Nathan Abrams is Director of Graduate Studies and Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Bangor University, UK. He has written widely on Jewish film, history, politics and popular culture in the United States and Great Britain. His research interests include Jews, Jewishness and Judaism in film; public intellectuals and American culture; and small Jewish communities in comparative perspective. His publications include (with Julie Hughes) Containing America: Production and Consumption in Fifties America (2000), (with Ian Bell and Jan Udris) Studying Film (2001), and Jews and Sex (2008).
Laura Agustin writes as a lifelong migrant and sometime worker in both nongovernmental and academic projects about sex, travel and work. Her publications include a special issue of Sexualities journal on ‘The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex’ (2007), and Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (2007).
Yaman Akdeniz is Associate Professor in Law at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. He is the founder and director of Cyber-Rights.Org, a non-profit civil liberties organization and the co-founder of BilgiEdinmeHakki.org, a pressure group working in the field of freedom of information law in Turkey. His publications include Internet Child Pornography and the Law: National and International Responses (2008) and Racism on the Internet (2010).
Kath Albury is Senior Lecturer at the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is a member of the Australian Society of Sex Educators, Researchers and Therapists and has worked as a sexual health educator/entertainer. She has been a member of the NSW Health Ministerial Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS and STIs Health Promotion Sub Committee since 2004. Her publications include Yes Means Yes: Getting Explicit About Heterosex (2002), (with Alan McKee and Catharine Lumby) The Porn Report (2008), (with Catharine Lumby) a special issue of Media International Australia on ‘Children, Young People, Sexuality and the Media’ (2010), and F**k Buddies: Sex, Love and Friendship (forthcoming).
Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia. His research interests include the development of the lesbian/gay movement; the globalization of sexual identities; the social, political and cultural impact of the AIDS epidemic; and political culture and its representations, with an interest in comparative Australian/American studies. He is a member of the Governing Council. International AIDS Society and President of the AIDS Society for Asia and the Pacific (ASAP). His publications include Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971), Coming Out in the Seventies (1979) and Global Sex (2001).
Steven Angelides holds a Fellowship in the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research and Sociology at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. His research reflects an interest in queer theory and the history and theory of genders and sexualities, with a current focus on child and adolescent sexualities. He is the author of A History of Bisexuality (2001). His current work includes projects on teacher-pupil sex crime, on moral panics and child sexualization and (with Mary Lou Rasmussen and Mindy Blaise) on sex and relationships education in Australia.
Klara Arnbergis a Senior Research Assistant at Umea University, Sweden. Her dissertation focused on the Swedish pornographic press and she has since written about the history of pornography and gender from business history and queer perspectives. Her research interests also include sexual meeting places on the internet and older women’s subjectivities and agencies in these forums.
Jane Arthurs is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Her research interests are in the fields of television and film studies, and especially the ways that gender and sexuality impinge on their production, texts, and reception. Her publications include (with Jean Grimshaw) Women’s Bodies: Discipline and Transgression (1999), (with Martin Barker and Ramaswami Harindranath) The Crash Controversy (2001), (with Iain Grant) Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material (2002), and Television and Sexuality: Regulation and the Politics of Taste (2004). She is co-editor of the Commentary and Criticism Section of Feminist Media Studies and a member of the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association Executive Committee.
Adam Arvidsson teaches sociology at the University of Milano, Italy. He is the author of Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture (2006), and has published on social production, ‘creativity’ and creative industries, and the political economy of cognitive capitalism in general. He is involved in four major projects: activist research on the conditions of ‘creative labor’ in the fashion industry in Milan; a research project on the financial value of reputation housed at the Copenhagen Business School; an EU funded attempt to develop bottom-up collaborative brands for small entrepreneurs in the creative industries, and (with Nicolai Peitersen) a new book, The Ethical Economy (2010).
Chris Ashford is Principal Lecturer in Law at the University of Sunderland, UK. His research focuses on the intersection of sexuality, law and technology. He has published widely on law and sexuality and legal education; the phenomena of public sex; male for male sex work; and, more recently, barebacking. He has advised LGBT community and health groups, the NHS, Police and UK Parliament, organizes the Gender, Sexuality and Law stream of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, and is a member of the Centre for Sex Work Research and Policy, UK. He is currently editing special editions on gender, sexuality and law for Liverpool Law Review and Sexualities and working on a monograph entitled Public Sex and the Law: Silent Desire.
Feona Attwood is Professor of Sex, Communication and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her research interests include ‘onscenity’ and ‘sexualization’; sexual cultures; and new technologies, identity and the body. Her work also focuses on the ways in which sexual practices and representations are caught up in wider expressions of anxieties and controversies around bodies, media and technologies. Her publications include Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (2009) and porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography (2010). She is working on two new books; Sex, Media and Technology, and (with Vincent Campbell, Ian Hunter and Sharon Lockyer) Controversial Images.
