The new issue of MAST is out, edited by Tony D. Sampson & Jernej Markelj: it also includes an interview that Jernej and Claudio Celis Bueno did with me, titled “Ambiguity and Affect in Digital Culture“. This took quite a bit of thinking and the kind of retrospection I seldom do: quite the pleasure!
Yul is out, out in the world!
My pandemic refuge project, Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity, is very freshly out. A Yul project was something I toyed with for years before eventually penning an article (out in Screen in 2019); without COVID-19 lockdowns, it is unlikely that I could have found the time for the kind of archival work that this book took. Trust me on this: both immersive and extensive.
It has been a pleasure to work with Edinburgh University Press and the editors of the International Film Stars series on this. Having opened the book on many a page by now, I have not noticed a typo yet. A personal first. A more affordable paperback version should be out in 2024; the 30% discount code NEW30 for the HB one may or may not still work.
Filed under academic pleasures, media history
kinky, leaky, opaque
A column that was very much fun to write: Kinky, Leaky, Opaque: Sexual Intimacies and Data for ACM’s Interactions with the marvelous Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, and with an illustration from Martyne Miller. Starts with an anecdote of me showing Jaz a visual example of sneaker fucking over dinner (classy) and thinks through technology, sex and domestic space.
Filed under academic pleasures, data culture, sexuality
Finnish print smut
Our short piece with Laura Saarenmaa, titled “Local Flavour, Film Fantasies and Shifting Selections: Finnish Sex Magazines, 1972–1973”, is freshly out with Porn Studies. This is the link to free e-prints and this the permanent/actual one. It’s part of a forthcoming special Forum revisiting the so-called “golden era” of porn through non-US examples that we’ve been co-editing, and here’s the abstract:
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 magazine titles published in Finland during this period, this article inquires after the visibility and invisibility of porn films within them, contextualizes the print market in terms of publishing economy and governmental regulation and attends to the methodological challenges involved in porn historiography.
Filed under academic pleasures, media history, porn studies
Yul on preorder
Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity is out end of March, and available now on pre-order (30% discount with the code NEW30).
304 pages, 35 b&w images, and an anal amount of historical print sources!
Yul Brynner’s star image was built on cosmopolitan flair, shifting tales of origin, baldness, as well as film roles as foreign rulers, freedom fighters, army officials, gunslingers and secret agents of ever-shifting ethnicities. Whether Cossacks, marauding pirate captains or cross-dressing torch singers, Brynner’s characters were invariably stand-outs.
This book explores his exotic and masculine star image and its transformations from lavish Orientalist Hollywood spectacles of the 1950s to 1960s European co-productions, 1970s action films and scifi. Extensively researched, it covers the actor’s entire film catalogue, his rumoured yet unrealised projects, television work and stage appearances, as well as their international media reception. Thematically organised, the book inquires after racial casting politics, the construction of sex symbols, Brynner’s humanitarian work and the recurring poses and gestures that characterised his performance style.
Filed under academic pleasures, media history, sexuality
about sex, open-mindedness, and cinnamon buns
Our article with Jenny Sundén, Katrin Tiidenberg and Maria Vihlman, titled “About Sex, Open-Mindedness, and Cinnamon Buns: Exploring Sexual Social Media“, is just out (on OA) with Social Media + Society. It’s the second joint article coming out from our collaborative project on local sexual platforms, with more to come.
And here’s the abstract: 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 and, by extension, in including sex in definitions of “the social” itself. We found that instead of context collapse, the users and developers of the studied sites operate with what we call context promiscuity, blending boundaries, but maintaining their structural integrity. This allows for a particular silosociality to emerge based on experiences of safety, risk, and consent. Building on this, we propose thinking of sexual expression as something not contained by, but put in motion across platforms, user cultures, content policies, and sexual norms. Rather than framing sexual social media exchanges in terms of their perceived risks and harms, we would do well to also inquire after the risks and harms involved in ousting sex from networked forms of sociality. Deplatforming of sex truncates our ways of understanding what interests, forces, and attachments drive our sociality. Yet, when analyzing social media as if the socio-sexual matters, platforms designed to support sexual displays and connections become vital nodal points in social media ecologies.
