Pornography and Seriality

Pornography and Seriality

Author: S. Schaschek

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-12-05

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1137359382

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Repetition and seriality are inherent in pornography and is constitutive for its functionality as a film genre, an industry, and an area of gender studies. By linking the styles of the genre to processes of serial production, consumption, and discussion, Schaschek questions the dominant assumptions about pornography and the stability of the genre.


Pleasure and Efficacy

Pleasure and Efficacy

Author: Grace Elisabeth Lavery

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-05-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0691243956

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A leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern period In Pleasure and Efficacy, Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms “trans pragmatism”—the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens. With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture—poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving—even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history.


Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes

Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes

Author: Lauren Rosewarne

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-19

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 3030158918

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Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes examines how sexiness, sexuality and revisited sexual politics are used to modernize film and TV remakes. This exploration provides insight into the ever-evolving—and ever-contested—role of sex in society, and scrutinizes the politics and economics underpinning modern media reproduction. More nudity, kinky sex, and queer content are increasingly deployed in remakes to attract, and to titillate, a new generation of viewers. While sex in this book refers to increased erotic content, this discussion also incorporates an investigation of other uses of sex and gender to help a remake appear woke and abreast of the zeitgeist including feminist reimaginings and ‘girl power’ make-overs, updated gender roles, female cast-swaps, queer retellings, and repositioned gazes. Though increased sex is often considered a sign of modernity, gratuitous displays of female nudity can sometimes be interpreted as sexist and anachronistic, in turn highlighting that progressiveness around sexuality in contemporary media is not a linear story. Also examined therefore, are remakes that reduce the sexual content to appear cutting-edge and cognizant of the demands of today’s audiences.


What Pornography Knows

What Pornography Knows

Author: Kathleen Lubey

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1503633128

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What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.


Sex Media

Sex Media

Author: Feona Attwood

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-12-08

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1509516913

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Media are central to our experiences and understandings of sex, whether in the form of familiar 'mainstream' genres, pornographies and other sex genres, or the new zones, interactions and technosexualities made possible by the internet and mobile devices. In this engaging new book, Feona Attwood argues that to understand the significance of sex media, we need to examine them in terms of their distinctive characteristics, relationships to art and culture, and changing place in society. Observing the role that media play in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality, this book considers the regulation of sex and sexual representation, issues around the 'sexualization of culture', and demonstrates how a critical focus on sex media can inform debates on sex education and sexual health, as well as illuminate the relation of sex to labour, leisure, intimacy, and bodies. Sex Media is an essential resource for students and scholars of media, culture, gender and sexuality.


New Views on Pornography

New Views on Pornography

Author: Lynn Comella

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 1440828067

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This book presents thought-provoking research and data about pornography that will prompt readers to reconsider their positions on a highly controversial and current issue. Why do people use pornography? Is porn addiction a fact or myth? What is revenge porn and is it illegal? Can pornography be more diverse? This interdisciplinary collection presents well-researched facts and up-to-date data that encourage informed discussion about controversial and relevant issues in contemporary society. Chapters address topics such as the history and cultural trends of pornography, labor and production practices in creating porn, the effects of technology, current issues in obscenity law, and myths and facts about the effects of pornography. New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law challenges assumptions about this popular yet controversial industry. Contributors include top scholars from media studies, sociology, psychology, gender studies, criminology, politics, and the law. This book provides a comprehensive overview of pornography that will help students, educators, and general readers deepen their understanding of this provocative subject.


The Color of Kink

The Color of Kink

Author: Ariane Cruz

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1479809284

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Winner of the MLA's 2016 Alan Bray Prize for Best Book in GLBTQ Studies How BDSM can be used as a metaphor for black female sexuality. The Color of Kink explores black women's representations and performances within American pornography and BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism) from the 1930s to the present, revealing the ways in which they illustrate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power for black women. Based on personal interviews conducted with pornography performers, producers, and professional dominatrices, visual and textual analysis, and extensive archival research, Ariane Cruz reveals BDSM and pornography as critical sites from which to rethink the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. She explores how violence becomes not just a vehicle of pleasure but also a mode of accessing and contesting power. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Cruz argues that BDSM is a productive space from which to consider the complexity and diverseness of black women's sexual practice and the mutability of black female sexuality. Illuminating the cross-pollination of black sexuality and BDSM, The Color of Kink makes a unique contribution to the growing scholarship on racialized sexuality.


Selling Sex on Screen

Selling Sex on Screen

Author: Karen A. Ritzenhoff

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-07-16

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1442253541

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Whether in mainstream or independent films, depictions of female prostitution and promiscuity are complicated by their intersection with male fantasies. In such films, issues of exploitation, fidelity, and profitability are often introduced into the narrative, where sex and power become commodities traded between men and women. In Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn, Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Catriona McAvoy have assembled essays that explore the representation of women and sexual transactions in film and television. Included in these discussions are the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Eyes Wide Shut, L.A. Confidential, Pandora’s Box, and Shame and such programs as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gigolos. By exploring the themes of class differences and female economic independence, the chapters go beyond textual analysis and consider politics, censorship, social trends, laws, race, and technology, as well as sexual and gender stereotypes. By exploring this complex subject, Selling Sex on Screen offers a spectrum of representations of desire and sexuality through the moving image. This volume will be of interest not only to students and scholars of film but also researchers in gender studies, women’s studies, criminology, sociology, film studies, adaptation studies, and popular culture.


Serial Forms

Serial Forms

Author: Clare Pettitt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-06-03

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0192566164

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Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. It is the first book in a series of three which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, moving from a focus on London to a global perspective. Serial Forms sets out the theoretical and historical basis for all three volumes. It suggests that, as a serial news culture and a stadial historicism developed together between 1815 and 1848, seriality became the dominant form of the nineteenth century. Through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, and shows, the past and the contemporary moment enter into public visibility together. Serial Forms argues that it is through seriality that the social is represented as increasingly politically urgent. The insistent rhythm of the serial reorganizes time, recalibrates and rescales the social, and will prepare the way for the 1848 revolutions which are the subject of the next book. By placing their work back into the messy print and performance culture from which it originally appeared, Serial Forms is able to produce new and exciting readings of familiar authors such as Scott, Byron, Dickens, and Gaskell. Rather than offering a rarefied intellectual history or chopping up the period into 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', Clare Pettitt tracks the development of communications technologies and their impact on the ways in which time, history and virtuality are imagined.


Law and TV Series

Law and TV Series

Author: Adam Andrzejewski

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-09-24

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9004387889

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The aim of this essay is to analyse TV series from the point of view of philosophical aesthetics. Aiming to show how philosophy may contribute to “seriality studies”, Andrzejewski and Salwa focus on seriality as a factor which defines the structure of TV series, their aesthetic properties, as well as their modes of reception. TV series have been studied within media theory and cultural studies for quite a long time, but they have been approached mainly in terms of their production, distribution, and consumption across various and changing social contexts. Following the agenda of philosophical aesthetics Andrzejewski and Salwa claim instead seriality implies a sort of normativity, i.e. that it is possible to indicate what features a television show has to have in order to be a serial show as well as the manner in which it should be watched if it is to be experienced as a serial work.