Clare Bale is a PhD student in the Faculty of Public Health at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research is located at the intersection of public health, sociology, media and cultural studies. Before commencing her PhD, Clare held the post of Public Health Principal in Sexual Health and Teenage Pregnancy for Nottinghamshire County Teaching PCT. She is a Registered General Nurse, and holds a Masters in Public Health from The University of Sheffield. She is a member of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV and chairs several regional sexual health networks.
Aaron Balick is the director of the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex and a UKCP registered psychotherapist working in London. He has a special interest in relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and is a founding and executive member of The Relational School, UK. In addition to his academic and clinical work, Aaron is a media spokesperson for the UKCP and a mental health writer, consultant and media contributor for the BBC.
Trudy Barber is Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of Portsmouth, UK. With a background in Fine Art, she combines academic and creative multimedia work. Her research interests are new media; social networking; cyberculture; cybersexualities; and digital futures. Her publications include work on virtual identity and sexuality, future sex tourism, and sex and science fiction.
Ruth Barcan is Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is the author of numerous articles on the body in culture, consumer culture, and teaching and her research interests include nudity and nudism; feminist cultural studies approaches to the body; alternative therapies and New Age practices; and pedagogy. Her publications include Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning (1997), Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry (1999), and Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (2004). Her current research project is on alternative therapies, and she is writing a book on alternative therapies and the senses.
Martin Barker is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Aberystwyth, UK. His research focuses on film audiences and he is the founder and co-editor (with Sue Turnbull) of the audience studies journal, Participations. His work has addressed comics; curricular issues; censorship; the control of culture; and ‘figures of the audience’ within public and policy debates. His publications include The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Arts (1984), (with Julian Petley) Ill Effects: the Media-Violence Debate (1997, 2001), (with Jane Arthurs and Ramaswami Harindranath) The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception (2001), and (with Kate Egan, Ernest Mathijs, Jamie Sexton, Russ Hunter, and Melanie Selfe, ‘Audiences and Receptions for Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema’, Report to the British Board of Film Classification (2007).
Meg Barker is Lecturer in Psychology at the Open University, UK. She co-organizes interdisciplinary seminars for the Critical Sexology group, co-edits the journal Psychology and Sexuality with Darren Langdridge, and is involved in organizing BiReCon events for bisexuality researchers, activists and groups. Her research focuses on social norms and rules around sexuality and gender and sexual communities, and especially on bisexuality, BDSM, and open non-monogamy. She practices as a sexual and relationship therapist and conducts workshops for therapists who are working with sexual or gender minority clients. Her publications include (with Darren Langdridge) Safe, Sane and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism (2007), and (with Darren Langdridge) Understanding Non-monogamies (2009).
Jenny Barrett is Lecturer in Film Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. Her research interests include the war genre, representations of armed combat, and representations of dominant and dangerous women in popular culture. Her publications include Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, Genre and American National Identity (2008). She was the organizer of the ‘Vamps, Bitches and Babes: The Dominant, Dangerous Woman in Popular Culture’ Seminar Programme at Edge Hill University in 2008.
David Bell is Senior Lecturer in Critical Human Geography at the University of Leeds, UK. His research interests span critical human geography and cultural studies and include cultural policy; urban and rural cultures; consumption and lifestyle; science and technology; and sexuality. His publications include (with Gill Valentine) Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (1995), (with Jon Binnie) The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond (2000), (with Jon Binnie, Ruth Holliday, Robyn Longhurst and Robin Peace), Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces (2001), Science, Technology and Culture (2005), and Cyberculture Theorists (2006).
Elizabeth Bernstein is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology at Columbia University, US. Her research interests include sexuality and the state; sexual commerce; the sociology of the body, sex, and gender, and ethnographic methods. Her publications include (with Laurie Shaffner) Regulating Sex: the Politics of Intimacy and Identity (2004), Temporarily Yours: Sexual Commerce in Post-Industrial Culture (2007), and a special issue of Sexuality Research and Social Policy, ‘Sexual Commerce and the Global Flow of Bodies, Desires, and Social Policies’ (2008).
Enrico Biasin obtained his Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Udine, Italy, where he teaches ‘History and Methodology of Film Criticism’. His research deals with the construction of masculine identity in Italian cinema, national identity in cinema discourse and industrial strategies in porn cinema. He has been a member of the Organization Committee of the Udine International Film Studies Conference and of the MAGIS Gorizia International Film Studies Spring School (University of Udine) since 2003. He has published in national and international journals, such as Bianco and Nero, Cinergie: Il cinema e le altre arti and Cinéma and Cie: International Film Studies Journal.
Petra Boynton is Lecturer in International Health Services Research at University College, London, U,. where she teaches doctors, nurses and other health professionals at postgraduate level. Her research is within the area of sexual health, including the effects of pornography; women involved in street prostitution; policy and practice in sex education; evaluating advice-giving in the media; sexual functioning; and modernising sexual health services. She is the author of The Research Companion: A Practical Guide for the Social and Health Sciences (2005). She has published widely on sex, relationships and health and also works as an agony aunt, sex editor, radio presenter and adviser to media outlets about accurate sex information.
