My research centres on sexual media and representations. I am interested in the textual formations of pornography and how those play out across different technologies; in how people access and engage with pornographic materials and with other forms of sexualized products. I’m also fascinated by seemingly constant demands for increasing regulation and censorship.
I have written about the problems of attempts to legislate against pornography and have been active in opposing measures which seek to criminalise the imagination. Alongside this work, I have explored porn-star performances, the meanings of masochism in sexual storytelling, the idea of ‘authenticity’ in pornography, and how audiences speak about the sexual content they like.
Recent publications:
Watching Game of Thrones - an examination of audience responses to the HBO series co-authored with Martin Barker and Feona Attwood and published by Manchester University Press.
Objectification On the Difference between Sex and Sexism (Gender Insights) was published by Routledge in August 2020. Authored with Susanna Paasonen, Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, and John Mercer, the book traces the history of the emergence and use of objectification in a variety of contexts such as debates about sexualization and the male gaze, and its mobilization in connection with the body, selfies and pornography, as well as in feminist activism.
I am a founding co-editor of the Routledge journal Porn Studies, a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Gender Studies, of Sexualities, of Cine-Excess and of Participations.
Between 2019 and 2022, I was co-investigator with Professor John Mercer, Birmingham City University (PI) on the Masculinity, Sex and Popular Culture research network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The network connected academics, early career researchers and students as well as experts and commentators from outside of academia. Together we explored the issues and debates around contemporary masculinity, sex and sexuality in order to set an ambitious agenda for subsequent research. You can see what the network achieved at our website https://mascnet.org/
Philosophy DPhil July 01 2002
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