showing 3 related works from this author
Strange bedfellows
2007
Feminist debates on pornography have relied on articulations of affect, from anti-pornography rhetoric of grief, anger and disgust to anti-anti-pornography claims to enjoyment and pleasure. The complexity of reading, the interpenetration of affect and analysis, experience and interpretation tend to become effaced in arguments both for and against pornography. This article argues for the necessity of moving beyond the affective range of disgust versus pleasure in feminist studies of pornography. Drawing on theorizations of reading and affect, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussion of ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ reading, it investigates the possibilities of analysing commercial emai…
Scripting the Rules for Mars and Venus: Advice Literature and Online Dating
2007
An Amazon.com search for ‘guide to online dating’ produces tens of hits ranging from Online Dating for Dummies and Complete Idiot’s Guide to Online Dating and Relating to titles targeted at Christians, teens, seniors, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and straight users, and people in recovery. This plethora of advice literature – in addition to novels, films, TV programmes, and articles on the topic – corresponds to the multitude of online dating services developed during the past decade. The books outline basic principles of online dating, available solutions, and netiquette. In addition, they provide guides in self-improvement in the tradition of self-help literature, which according to Lichterman…
Email from Nancy Nutsucker
2006
This article addresses the representational conventions and gendered forms of address in online pornography through analysis of 366 unsolicited email (spam) messages advertising porn websites. Combining content description with close reading, it considers the terminology, imagery, narrative elements and points of view employed in advertising commercial heterosexual pornography. The spam advertisements create excessive displays of gender difference. It seems that limited female agency is central, especially in messages advertising reality sites structured by gendered relations of control. Arguing that such displays of control should not be automatically translated as displays of power, this…