Julie Bradford is Programme Leader for Journalism Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK. She is also working on a study of female-authored sex blogs and how women represent themselves sexually online. The research focuses on the practices and discourses of female sex bloggers themselves, to explore how they confound theoretical accounts of sexual representation and how far they stay within the conventions of existing genres.
Sara Bragg is RCUK Academic Fellow in Child and Youth Studies in the Childhood Development and Learning Unit at the Open University, UK. Her research interests include young people as media audiences; media education; creative research methods; and young people’s participation rights in schools. Her publications include (with David Buckingham) Children, Media and Personal Relationships (2003) and (with David Buckingham) Young People, Sex and the Media: the Facts of Life? (2004).
Barbara G. Brents is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, US. Her research uses a political economy lens to study sex and gender in market culture. Her recent work uses the sex industry as a site to understand the intersections of culture and economics – including the construction of ‘market morality’ in political debates around sexuality; the relation between tourism, consumption and sexuality; the emotional and bodily labor of selling sex; and consuming sex. She is a founding member of ‘Globalization, Sexuality and the City’, an interdisciplinary project and network to encourage the production and dissemination of research on the intersections of sexuality, culture and economics across the globe. She is co-author (with Crystal A. Jackson and Kathryn Hausbeck) of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland (2010).
Belinda Brooks-Gordon is Reader in Psychology and Social Policy at Birkbeck College, UK. Her research interests address psychological, legal, and social policy questions on gender, rights, sexuality, and the law. Her publications include (with Loraine Gelsthorpe, Andrew Bainham, and Martin Johnson) Sexuality Repositioned; Diversity and the Law (2004) and The Price of Sex: Prostitution, Policy, and Society (2006).
Mikita Brottman is Professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, US. Her main area of teaching and research is the pathological impulse in contemporary culture and she has authored and edited a number of books on this subject. She writes for a number of publications and has also worked as a psychoanalyst in private practice. Her books include Car Crash Culture (2002), Offensive Films (2005), High Theory, Low Culture (2005), and The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (2008).
Kath Browne is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Brighton, UK. Her research interests include geographies of marginalization and exclusion; geographies of sexualities; queer geographies, theories and methodologies; geographies of gender; feminist geographies and methodologies; and lesbian geographies. Her current research examines Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Lives in Brighton and Hove, part of a Community University Partnership project that began in 2005. She is also working (with Sally Munt and Andrew Yip) on an AHRC project, ‘Queer Spiritual Spaces’. Her publications include (with Jason Lim and Gavin Brown) Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Politics and Practice (2007).
David Buckingham is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media. His research focuses on children’s and young people’s interactions with electronic media, and on media education. He is currently working on two major projects, one on the role of the internet in promoting young people’s civic participation, and the other on learning and progression in media education. His publications include Children Talking Television (1993), Moving Images (1996), Media Education (2003), (with Sara Bragg) Young People, Sex and the Media (2004), Beyond Technology: Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Media (2007), and Young People, Identity and Digital Media (2007).
Maria Elena Buszek is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado, Denver, US. She is the author of Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (2006). She has contributed to numerous international books and exhibition catalogs and her writing has appeared in such journals as Art in America, Photography Quarterly, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies and The Journal of Modern Craft. Her latest book is the anthology Extra/ordinary: Craft culture and contemporary art (2011).
Moira Carmody is Professor and interdisciplinary scholar focusing on gender and sexuality at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Her major areas of research are focused around young people, sexual assault prevention education and policy and sexual ethics. Her most recent books are Sex & Ethics: Young People and Ethical Sex (2009) and Sex & Ethics: The Sexual Ethics Education Program for Young People (2009).
Pamela Church-Gibson is Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion, UK. Her research interests include film and fashion; history and heritage; cities and consumption; and gender and spectacle. Recent work has focused on the relationship between cities, cinema, consumption and gender in the post-war period. She is the editor of More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power (1993, 2004).
Hera Cook is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests are the history of sexuality and women and the history of the control of emotion in 20th century England. Her book, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception in England 1800-1975 (2004) examined the causes of sexual change from the Victorians to the late 20th century. She is the editor of the History of Sexuality electronic list, H-Histsex,
Mark Dery is a North American cultural critic, best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (2000). He has been a Professor of Journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. His writings on transgressive sexualities and the cultural politics of porn have appeared on Nerve.com and in his column of cultural commentary, ‘Doom Patrol’, on the website True/Slant (http://trueslant.com/markdery/).
