual boundary work to delineate liberated sex. Independent of particular preferences (non-monogamy, BD…
Short-Lived Play: Trans-European Travels in Print Sex Edutainment
Media history is still written largely from national perspectives so that the role of import and export, translations and franchises is seldom foregrounded. On geographically and linguistically limited markets, imported materials have nevertheless been crucial parts of popular print culture. This paper explores the market of ‘sex edutainment’ magazines in 1970s Finland, zooming specifically in on Leikki (‘Play’, 1976), a sex magazine for women tr…
Inappropriate Laughter: Affective Homophily and the Unlikely Comedy of #MeToo
This article investigates the affective and ambiguous dynamics of feminist humor as an unexpected strategy of resistance in connection with #MeToo, asking what laughter may do to the sharpness of negative affect of shame and anger driving the movement. Our inquiry comes in three vignettes. First, we deploy Nanette-Hannah Gadsby's 2018 Netflix success heralded as the comedy of the #MeToo era-arguing that the uniform viral warmth surrounding the sh…
Grains of Resonance: Affect, Pornography and Visual Sensation
In studies of pornography to date, feminist theorisations of looking have largely focused on issues of power, control and the gaze. Much, however, remains to be said of being impressed by images and sounds beyond conceptualisations of the gaze. This article investigates the possibilities of resonance as an analytical concept in and for addressing affective intensities in encounters with pornography and, with some reservations, with visual culture…
I feel the irritation and frustration all over the body’ Affective ambiguities in networked parenting culture
This article investigates the affective power of social media by analysing everyday encounters with parenting content among mothers. Drawing on data composed of diaries of social media use and follow-up interviews with six women, we ask how our study participants make sense of their experiences of parenting content and the affective intensities connected to it. Despite the negativity involved in reading and participating in parenting discussions,…
Social Networking Sites' Gag Order: Commercial Content Moderation's Adverse Implications for Fundamental Sexual Rights and Wellbeing
This article critically investigates the reasoning behind social media content policies and opaque data politics operations regarding sexual visual social media practices and sexual talk, asking what is at stake when social media giants govern sexual sociability on an international scale. Focusing on Facebook, in particular, this article proposes an alternative perspective for handling various expressions of sexuality in social media platforms by…
Elusive intensities, fleeting seductions, affective voices
As a genre, pornography aims to move its readers and viewers in corporeal ways. Scholarly work examining its conventions and codes may emulate some of this carnal address or, alternatively, firmly hold the materials studied at arm’s length. With different strategies of academic writing come different proximities and distances that set the stage for certain forms of reader engagement. Zooming in on proximities where the intensities of text set the…
Email from Nancy Nutsucker: Representation and gendered address in online pornography
This article addresses the representational conventions and gendered forms of address in online pornography through analysis of 366 unsolicited email (spam) messages advertising porn websites. Combining content description with close reading, it considers the terminology, imagery, narrative elements and points of view employed in advertising commercial heterosexual pornography. The spam advertisements create excessive displays of gender differenc…
Strange bedfellows: Pornography, affect and feminist reading
Feminist debates on pornography have relied on articulations of affect, from anti-pornography rhetoric of grief, anger and disgust to anti-anti-pornography claims to enjoyment and pleasure. The complexity of reading, the interpenetration of affect and analysis, experience and interpretation tend to become effaced in arguments both for and against pornography. This article argues for the necessity of moving beyond the affective range of disgust ve…
Healthy Sex and Pop Porn: Pornography, Feminism and the Finnish Context
Objections to pornography as the commercialization of the intimate, as sexist or as generally harmful are voiced internationally, yet their investments and dynamics cannot be reduced to those expressed in the US in the wake of the sex wars. Addressing Finnish traditions of porn regulation, consumption and research, as well as the Nordic discourses of 'good sex', this article argues for the centrality of local histories in making sense of pornogra…
Labors of love: Netporn, Web 2.0 and the meanings of amateurism
The blurred boundaries between producers and consumers and the increased centrality of user-generated content have been seen as characteristic of Web 2.0 and contemporary media culture at large. In the context of online pornography, this has been manifested in the popularity of amateur pornography and alt porn sites that encourage user interaction. Netporn criticism has recently formed an arena for thinking through such transformations. Aiming to…
Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography
An exploration of the modalities, affective intensities, and disturbing qualities of online pornography. Digital production tools and online networks have dramatically increased the general visibility, accessibility, and diversity of pornography. Porn can be accessed for free, anonymously, and in a seemingly endless range of niches, styles, and formats. In Carnal Resonance, Susanna Paasonen moves beyond the usual debates over the legal, political…
Engaging with the Bailey Review: Blogging, academia and authenticity
This article reproduces and discusses a series of blog posts posted by academics in anticipation of the report on commercialisation, sexualisation and childhood, ‘Letting Children Be Children’ by Reg Bailey for the UK Department of Education in June 2011. The article discusses the difficulty of ‘translating’ scholarly work for the public in a context where ‘impact’ is increasingly important and the challenges that academics face in finding new wa…
Revisiting cyberfeminism
In the early 1990s, cyberfeminism surfaced as an arena for critical analyses of the inter-connections of gender and new technology - especially so in the context of the internet, which was then emerging as something of a "mass-medium". Scholars, activists and artists interested in media technology and its gendered underpinnings formed networks and groups. Consequently, they attached altering sets of meaning to the term cyberfeminism that ranged i…
Grains of Resonance: Affect, Pornography and Visual Sensation
In studies of pornography to date, feminist theorisations of looking have largely focused on issues of power, control and the gaze. Much, however, remains to be said of being impressed by images and sounds beyond conceptualisations of the gaze. This article investigates the possibilities of resonance as an analytical concept in and for addressing affective intensities in encounters with pornography and, with some reservations, with visual culture…
