I. Q. Hunter

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).

The Stanley Kubrick Archive: A Dossier of New Research

Ten years ago those immersed in researching the life and work of Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) were gifted a unique opportunity for fresh insights into his films and production methods. In March 2007 the Kubrick Estate—supervised by his executive producer and brother-in-law, Jan Harlan—donated the director’s vast archive to the University of Arts London and instigated a new wave of scholarly study into the director. The Stanley Kubrick Archive comprises the accumulated material at Childwickbury, the Kubrick family home near St Albans, from which he largely worked and where he maintained a comprehensive record of his films’ production and marketing, collated and stored in boxes. The catalog introduction online testifies to the sheer size of the Archive, which is stored on over 800 linear metres of shelving:

Introduction: Media Controversy and the Crisis of the Image

The media are inextricable from controversy. Their emergence and development have been dogged, determined and accelerated by censorship, media panics and public fascination with the seemingly uncontrollable spread of disturbing and taboo-breaking images into everyday life. Yet ‘controversy’ is a rarely used and much under-theorized term in academic studies of the media, even though controversies over specific images, from ‘video nasties’ to snapshots from Abu Ghraib, have structured our understanding of the media’s power, seductiveness and dangers.