Nicola Döring is Professor in the Department for Media and Communication Science at the Ilmenau Technological University, Germany. Her research examines the implications and media representations of new technologies. Her recent work focuses on computers, computerization and the internet; mobile communication technologies; and robots, robotization and nanotechnology. Her publications include (with Klaus Boehnke) New Media in Everyday Life (2001), Social Psychology of the Internet (2003), and (with Emanuel Maxl and Astrid Wallisch) Mobile Market Research (2009).
Jo Doezema holds a PhD from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She is a member of the Paulo Longo Research Initiative, which works on shaping new directions in sex work research and policy. She has been involved in advocacy and research on sex workers’ rights for two decades and has worked closely with sex worker rights organizations around the world. Her research interests include sex work and human rights; feminism; masculinities; and trafficking. Her publications include Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition (1998) and Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (2010).
Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Exeter, UK, and Director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe. Her research interests include the history and theories of sexuality; the history and politics of sexual ‘perversion'; and gender, feminism and sexual subculture community-building in weblogs and other new media based interfaces produced by women. Her publications include Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth Century French Literature (2003), (with Dany Nobus) Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (2006), The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (2008), and (with Libby Saxton) Film and Ethics (2009).
Susan Driver is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at York University, Canada. Her research interests are feminist and queer theories; identifications and desires; subcultures; embodiment; and popular cultures. She has published extensively in the area of maternal embodiment and desire, and her more recent work focuses on queer youth and popular culture, exploring the ways young people exceed hegemonic categorizations as they signify themselves in mobile and dynamic ways. She is currently working on a project based on self-representational modes of online dialogue by, for and about youth. She is the author of Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting and Creating Media (2007) and editor of Queer Youth Cultures (2008).
Alex Dymock is an independent scholar, performer and activist based in the UK. Her interest in feminism, gender, queer theory, radical philosophy and new forms of critical practice, as well as her active participation in the BDSM/Queer UK scenes, have prompted writing and research on alternative sexualities with an emphasis on public and private sexual spaces and their relationship to citizenship and the law. She has given papers at Critical Sexology, Intersections, Queer in Europe and Feminist Fightback, and is chair and spokesperson for Backlash. She plans to continue her work on sexualities in her future doctoral research.
R. Danielle Egan is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York. Her current research interest is in cultural constructions of childhood sexuality. Her publications include Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: Exotic Dancers and their Regular Customers (2006), (with Katherine Frank and Merri Lisa Johnson) Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance (2006), and (with Gail Hawkes) Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (2010).
Sharon Elley manages the BA Social Sciences Foundation Programme at the University of Leeds, UK. Her key areas of research are young people’s intimate personal relationships; educational practices; and class, gender and sexuality. Her doctoral research is entitled ‘Sex and Relationship Education (SRE) and Young People’s Lived Experiences’ and explores the ‘gap’ that exists in SRE knowledge, provision and practice. Her publications include Understanding Sex Education, Youth and Class (forthcoming).
Adrienne Evans is a doctoral student at the University of Bath, UK. Her PhD research explored the relationship between the cultural, material and subjective within the field of the sexualization of culture. Intersecting with issues of sexuality, gender, power, generation, and class, the research documented the lived experience of women’s negotiations of sexiness in the twenty-first century. She has published work in the European Journal of Women’s Studies and Feminism and Psychology.
Jane Fae is a writer on issues of political and sexual liberty, based in the UK. Formerly known as John Ozimek, she has recently written Beyond the Circle: Sexuality and Discrimination in Heteronormative Britain (2009), a book which takes a radical new view of discrimination on the grounds of sexuality, and for which she was awarded the title ‘Erotic Writer of the Year 2010’.
Debra Ferreday is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests include digital culture and new media; feminist cultural theory; weight and eating disorders; sex work; affect; queer theory; fashion; celebrity; popular culture; somatechnics; and theories of embodiment. Her publications include Online Belongings: Fantasy, Virtuality, Community (2009) and (with Rebecca Coleman) a special issue of Journal of Cultural Research on ‘Hope and Feminist Theory’ (forthcoming). She is working on a cultural history of femininity at the turn of the millennium, focussing on fashion, celebrity and consumer culture, and on a short monograph on Kate Moss which will explore contemporary perceptions of beauty in relation to art, fashion and photography.
Katherine Frank is a cultural anthropologist based in the US who has written on the sex industry; pornography; feminism; eating disorders; swinging; and reality television. Her current research projects focus on the meaning and negotiation of sexual exclusivity in contemporary relationships; on the boundaries of monogamy for married couples and on alternative relationship styles, such as swinging and polyamory, erotic couples’ tourism and circuit parties. She is the author of G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire (2002) and (with R. Danielle Egan and Merri Lisa Johnson) Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance (2006).
Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, UK. His work focuses on the sociology of fear; therapy culture; paranoid parenting; and sociology of knowledge. He is the author of Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (2003), Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting Twenty-First Century Philistinism (2004), The Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right (2005), Invitation to Terror: The Expanding Empire of the Unknown (2007), and Wasted: Why Education is not Educating (2009).
