Published for the first time in 1953, Playboy was not only the first pornographic popular magazine in America; it also came to embody an entirely new lifestyle through the construction of a series of utopian multimedia spaces — from the Playboy Mansion and fictional Playboy’s Penthouse of 1959 to the Playboy Clubs and hotels appearing around the world in the 1960s. Simultaneously, the invention of the contraceptive pill provided access to a biochemical technique that separated (hetero) sexuality and reproduction. Addressing these concurrent cultural shifts, Paul Preciado investigates the strategic relationships between space, gender, and sexuality in popular sites related to the production and consumption of pornography that have tended to reside at the margins of traditional histories of architecture: bachelor pads, multimedia rotating beds, and design objects, among others. Combining historical perspectives with contemporary critical theory, gender and queer theory, porn studies, the history of technology, and a range of primary transdisciplinary sources — treatises on sexuality, medical and pharmaceutical handbooks, architecture journals, erotic magazines, building manuals, and novels — Pornotopia explores the use of architecture as a biopolitical technique for governing sexual relations and the production of gender in the postwar United States.

This volume's contributors explore the links among sexuality, ethnography, race, and colonial rule through an examination of ethnopornography—the eroticized observation of the Other for supposedly scientific or academic purposes. With topics that span the sixteenth century to the present in Latin America, the United States, Australia, the Middle East, and West Africa, the contributors show how ethnopornography is fundamental to the creation of race and colonialism as well as archival and ethnographic knowledge. Among other topics, they analyze eighteenth-century European travelogues, photography and the sexualization of African and African American women, representations of sodomy throughout the Ottoman empire, racialized representations in a Brazilian gay pornographic magazine, colonial desire in the 2007 pornographic film Gaytanamo, the relationship between sexual desire and ethnographic fieldwork in Africa and Australia, and Franciscan friars' voyeuristic accounts of indigenous people's “sinful” activities. Outlining how in the ethnopornographic encounter the reader or viewer imagines direct contact with the Other from a distance, the contributors trace ethnopornography's role in creating racial categories and its grounding in the relationship between colonialism and the erotic gaze. In so doing, they theorize ethnography as a form of pornography that is both motivated by the desire to render knowable the Other and invested with institutional power. Contributors. Joseph A. Boone, Pernille Ipsen, Sidra Lawrence, Beatrix McBride, Mireille Miller-Young, Bryan Pitts, Helen Pringle, Pete Sigal, Zeb Tortorici, Neil L. Whitehead

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, and moral aspects of pornography to address online porn in a media historical framework, investigating its modalities, its affect, and its visceral and disturbing qualities. Countering theorizations of pornography as emotionless, affectless, detached, and cold, Paasonen addresses experiences of porn largely through the notion of affect as gut reactions, intensities of experience, bodily sensations, resonances, and ambiguous feelings. She links these investigations to considerations of methodology (ways of theorizing and analyzing online porn and affect), questions of materiality (bodies, technologies, and inscriptions), and the evolution of online pornography. Paasonen dicusses the development of online porn, focusing on the figure of the porn consumer, and considers user-generated content and amateur porn. She maps out the modality of online porn as hyperbolic, excessive, stylized, and repetitive, arguing that literal readings of the genre misunderstand its dynamics and appeal. And she analyzes viral videos and extreme and shock pornogaphy, arguing for the centrality of disgust and shame in the affective dynamics of porn. Paasonen's analysis makes clear the crucial role of media technologies—digital production tools and networked communications in particular—in the forms that porn takes, the resonances it stirs, and the experiences it makes possible.

Classical culture belongs to us all: whether as academic subject or as entertainment, it constantly stimulates new ideas. In recent years, following Gladiator’s successful revival of the ‘toga epic’, studies of the ancient world in cinema have drawn increasing attention from authors and readers. This collection builds on current interest in this topic, taking its readers past the usual boundaries of classical reception studies into less familiar—and even uncharted—areas of ancient Greece and Rome in mass popular culture. Contributors discuss the uses of antiquity in television programmes, computer games, journalism, Hollywood blockbusters, B-movies, pornography, Web 2.0, radio drama, and children’s literature. Its diverse contents celebrate the continuing influence of Classics on modern life: from controversies within academia to ephemeral pop culture, from the traditional to the cutting-edge. The reader will find both new voices and those of more established commentators, including broadcaster and historian Bettany Hughes, Latinist Paula James, and Gideon Nisbet, author of Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture. Together they demonstrate that rich rewards await anyone with an interest in our classical heritage, when they embrace the diversity and complexity of mass popular culture as a whole.

No cultural product reveals our collective fascination with sexual violence more candidly than pornography. Popular heterosexual pornographies showcase scenes of intense sexual aggression and cruelty that are gendered in repetitive, patterned configurations—configurations that are designedto arouse. Purcell uses comparative critical readings of popular U.S. pornographies to illuminate the changing psychosocial foundations of sexually aggressive fantasies. By examining how depictions of violence in pornography have changed over the past forty years, she investigates the evolving desires and anxieties of the genre’s growing U.S. audience. Adopting a thick descriptive approach, she moves beyond the mere observation and recording of instances of sexism and violence, elucidating the changing aesthetics, themes, and conventions of depicted sexual aggression and showing how they have emerged in specific socio-historical contexts. Finally, she draws from a range of industry publications and fan forums to examine the fabric and function of misogyny and violence in people’s fantasies and everyday lives.

South Asian Pornographies is the first consolidated volume that explores the relationships between pornography, obscenity, law and desire in South Asia. Focusing on case studies from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh while gesturing towards other countries in South Asia, the authors of this volume come from fields as varied as history, literature, media and communication, and the visual arts. The book proposes that as a geo-political location, South Asia has a unique relationship to pornography, given the multiplicity of cultural and legal-censorial regimes that define the obscene and the permissible. South Asian case studies can demonstrate how pornography in the region is often defined in oblique terms, finding reflection in various modes of popular (and sometimes underground) culture, bypassing legal and censorial constraints. Like questions of identity that can only be answered in the plural (identities rather than identity), this book demonstrates how a range of pornographies constitutes the force field of sexualized media in South Asia. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, History, Sociology, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Porn Studies.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series 2011 Winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award presented by the Modern Language Association Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation. Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we’re racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power—indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, “power” assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form. In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter–intuitive power—as a resource for the political present—found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.

Elaine Baruch is not only among the most quiet-voiced and fair-minded of feminist writers. She is also among the most far-ranging in her scholarship, equally at ease with the writers of the Renaissance and Freud, the medieval troubadours, and our contemporary polemicists. . . instructive, absorbing, and persuasive. --Diana Trilling A lively mind is at work here and a keen and witty writer too. --Irving HoweThis is a fine collection of essays. . . making many imaginative conjectures and amusing connections. --Times Literary SupplementIn these essays what emerges is a history of romantic love. . . Highly recommended.--Library Journal Arguing that romantic love need not be a tool of women's oppression, feminist critic Baruch. . . contends that unacknowledged male fantasies about love motivate much literature by men. . . rewarding, provocative.--Publishers Weekly Utilizing both Freudian and non-Freudian psychoanalysis as well as feminist criticism, Baruch examines literary works by women and men from medieval and Romantic periods as well as cultural observations on the twentieth century and how they have influenced attitudes toward love.

'Medieval Cultural History' celebrates the 65th birthday of Professor Stephen Knight. The book pays tribute to Professor Knight's pioneering work by reporting and reflecting on recent developments in the area of Medieval Cultural Studies, especially the Robin Hood tradition, Chaucer, romance, and medievalist crime fiction.