Feona Attwood

Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization of Culture

This article reviews and examines emerging academic approaches to the study of ‘sexualized culture’; an examination made necessary by contemporary preoccupations with sexual values, practices and identities, the emergence of new forms of sexual experience and the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay. The article maps out some key themes and preoccupations in recent academic writing on sex and sexuality, especially those relating to the contemporary or emerging characteristics of sexual discourse. The key issues of pornographication and democratization, taste formations, postmodern sex and intimacy, and sexual citizenship are explored in detail.

Sluts and Riot Grrrls: Female Identity and Sexual Agency

This article examines the history of the term ‘slut’ and the articulation of different meanings around it. It traces some of the ways in which the term has been appropriated in various popular culture and new media texts and within subcultural practices and performances. It asks what this reveals not only about the way words are used to define women sexually, but about the way women engage with a culture that frequently reduces them to their sexual value whilst ignoring their sexuality. It argues that this kind of examination can also be a starting point for asking what is at stake in struggles between women, whether this takes the form of struggles over class, generation, aesthetics or politics.

Fashion and Passion: Marketing Sex to Women

Against a backdrop of a ‘pornographication’ of mainstream media and the emergence of a more heavily sexualized culture, women are increasingly targeted as sexual consumers. In the UK, the success of TV shows like Sex and the City and the ‘fashion ‘n’ passion’ of sex emporia like Ann Summers suggests that late 20th-century discourses which foregrounded female pleasure have crystallized in a new form of sexual address to women. This article examines how sex products are being marketed for female consumers, focusing on the websites of sex businesses such as Myla, Babes n Horny, Beecourse, tabooboo and Ann Summers. It asks how a variety of existing discourses - of fashion, consumerism, bodily pleasure and sexuality - are drawn on in the construction of this new market, how they negotiate the dangers and pleasures of sexuality for women, and what they show about the construction of ‘new’ female sexualities.

‘Tits and ass and porn and fighting’ Male heterosexuality in magazines for men

This article examines the presentation of male heterosexuality in British soft-core pornographic and men’s lifestyle magazines, looking across these formats at the range of conventions and discourses they share. It maps out the key features of male heterosexuality in these publications, focusing on a sample of British magazines collected in June 2003 across both soft core and lifestyle formats, and on the new men’s weeklies, Nuts and Zoo Weekly, launched in January 2004. The depiction of the male body and its relation to sexual pleasure and the presentation and investigation of heterosexual activity are set in the broader historical context of men’s print media and the current socio-cultural context of sex and gender representation.

Investigating young people's sexual cultures: an introduction

This special issue has grown out of a small British Academy-funded project in the United Kingdom that ran from 2008 to 2010 and aimed to examine ways of developing research on young people’s sexual cultures. Our backgrounds are in the area of media and cultural studies, and our own work focuses on a range of aspects of sexual culture; in particular, the production, characteristics, use and regulation of sexually explicit media texts and other sexual artefacts (see, for example, Smith 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Attwood 2009, 2010; Attwood and Smith 2010). We were interested in exploring ways of building on earlier work on young people, sex and relationships (for example, Holland et al. 1998) and more recent research (for example, Buckingham and Bragg 2004) that develops this focus in the context of a contemporary media-saturated and technology-focused culture.

Inside out: men on the Home Front

This article examines the representation of men as domestic experts in the lifestyle genre on British primetime TV. This is contextualized in relation to changing representations of the home as a space for the stylish individual and to changes in British primetime programming, where a movement towards hybrid TV forms appears to rearticulate the mission to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ and to transform private matters into public spectacle. The article aims to examine the ways in which contemporary representations of the male domestic expert struggle to negotiate perceived boundaries between the ‘inside’ of private space and the ‘outside’ of the public sphere and between the categories of femininity and masculinity, a struggle that is evident across the lifestyle genre and within individual programmes, such as BBC2’s Home Front. In Home Front, aestheticism and camp become key strategies for the redefinition of the home and masculinity as matters of lifestyle.

Lamenting sexualization: research, rhetoric and the story of young people's ‘sexualization’ in the UK Home Office review

This article discusses ‘The Sexualisation of Young People’ review, authored by Dr Linda Papadopoulos in 2010 for the UK Home Office. The article examines the review as an academic piece of work, considers it in the context of debates about young people, violence and sexualization, and discusses the characteristics and significance of rhetorical accounts that operate as ‘laments’ about sexualization.

Pornography and objectification

This paper examines the significance of the terms objectification and pornography in three key approaches to analysing pornographic texts; an anti-pornography feminist approach, an historical approach focused on pornography and regulation, and an approach which details pornography’s aesthetic transgressiveness. It suggests that while all three approaches continue to be productive for the analysis of sexual representations, their usefulness is limited by a tendency towards essentialism. A discussion of the public controversy around an advert for Opium perfume in 2000 is used to argue that an attentiveness to the context of particular images, and to the variety of reactions they provoke, provides a useful way of developing the analysis of sexual representations and their contemporary significance.

Anti/pro/critical porn studies

In this introductory article we explore contemporary debates about the ‘critical’ study of pornography in relation to ‘anti-porn’, ‘pro-porn’, ‘sex-positive’ and ‘sex-critical’ approaches, and the recent reframing of pornography and sex more generally in relation to postfeminism and neoliberalism. The article reviews emerging work in porn studies, discusses the importance of developing a critical examination of the porn industries, and introduces the contributions that comprise this first issue. We end with some thoughts on nomenclature.

Not Safe for Work? Teaching and Researching the Sexually Explicit

This special issue of Sexualities emerged from a day school in May 2007, organized by the editors and hosted jointly by De Montfort University and Sheffield Hallam University, on ‘Researching and Teaching the Sexually Explicit: Ethics, Methodology and Pedagogy’. Featuring presentations by Martin Barker, Brian McNair and Clarissa Smith, the day provoked valuable discussion about the challenges of academic work in this area at a time of media panics about ‘pornification’ and restrictive legislation about sexually extreme material. This resulting special issue brings together contributions from the UK, Australia, the USA, Finland and Hong Kong to reflect on shared concerns in a field transformed by new paradigms for understanding sexuality, in a context where the media seem increasingly important in the construction of sex and ‘discourse around sexuality at many social levels has focused more and more on visual representations’ (Kleinhans, 2004: 71).