Rosalind Gill is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at King’s College, London. She is known for her work on gender, media, cultural industries and new technologies, as well as for longstanding interests in discourse and narrative analysis and visual methods. Her publications include (with Keith Grint) The Gender-Technology Relation (1995), Gender and the Media (2007), and Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? (2007). She is currently writing a book about mediated intimacy and another about creatives. Her latest book is (with Roisin Ryan Flood) Silence and Secrecy in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections (2010). She is the organizer of the ESRC Research Seminar Series (with Jessica Ringrose and Emma Renold), ‘Pornification? Complicating the debates about the sexualization of culture’.
Carrie Hamilton is Reader in History at Roehampton University, UK. Her research interests include gender history; the history of sexuality; feminism and queer theory; oral history and cultural memory; political violence and conflict; revolution and political activism; Spanish and Latin American history; and Hispanic studies. Her publications include Women and ETA: The Gender Politics of Radical Basque Nationalism (2007), and (with Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland) Activist Memories, Trauma and the Pleasures of Politics (forthcoming). She is Director of the Roehampton Centre for Research in Sex, Gender and Sexuality (SeGS) and co-organizer of the Cultural Memory Seminars at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of London, UK.
Simon Hardy is Senior Lecturer in Sociology/Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Worcester, UK. His book on pornography, men and feminism, The Reader, The Author, His Woman and Her Lover, was published in 1998. Since then he has written a number of articles on gender, eroticism and representation. His wider academic interests include the media coverage of war and the history of sexuality.
Sanna Härmä is a Media Studies postgraduate student at the University of Turku, Finland. Her dissertation examines mainstream pornography within the context of cultural and media studies, feminist and queer theory, and the pornification of popular culture. Her publications include a chapter in Pornoakatemia (ed. Harri Kalha, 2007) and (with Joakim Stolpe) porn.com (ed. Feona Attwood, 2010).
Sarah Harman is a PhD candidate at Brunel’s Screen Media Research department, and her thesis, ‘Femininity, Feminism and Masochism: The Female Masochist Body in Cinema’, examines erotic and pornographic adaptations of contemporary and classical sadomasochistic texts. She is currently working (with Wickham Clayton) on a collection titled Screening Twilight: Critical Cinematic Approaches. She is also a peer editor for the Roehampton University journal for performance and creative research, Activate, and of Goldsmiths’ Cultural Studies department magazine, Nyx, a Noctournal.
Julie Harpin is Senior Lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. She is currently the course leader of BA (Hons) Sport, Leisure and Culture, teaching in the areas of gender, sexualities, popular culture, and sociology of leisure. Her research interests are around gender and sexualities, online relationships, and dark leisure.
Laura Harvey is a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at the Open University, UK, researching a thesis on the negotiation and representation of condom use in the UK. She is interested in the production of mediated sexual knowledges, identities and behaviours.
Gail Hawkes teaches Sociology at the University of New England, Australia. She has been teaching and writing about sexuality since 1992 in the UK and in Australia. She is the author of A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality (1996, 2000, 2003), Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture (2004), (with John Scott) Perspectives in Human Sexuality (2005), and (with R. Danielle Egan) Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (2010).
Marjorie Heins is an activist, writer, and founder of the Free Expression Policy Project, (http://fepproject.org/), an organization dedicated to exploring challenges to free expression from censorship, media regulation and intellectual property laws. She founded and directed the Arts Censorship Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and from 1991 to 1998, worked on a number of high-profile arts censorship matters. Her publications include Sex, Sin and Blasphemy: A Guide to America’s Censorship Wars (1993, 1998) and Not in Front of the Children: ‘Indecency’, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (2001).
Claire Hines is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Society at Southampton Solent University, UK. Her current research interests include fantasy film; popular Hollywood genres; art and pornography; representations of gender and sexuality on screen; and British popular culture and society. She is the co-editor (with Darren Kerr) of Hard to Swallow (forthcoming), a collection of articles that investigate hardcore screen pornography. She has published articles on James Bond, gender representation and queerness in contemporary film and television.
Anja Hirdman teaches in the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her doctoral dissertation, ‘Alluring Images’ (2002), focuses on the visual and textual production of gender in popular magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s, and the construction of gendered modes of addresses. Her main field of interest concerns questions of mediatized intimacy and sexuality, gender and visuality, in particular, representations of masculinity. Recent and ongoing projects include visual self-representation on the internet; gender and advertisements; and mediatized intimacy from an intersectional perspective. She is currently working on a book on masculinity, embodiment and media culture.
Lesley Hoggart is Principal Research Fellow in the School of Health and Social Care at Greenwich University, UK. Her recent research has focused on sexual and reproductive health, in particular that of young people, and her most recent project is a Government for London funded project on teenage abortions and repeat abortions in London. Her publications include work on sexual health; teenage pregnancy; poverty and work; and research methodologies. She is the author of Feminist Campaigns for Birth Control and Abortion Rights in Britain (2002), and (with Joan Phillips) Young People in London: Abortion and Repeat Abortion (2010).
