Sharif Mowlabocus

Porn laid bare: Gay men, pornography and bareback sex

This article details the preliminary findings from Porn Laid Bare, a collaborative research project between the University of Sussex and the Terrence Higgins Trust, Brighton. We explore the multidimensional relationship that respondents identified as having formed with pornographic material, together with its role within gay male subculture. We then consider how interview respondents understood and conceptualised bareback pornography. Our findings reveal consistent contradictions between general discussions of gay pornography and specific discussions of bareback representations. Utilising Dean’s (2009) work on bareback subculture and the ‘ambivalent gift’, we develop a critical reading of these contradictions in order to identify the methods by which the anxieties and pleasures of bareback pornography were handled by respondents.

Hard Times and Rough Rides: The Legal and Ethical Impossibilities of Researching "'Shock"'Pornographies

This article explores the various ethical and legal limitations faced by researchers studying extreme or ‘shock’ pornographies, beginning with generic and disciplinary contexts, and focusing specifically upon the assumption that textual analysis unproblematically justifies certain pornographies, while legal contexts utilize a prohibitive gaze. Are our academic freedoms of speech endangered by legislations that restrict our access to non-mainstream images, forcing them further into taboo locales? If so, is the ideological normalization of sexuality inextricable from our research methodologies? Simultaneously, can we justify researchers being allowed access to materials that are not deemed suitable for general consumption, which may further bolster normalized hierarchies of class-privilege and cultural capital?

What we can't see? Understanding the representations and meanings of UAI, barebacking, and semen exchange in gay male pornography.

Since the late 1990s, the use of condoms within gay male pornography has been on the wane. Moving from a niche category into more mainstream forms of commercial pornography, unprotected anal sex has become a dominant theme within this sphere of gay male sexual representation. However, while the definition of what constitutes bareback pornography may at first sight appear unproblematic, this article argues that meanings and understandings of unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) are not constant across all genres of gay male pornography. Using textual analysis and focus group methods, the authors demonstrate how subcultural understandings of UAI are dependent on a variety of textual factors. These include the age, body type, and racial identities of the performers; the setting, context, and mise-en-scène of the pornographic scene; and the deployment of power relations between the insertive and receptive partners. The article concludes by suggesting that the recognition of the diverse representations of “barebacking” found in contemporary gay male pornography should influence the ways in which health promotion strategies address discussions of UAI and bareback pornography.

Engaging with the Bailey Review: blogging, academia and authenticity

This article reproduces and discusses a series of blog posts posted by academics in anticipation of the report on commercialisation, sexualisation and childhood, ‘Letting Children Be Children’ by Reg Bailey for the UK Department of Education in June 2011. The article discusses the difficulty of ‘translating’ scholarly work for the public in a context where ‘impact’ is increasingly important and the challenges that academics face in finding new ways of speaking about sex in public.

‘Because even the placement of a comma might be important’ Expertise, filtered embodiment and social capital in online sexual health promotion

The Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) is a leading UK HIV and sexual health organization, and community outreach and support remain a key tenet of the charity’s philosophy. Outreach work includes campaign drives in bars, clubs and saunas, peer-led workshops, support groups, condom distribution in community venues and one-to-one intervention programmes to help raise HIV/AIDS awareness. But what happens to community activism and outreach when the community one seeks to engage moves online? In this article, we report on a study capturing the experiences of workers engaged in THT’s digital outreach service, Netreach. Using ethnographic and other qualitative methods, we identify the shifting nature of health promotion outreach work and the changes in expert–client relationship that occur when community outreach takes place on digital platforms. We identify how issues of (dis)embodiment, expertise and cultural capital play a role in determining the success – or failure – of online outreach work.

‘Y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife’: Mobile applications, risk and sex offender databases

This article reflects upon recent developments in sex offender tracking and monitoring. Taking as its focus a suite of mobile applications available for use in the United States, the author explores the impact and consequences of remediating the data held by State offender databases. The article charts the recent history of techno-corrections as it applies to this category of criminal, before then undertaking an analysis of current remediation of this legally obtained data. In doing so, the author identifies how the recontextualizing of data serves to (re)negotiate the relationship between the user, the database and registered sex offenders. The author concludes by arguing that the (mobile) mapping of offender databases serves to obscure the original intentions of these recording mechanisms and might hinder their effectiveness in reducing sex offending.

Six propositions on the sonics of pornography

ABSTRACTPornography (and all its contentious pleasures, contested politics and attendant problematics) is enjoying a fresh wave of academic attention. The overwhelming majority of these studies, however, focus on the visual discourses of sexually explicit material. This risks the sonic dimensions of pornography being overlooked entirely. Yet porn is anything but silent. This speculative article maps out some of the ways in which the sounds of pornography (and the pornography of sound) might be approached in the analytical context of gay male culture. Not only do the texts of porn contain assorted sounds (dialogue, soundtracks, non-verbal noises of participation, background and accidental audio), they also seek to prompt sounds (not least the non-verbal noises pornography seeks to elicit during the moments of its consumption) and sometimes depend on sound alone (telephone lines that allow access to recorded narratives or ‘live’ chat). Pornography speaks in particular accents, it mobilizes particular music,...

From scene to screen: the challenges and opportunities of commercial digital platforms for HIV community outreach

This article draws upon data from Reaching Out Online, a collaborative research project that explored the need for, and development of, a digital health outreach service for gay, bisexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) in London and Brighton, United Kingdom. It identifies the challenges that commercial hook-up apps and other digitally based dating and sex services pose for conventional forms of gay men’s health promotion. It then moves to explore the opportunities that these same services offer for health promotion teams. Chiefly, the discussion highlights the potential that commercial platforms offer to peer educators in terms of reaching local cohorts of men, together with the constraints placed upon this form of outreach as a result of the commercial imperatives that underpin these digital services.