Susanna Paasonen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674620 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susanna Paasonen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susanna |
| FAMILY NAME | Paasonen |
| SIGNATURE | PAASONEN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Media Studies, University of Turku, Turku, Finland |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
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…
Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity
Explores the cinematic appeal and star persona of Yul Brynner Examines Brynner’s star image and performance style over his whole career through rich archival sources Explores the racial casting policies of Hollywood in transition Analyses the role of physical presence and bodily gesture in film performance Yul Brynner’s star image was built on cosmopolitan flair, shifting tales of origin, baldness, as well as film roles as foreign rulers, freedom…
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…
Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity
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 …
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…
Gender, Identity, and (the Limits of) Play on the Internet
Intimacies and Digital Media Infrastructures
The breadth of what it means to study intimacies in the context of media has changed significantly in recent years because of current technological, social, and cultural changes. The digital mediation of intimacy - the changing attitudes, experiences, and practices of intimacy performed through digital media - demands that scholars look beyond well-established frameworks for studying intimacy and media, expanding their methodological and theoreti…
Platformed Sex Lives
This panel builds on a recently funded research project on the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden, and Finland (2020-2022) investigating three local online platforms devoted to communities around nudity and kink: iha.ee, darkside.se, and alastonsuomi.com. Our case studies are in a sense “edge cases” which partly move within sexual margins, making space for alternate understandings of platform sociability. Contra to the curr…
Puritanisme sexuel et capitalisme numérique
Trois chercheur-es spécialistes des médias numériques signent ensemble aux presses du Massachusetts Institute of Technology un ouvrage consacré à la régulation de la sexualité sur les réseaux socio-numériques : NSFW. Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media [Paasonen, Jarrett et Light, 2019]. Susanna Paasonen, professeure à l’Université de Turku (Finlande), est connue pour son travail sur les pornographies numériques, dont elle explore les dimensions…
Mediating Presents
This introduction to a special issue of Media Theory on Mediating Presents contextualises the thematic focus and outlines the central arguments of the contributions. It suggests it is both productive and necessary to think together ‘the present’ and mediation to understand how various interlocking aspects of socio-cultural life are currently produced, organised and arranged, embodied and affectively experienced. The contributions to the special i…
Distracted Present, Golden Past
According to diverse recurrent cultural diagnoses, networked media is atrophying our affective, cognitive and somatic capacities through its distracting, rapid speeds. Echoing critiques of modernity and media technology voiced since the mid-nineteenth century, these accounts are broadly premised on loss in arguing that a general disenchantment is hollowing out our sociability and personal experiences alike. Building on Jane Bennett’s critique of …
Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism
Gay Porn, Politics and Lifestyle in 1980s Finland: The Short Life of Mosse Magazine
Although the gay press has been seen as central to the formation of the gay movement, entertainment magazines focusing on sex and consumer lifestyle have until recently received little attention in studies on gay history. This article focuses on Mosse, the short-lived gay porn magazine published by mainstream publishing company Lehtimiehet in Finland between 1983 and 1985. In addition to nude photos and porn stories, Mosse featured articles on ga…
Striking poses: The fantastic figure of Yul Brynner
Journal Article Striking poses: the fantastic figure of Yul Brynner Get access Susanna Paasonen Susanna Paasonen Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 60, Issue 2, Summer 2019, Pages 242–260, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjz007 Published: 18 June 2019
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…
Affective Body Politics of Social Media
In this introduction to special issue, we elaborate our use of the concept affective body politics in the context of social media. Bringing together two theoretical concepts, the notion of 'body politics' and that of 'affective politics,' we direct attention to the carnal ways in which bodies experience practices of governance, how they affect and are affected by other bodies. The introduction maps out some of the interdisciplinary voices that st…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
Distracted Present, Golden Past
According to diverse recurrent cultural diagnoses, networked media is atrophying our affective, cognitive and somatic capacities through its distracting, rapid speeds. Echoing critiques of modernity and media technology voiced since the mid-nineteenth century, these accounts are broadly premised on loss in arguing that a general disenchantment is hollowing out our sociability and personal experiences alike. Building on Jane Bennett’s critique of …
Gay Porn, Politics and Lifestyle in 1980s Finland: The Short Life of Mosse Magazine