Samantha Holland is Research Fellow at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. Her research interests are in gender; sexualities; body/embodiment; ageing; and subcultures and leisure, and her current projects are studies of women’s roller derby and generations of women’s leisure. Her publications include Alternative Femininities: Body, Age and Identity (2004), Remote Relationships in a Small World (2007), and Pole Classes, Empowerment and Embodiment: Defying Gravity? (2010).
Ruth Holliday is Professor of Gender and Culture and Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests are primarily located in contemporary cultural theories of gender; sexuality; class; the body; and popular culture. She has a particular interest in the social and cultural uses of aesthetics, especially in relation to ‘elective’ cosmetic surgery and kitsch. Her publications include (with John Hassard) Contested Bodies (2001), (with John Hassard and Hugh Willmott) Body and Organization (2000), and (with Tracey Potts) Kitsch: A Cultural Politics of Taste (forthcoming).
Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is an urban/social geographer whose research focuses on questions of social inclusion and exclusion. His current research includes work on sexuality, sex work and the city – particularly on the production and maintenance of red-light landscapes, and more broadly on heterosexuality and the city. His publications include Key Ideas in Geography: The City (2006) and (with Rob Kitchin and Gill Valentine) Key Texts in Human Geography (2008).
Ian Hunter is Director of the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University, UK His research interests include cult, exploitation, horror and science fiction films, as well as literary adaptations. He co-edits two book series, ‘British Popular Cinema’ and ‘Screen Adaptations’. His publications include (with Deborah Cartmell, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan), Pulping Fictions (1996), (with Deborah Cartmell, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan) Trash Aesthetics (1997), (with Deborah Cartmell, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan) Alien Identities (1999), (with Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan) Retrovisions (2001) and (with Chiara Barbo) Brit-Invaders! (2005). He is writing two books; British Trash Cinema and Cult Adaptations.
Roger Ingham is Professor of Health and Community Psychology at the University of Southampton, UK, and Director of the Centre for Sexual Health Research. He is a consultant for the World Health Organization on their reproductive health and AIDS programmes, a member of the Government’s Independent Advisory Group for the Teenage Pregnancy Unit and was a member of the core group involved in the development of the UK National Sexual Health and HIV Strategy. His research interests include risk-taking; social and cultural contexts of sexual activity; comparative analyses of sexual conduct in European countries; and the relationship between early sexual activity and service use. His publications include (with Ellie Lee, Steve Clements, and Nicole Stone) A Matter of Choice? Explaining National Variation in Teenage Abortion and Motherhood (2004) and (with Peter Aggleton) Promoting Young People’s Sexual Health; International Perspectives (2006).
Katrien Jacobs is a scholar, curator and artist in the field of new media and sexuality and works as assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has organized netporn conferences with the Institute of Network Cultures. Her current research is focused on pornography in Chinese cultures and on costume play. Her publications include Libi_doc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art (2005), (with Marije Janssen and Matteo Pasquinelli) C’lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (2007), and Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (2007).
Sue Jackson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Wellington, Victoria, New Zealand. Her research focuses primarily on young people, gender and sexuality issues, iespecially bodies; ‘dating’ relationships and abuse; sexual coercion; sexuality education; safer sex; ‘growing up girl'; and teenage pregnancy. She is particularly interested in popular culture both from the perspectives of messages about gender/sexuality/body it delivers and from the perspective of how young people make sense of that information. Part of her research on popular culture includes work with younger children examining gender issues in particular.
Mark Jancovich is Professor of Film Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is a founding member of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; His research interests include media and cultural theory; horror; pornography; the historical epic; audience and reception studies; and contemporary popular television. His publications include Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (2003), The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (2003), Defining Cult Movies (2003), and (with Lincoln Geraghty) Shifting Definitions of Genre (2008).
Beth Johnson is Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK. Her research interests include screening sexualities; realism; psychoanalysis; and the ‘cult’ and the avant garde in European cinema. Recent work includes publications on realism, real sex and experimental film, Anna Biller, emotion and obscenity. She is working (with Charlie Blake) on a study of sex and post-transgressive cinema.
Mark Jones is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, where he teaches Film Studies and is award leader of the MA in Popular Culture. He teaches mainstream pornography as part of a module on challenged and contested texts, and addresses related topics in sessions on horror and exploitation films. He has published on horror films; popular music; 1960s fiction; paedophilia in popular culture; and the use of pornography in university teaching.
Steve Jones is Lecturer in Media at the University of Northumbria, UK. His research is focused on horror and pornography, and particularly the intersection between these genres. Recent research includes work on zombie porn; contemporary action cinema and the issue of rape; horror film; shock sites; and researching extreme online porn.