Social media: Implications for Everyday Life, Politics and Human Agency
With the current saturation of digital devices in contemporary society, the boundaries between humans and machines have become increasingly blurred. This digitalization of everyday life both obscures and reminds us of the fact that identity, agency and power cannot be attributed to the individual or the machine alone: rather, they are the outcome of interactions and negotiations within a network of actors. Social media, such as Facebook, blogs, T…
Pornographies: An Interview With Susanna Paasonen1
Your book Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography proposes a move beyond the binary affect x representation. You say that "critique "after representation" is difficult to tell apart from studies of representation" (p. 10). Do you think that this rejection of the opposition between representation and affect suggests a methodology for porn studies in general? Or to put it more broadly, how can we best "read" porn
Between meaning and mattering: On affect and porn studies
Affect has recently become something of an academic buzzword and a 'turn to affect' has been posed as an alternative to the investigations of meaning, representation and identity that have dominated media studies for the past decades. This article explores the implications, motivations and possibilities of such a turn within the framework of porn studies. It asks what may be gained from accounting for affect in studies of pornography, what limita…
As Networks Fail: Affect, Technology, and the Notion of the User
Network connections failing, logins not functioning, and servers not responding evoke both affective sharpness and disturbing itchiness that cannot be easily smoothed out. This article draws on forty-five student essays describing the sensations evoked by technological failure and explores them as vignettes into the affective dynamics evoked by constant connectivity to, and dependency on, network media. By asking how the essays articulate and con…
Risk and Utopia
The utopian promise of porn is one of carnal intensity, sexual abundance, and pleasure. Building on Richard Dyer's discussion of the utopian aspects of entertainment, this article expands his conceptualization to contemporary pornography and the gay bareback subculture in particular. Structured as a dialogue between a gay bareback porn producer and a media studies scholar, it explores the sexual politics of barebacking, the notion of risk in gay …
Online Pornography
Introduction: Networks of Transmission: Intensity, Sensation, Value
‘Pervy role-play and such’: Girls' experiences of sexual messaging online
Sexting is one of the recurring causes of concern in public discussion of young people and network media. This paper builds on findings from a survey with 1269 Finnish female respondents aged 11–18 conducted using a popular online community for girls on their experiences of and views on online messages concerning sex and sexuality. Sixty-five per cent of respondents had received messages related to sex from either adults or minors while 20% had a…
‘We hid porn magazines in the nearby woods’: Memory-work and pornography consumption in Finland
This article presents the key findings of a Finnish memory-work project conducted in 2012 on consumer experiences and associations related to pornography. The memory-work material points to a high degree of reflexivity in definitions of pornographic preference as well as to drastic shifts in the ubiquity of pornography from the pre-1990s ‘age of scarcity’ to the current ‘age of plenty.’ At the same time, contributors' narratives of childhood expe…
Glimmers of the forbidden fruit: Reminiscing pornography, conceptualizing the archive
The article explores theoretical and methodological understandings of the archive, drawing on a research project that investigates reminiscences of using and encountering pornography in Finland. The contributors’ reminiscences of what they have done with porn can be seen as forming an archive of feelings, which sheds light on attachments and practices often considered ephemeral and hidden, and focuses attention on the queer significance of those …
Fickle focus: Distraction, affect and the production of value in social media
The uses of social media can be seen as driven by a search for affective intensity translating as moments of paying attention, no matter how brief these instances may be. In the framework of attention economy, attention has been discussed as a valuable commodity whereas distraction, involving both pleasurable entertainment and dissatisfactory disorientation, has been associated with cognitive overload and the erosive lack of focus. By discussing …
Visceral pedagogies: Pornography, affect, and safety in the university classroom
Debates on the sexualization of culture, including the increased availability and volume of online pornography, the assumed social effects of porn, its public visibility and circulation, have been
Infrastructures of intimacy
This chapter examines the role that network connectivity plays as an infrastructure of intimacy. It focuses on a body of 70 essays written by Finnish undergraduate media studies students between 2013 and 2015, describing the sensations evoked by the failure or breakdown of mobile phones, computers and network connections. The chapter shows that the intimate connections and disconnections the essays address nevertheless resonate across generations…
Time to celebrate the most disgusting video online
It is 10 years since 2Girls1Cup first went viral. This forum contextualizes the video within the attention economy of social media to examine whether this particular one-minute video, by now markedly stale in its novelty appeal, is relevant in terms of online pornography, social media or the field of porn studies
Bad education? Childhood recollections of pornography, sexual exploration, learning and agency in Finland
This article draws on a memory-work project on the childhood experiences and memories of pornography in Finland to argue that the autobiographical younger self used in these reminiscences is a creature distinct from the cultural figure of a child at risk, and that the forms of learning connected to pornography are more diverse and complex than those limited to sexual acts alone. The notion of an asexual child susceptible to media effects remains …
Malleable identities, leaky taxonomies: The matter of sexual flexibility
Many splendored things: Sexuality, playfulness and play
This article makes a theoretical argument for the productivity of the notions of playfulness and play in feminist and queer studies of sexuality. Defined as a mode of sensory openness and drive towards improvisation, playfulness can be seen as central to a range of sexual activities from fumbling, random motions to elaborate, rehearsed scenarios. Play in the realm of sexuality involves experimentations with what bodies can feel and do. As pleasur…
Sociology (51 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (48 works) · Psychology (42 works) · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology (36 works) · Art (29 works) · Political science (27 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Media studies (24 works) · Aesthetics (23 works)