Natalie Wood Day
Co-authored with Tanya Horeck, our article “Natalie Wood Day”: Sexual Violence and Celebrity Remembrance in the #MeToo Era is freshly out with Celebrity Studies. Not on open access, alas, but here’s a manuscript version at least. The abstract reads like this:
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 othering sex offenders as exceptional ‘monsters,’ #MeToo’s affective and discursive force lies in framing sexual violence as unextraordinary, banal, and ubiquitous. In what follows, we make a case for forms of remembrance acknowledging that a person can simultaneously be an accomplished professional, a loving parent, and a rapist, so that one aspect of one’s being and actions need not require silence over others. Reflecting on what it means to remember public figures in their totality, we flag the importance of attending to the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts that have contributed to the prominence, and subsequent remembrance of individuals. We argue that such a contextual move makes it possible to see the individual public figure within the social networks and hierarchies that have allowed, or disallowed, patterns of behaviour.
locating sex
Locating Sex: Regional Geographies of Sexual Social Media, the first article on our study of Swedish, Estonian and Finnish sexual platforms with Jenny Sundén, Katrin Tiidenberg and Maria Vihlman, is out on OA with Gender, Place & Culture. This is a collab between the Rethinking Sexuality project and the IDA consortium, with more to follow. Here’s the abstract:
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 contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. First, we focus on the platforms as tools for digital wayfinding and hooking up. Second, we consider how the platforms help to reimagine and sexualize physical locations as ones of play, and how this transforms the ways of inhabiting such spaces. Third, we analyze how the platforms operate as sexual places in their own right, designed to accommodate certain forms of display, relating, and belonging. We argue, in particular, that these platforms shape how users imagine and engage with location by negotiating notions of proximity and distance, risk and safety, making space for sexual sociability. We approach geographies of sexuality both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants’ sense of comfort and investment in local spaces of sexual play. As sexual content is increasingly pushed out of large, U.S.-owned social media platforms, we argue that locally operating platforms provide a critical counterpoint, allowing for a vital re-platforming of sex on a regional level.
Filed under data culture, feminist media studies, internet research, NSFW, sexuality
Yul Brynner
This book is way more than a pet project and it ended up being a deep, deep dive not just into the actor’s film work but also to archival press sources. Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity has a due date for March in Edinburgh University Press’s International Film Stars Series. I’m tickled pink and it’s been a joy working with the publisher. Here’s the blurb:
Yul Brynner’s star image was built on cosmopolitan flair, shifting tales of origin, baldness, as well as film roles as foreign rulers, freedom fighters, army officials, gunslingers and secret agents of ever-shifting ethnicities. Whether Cossacks, marauding pirate captains or cross-dressing torch singers, Brynner’s characters were invariably stand-outs.
This book explores his exotic and masculine star image and its transformations from lavish Orientalist Hollywood spectacles of the 1950s to 1960s European co-productions, 1970s action films and scifi. Extensively researched, it covers the actor’s entire film catalogue, his rumoured yet unrealised projects, television work and stage appearances, as well as their international media reception. Thematically organised, the book inquires after racial casting politics, the construction of sex symbols, Brynner’s humanitarian work and the recurring poses and gestures that characterised his performance style.
Filed under academic pleasures, media history
experimentations in pandemic boredom
A new book edited by Britta Timm Knudsen, Mads Krogh and Carsten Stage, titled Methodologies of Affective Experimentation, came out in the summer with Palgrave. Full of insight into things to do with affect in cultural inquiry, it also includes my chapter, “Experimentations in Pandemic Boredom”. It asks how diagnoses of pandemic boredom, and cures thereof, during the COVID-19 lockdowns can help us to rethink broad theoretical takes on boredom identifying it as a modern (Zeitgeist?) phenomenon connected to an abundance of stimuli, or as a state of flatness and disinterest specifically brought forth by networked/social media.
Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, cultural studies, data culture
Susanna Paasonen 