Harri Kalha is an art historian specializing in visual theory at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His fields of interest include gender and sexuality; critical historiography; French post-structuralism; and psychoanalytical theories. He has published numerous scholarly articles and essays on design, contemporary art, visual culture, and gender theory. His publications include Nurkan takana (2004), Tapaus Magnus Enckell (2005), and Pornoakatemia! (2007), a critical anthology on pornography which won the award for the Erotic Charge of the Year (Vuoden eroottinen lataus).
Irmi Karl is Principal Lecturer and Subject Area Leader for Media Studies at the University of Brighton, UK. Her research interests include ICTs and everyday life, gender and sexuality. She is a founding member of the Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Research Network (BSSN) which promotes inter-disciplinary research under the umbrella of sexualities and fosters ties with local LGBT communities and projects, and of the LGBT Queer Life research hub designed to generate projects in the areas of contemporary sexualities and gender research.
Mary Jane Kehily is Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies at the Open University, UK. Her academic interests focus on the intersection between cultural studies and education. Following cultural studies traditions, she is particularly experienced in ethnographic methods and uses them to explore the everyday settings in which gender and sexuality, narrative, identity and popular culture are given meaning by young people themselves. Her publications include Sexuality, Gender and Schooling: Shifting Agendas in Social Learning (2002), (with Joan Swann) Children’s Cultural Worlds (2003), Understanding Youth: Perspectives, Identities and Practices (2006), An Introduction to Childhood Studies (2008), and (with Anoop Nayak) Gender, Youth and Culture; Young Masculinities and Femininities (2008).
Darren Kerr is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Southampton Solent University, UK. His research interests include adaptations from classic literature to the graphic novel; screen violence; cult film; British horror; and pornography. His publications include articles on adaptation (Screen Methods, 2006) and pornography (Peepshows, 2009), and he is co-editor (with Claire Hines) of a forthcoming collection looking at sex on screen (Hard to Swallow, 2010).
James R. Kincaid is Aerol Arnold Chair in English and Professor of English at the University of Southern California, US. He researches critical theory, American Studies and queer studies. His work has focused on the history and current cultural practices of eroticizing children. He teaches classes in criminality, lunacy and perversion; age studies; censorship; and other areas of literary, political, and cultural studies. He is the author of Child Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (1994) and Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (1998).
Neil Kirkham is Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the University of the Arts, London, UK. He has recently completed his PhD, entitled ‘Simple Pornographers? Sade, Libertinage and the Evolution of the Hard-Core Pornographic Film Narrative’ and is preparing a series of journal articles which are based on his doctoral research.
Marty Klein is a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified sex therapist, based in the US. His work includes therapy, lectures, writing, lobbying, media, and forensic work. He has published widely in both popular magazines and professional books, such as The Handbook of Clinical Child Psychology and Treating Sexual Disorders. His blog is widely quoted, and his electronic newsletter, Sexual Intelligence, has 5,000 subscribers every month. He is a national board member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. His book, America’s War On Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty (2006) was honored as Sexuality Book of the Year by the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists.
Susanne V. Knudsen is Professor in Educational Texts and Media at Vestfold University College, Norway. Her research interests include the relation of media, genres and gender; literature; textbooks; educational media; digital media; youth culture; and intersectionality. She was editor of the Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (NORA) from 2001 to 2005. Her publications include (with Lotta Löfgren-Mårtenson and Sven-Axel Månsson) Generation P?: Youth, Gender and Pornography (2007). She is President of the International Association for Research on Textbooks and Educational Media.
Tanya Krzywinska is Professor of Screen Studies at Brunel University, UK. She is President of the Digital Games Research Association and has published widely on different aspects of videogames. Her publications include (with Geoff King) Science Fiction Cinema: From Outer Space to Cyberspace (2000), (with Geoff King) ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (2002), (with Geoff King) Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders (2006), Sex and the Cinema (2006), and Videogame/Player/Text (2008).
Jason Lee is Professor of Culture and Creative Writing at the University of Derby, UK. His research interests are in creative media, transgression, and cultural theory. His publications include Pervasive Perversions (2005) and Celebrity, Pedophilia and Ideology in American Culture (2009).
Peter Lehman is Director of the Center for Film, Media and Popular Culture at Arizona State University, US. His publications include Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (2001), Roy Orbison: The Invention of an Alternative Rock Masculinity (2003), (with William Luhr) Thinking about Movies: Watching Questioning, Enjoying (2003), Pornography: Film and Culture (2006), (with Arthur M. Eckstein) The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western (2004), and Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (2007). He is a former president of the Society for Film and Media Studies.
Judith Levine is an author, journalist, and co-founder of the National Writers Union in the US. She has written on sex, gender, ageing, consumerism, and culture for dozens of national magazines and newspapers. She is the author of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002) which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) as one of history’s most influential books about sexuality. Her other publications include My Enemy, My Love: Women, Men, and the Dilemmas of Gender (1992), Do You Remember Me?: A Father, A Daughter, and a Search for the Self (2005), and Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping (2007).