Although the gay press has been seen as central to the formation of the gay movement, entertainment magazines focusing on sex and consumer lifestyle have until recently received little attention in studies on gay history. This article focuses on Mosse, the short-lived gay porn magazine published by mainstream publishing company Lehtimiehet in Finland between 1983 and 1985. In addition to nude photos and porn stories, Mosse featured articles on ga…
Striking poses: The fantastic figure of Yul Brynner
Journal Article Striking poses: the fantastic figure of Yul Brynner Get access Susanna Paasonen Susanna Paasonen Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 60, Issue 2, Summer 2019, Pages 242–260, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjz007 Published: 18 June 2019
Affective Body Politics of Social Media
In this introduction to special issue, we elaborate our use of the concept affective body politics in the context of social media. Bringing together two theoretical concepts, the notion of 'body politics' and that of 'affective politics,' we direct attention to the carnal ways in which bodies experience practices of governance, how they affect and are affected by other bodies. The introduction maps out some of the interdisciplinary voices that st…
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…
Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences
"'Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences' explores the place and function of affect in feminist knowledge production, investigating what it means to work with and through affect, as well as the kinds of ethical and methodological challenges that this involves."--Publisher's information
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…
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…
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
Networked Affect
Investigations of affective experiences that emerge in online settings that range from Facebook discussion forums to “smart” classrooms. Our encounters with websites, avatars, videos, mobile apps, discussion forums, GIFs, and nonhuman intelligent agents allow us to experience sensations of connectivity, interest, desire, and attachment—as well as detachment, boredom, fear, and shame. Some affective online encounters may arouse complex, contradict…
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…
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 …
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…
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 …
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…
Gay Porn, Politics and Lifestyle in 1980s Finland: The Short Life of Mosse Magazine
Although the gay press has been seen as central to the formation of the gay movement, entertainment magazines focusing on sex and consumer lifestyle have until recently received little attention in studies on gay history. This article focuses on Mosse, the short-lived gay porn magazine published by mainstream publishing company Lehtimiehet in Finland between 1983 and 1985. In addition to nude photos and porn stories, Mosse featured articles on ga…
Striking poses: The fantastic figure of Yul Brynner
Journal Article Striking poses: the fantastic figure of Yul Brynner Get access Susanna Paasonen Susanna Paasonen Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 60, Issue 2, Summer 2019, Pages 242–260, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjz007 Published: 18 June 2019
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…
Affective Body Politics of Social Media
In this introduction to special issue, we elaborate our use of the concept affective body politics in the context of social media. Bringing together two theoretical concepts, the notion of 'body politics' and that of 'affective politics,' we direct attention to the carnal ways in which bodies experience practices of governance, how they affect and are affected by other bodies. The introduction maps out some of the interdisciplinary voices that st…
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…
Gender, Identity, and (the Limits of) Play on the Internet
Intimacies and Digital Media Infrastructures
The breadth of what it means to study intimacies in the context of media has changed significantly in recent years because of current technological, social, and cultural changes. The digital mediation of intimacy - the changing attitudes, experiences, and practices of intimacy performed through digital media - demands that scholars look beyond well-established frameworks for studying intimacy and media, expanding their methodological and theoreti…
Platformed Sex Lives
This panel builds on a recently funded research project on the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden, and Finland (2020-2022) investigating three local online platforms devoted to communities around nudity and kink: iha.ee, darkside.se, and alastonsuomi.com. Our case studies are in a sense “edge cases” which partly move within sexual margins, making space for alternate understandings of platform sociability. Contra to the curr…
Puritanisme sexuel et capitalisme numérique
Trois chercheur-es spécialistes des médias numériques signent ensemble aux presses du Massachusetts Institute of Technology un ouvrage consacré à la régulation de la sexualité sur les réseaux socio-numériques : NSFW. Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media [Paasonen, Jarrett et Light, 2019]. Susanna Paasonen, professeure à l’Université de Turku (Finlande), est connue pour son travail sur les pornographies numériques, dont elle explore les dimensions…
Sociology (30 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (24 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Art (15 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Media studies (13 works)