About

I’m professor of Media Studies at University of Turku. My work revolves around internet research, affect inquiry and sexuality studies while also broadening to media history,  materiality and pornography.

I’m currently the PI of the consortium, Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (2019-2025) funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Research Council of Finland exploring different vulnerabilities connected to data culture, the shapes that intimacies take in networked exchanges, and the avenues that are available for building a more just and open data economy.

The past few years, I’ve been working on perhaps too many book-length projects: Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press, 2018) explores sex and sexuality through the notions of play and playfulness. NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light (MIT Press 2019) focuses on the the zoning out of sex from social media, and was the winner of the 2020 Association of Internet Researchers Nancy Baym Book Award. Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer, and Clarissa Smith (Routledge, 2020) is an accessible book exploring the uses, meanings and limitations of the notion of objectification in the humanities and social sciences, and written with students in mind.

Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media with Jenny Sundén (MITP, 2020) examines feminist forms of laughter through the lens of the absurd in particular, and was a joy to write. In the making for a decade, my Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP, 2021), counters broad Zeitgeist narratives connected to contemporary media. The project continued partly in Technopharmacology with Joshua Neves, Aleena Chia and Ravi Sundaram (University of Minnesota / OA with Meson, 2022) where my section examines diagnoses of online porn addiction. And my anally researched pandemic film historical inquiry, Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity, came out from Edinburgh University Press in 2023.

Our coauthored book with Jenny Sundén and Katrin Tiidenberg, titled Naked Affinities, Kinky Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter, is under contract with MITP. I’m also writing a more experimental book on cursed images, affect, and tweeting with Elena Pilipets for the Institute of Network Cultures, and developing a monograph together with Mari Pajala and Laura Saarenmaa on the first out gay male celebrity in Finland, Monsieur Mosse.

I’m an advisory/editorial board member of the journals Sexualities, New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Porn Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Postmodern Culture, Dialogues on Digital Society, Capacious, MedieKultur, Monstrum, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning and Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. I love brutalist architecture, kickboxing, good food and wine, and can be reached at <suspaa(at)utu.fi>