Julie Levin Russo is Acting Assistant Professor of New Media at Stanford University, Palo Alto, US. Her dissertation was titled ‘Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities’, and other recent projects have included contributing to the editorial team of Transformative Works and Cultures (http://journal.transformativeworks.org) and co-editing a special Battlestar Galactica issue of the online journal FlowTV (http://flowtv.org/?cat=127). She has presented on media convergence, online TV fandom, and cybersexuality at numerous conferences, and her work has been published in Camera Obscura and Cinema Journal.
Ben Light is Professor of Digital Media at Salford University, UK. His current research centres on analyzing the development and use of social media such as those that support romantic relationships and internet dating (specifically Gaydar) and those that are more focussed upon platonic relationships such as Facebook, and Digital Gaming artefacts.
Simon Lindgren is Professor of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests include the sociology of culture; media studies; discourse analysis; popular culture; semiotics; web studies; and critical theory. His publications include two textbooks within these fields, Populärkultur: Teorier, Metoder och Analyser (2005) and Sociologi 2.0: Samhällsteori och Samtidskultur (2007), as well as a number of articles in international journals. He is currently leading two research projects about media discourses on crime victims and online piracy.
Geert Lovink is Research Professor of Interactive Media, at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, a Professor of Media Theory at the European Graduate School, and an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam. He is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. He is co-founder of The Fibreculture Journal. His publications include Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002), My First Recession (2003), and Zero Comments (2007).
Catharine Lumby is Director of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research interests include the representation of gender in the media; popular culture and advertising; censorship, public policy and the production and consumption of pornography in Australia; the production and consumption of children’s media culture; and contemporary debates around the sexualization of children. Her publications include Bad Girls: The Media, Sex and Feminism in the 90s (1997), Gotcha: Life In A Tabloid World (1999), (with Duncan Fine) Why TV Is Good For Kids: Raising 21st Century Children (2006), (with Alan McKee and Kath Albury) The Porn Report (2008), and Alvin Purple (2008).
Jan Macvarish is Research Associate in the Centre for Health Services Studies at the University of Kent, UK. Her interests lie in the sociology of interpersonal relationships; parenting; family life; sex; and intimacy. Her thesis explored the construction of contemporary singleness and she is interested in questions of risk culture, de-moralization and individualization and policy developments. She is currently working on the Big Lottery-funded ‘Am I Bovvered?’ project, exploring teenage girls’ relationships to exercise.
Stephen Maddison is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London, UK. His research interests are in pornography; cultural politics, identity and capital; and popular culture, resistance, gender and sexuality. His book, Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture was published in 2000 and he has published articles in journals such as Textual Practice and New Formations.
Dr Paul Maginn is Senior Lecturer/Program Coordinator (Urban and Regional Planning) School of Earth and Environment, The University of Western Australia. His research interests are: Sex industry/commercial sex; Urban Planning – strategic planning & planning reform; Suburbia; Urban regeneration; Community participation. His co-edited collection (with Christine Steinmetz), (Sub)Urban Sexscapes: Geographies and Regulation of the Sex Industry has just been published in Routledge’s Advances in Sociology Series.
Giovanna Maina is attending the Ph.D. School in History of Visual Arts, Theatre and Cinema at the University of Pisa, Italy. She has published in national and international journals, such as Comunicazioni Sociali, Quaderni del CSCI and Cinéma and Cie: International Film Studies Journal. She is the editor (with Maurizio Ambrosini and Elena Marcheschi) of I Film in Tasca. Videofonino, Cinema e Televisione (2009). She is a member of the Organization Committee of the MAGIS Gorizia International Film Studies Spring School, University of Udine, Italy.
Sven-Axel Månsson is Professor of Social Work at the University of Malmö, Sweden. His work focuses on commercial sexuality; pornography; sexual violence; and internet sexuality. His books include (with Peter Söderlind) The Sex Industry on the Internet (2004), (with Lotta Löfgren-Mårtenson) Sex Everywhere?: On Youth and Pornography (2006), and (with Susanne V. Knudsen and Lotta Löfgren-Mårtenson) Generation P?: Youth, Gender and Pornography (2007).
Barbara Marshall is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality and technology, particularly the links between gender, sexuality, biomedical technologies, and consumer culture with a focus on the concept of ‘sexual dysfunction’ and the convergence of scientific and commercial interest in mid and late-life sexuality. She is the author of Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory, and Social Change (1994), Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics (2000), and co-editor (with Anne Witz) of Engendering the Social: Feminist Encounters with Sociological Theory (2004) and (with Austin Harrington and Hans-Peter Müller) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2006).
Ester McGeeney is a PhD student at the Open University, UK, on a matched studentship funded by the OU and Brook, the young people’s sexual health charity. Her PhD title is ‘Good Sex’: Sexual Pleasure, Young People and Sexual Health. Her research focuses on young peoples’ and practitioners’ views of ‘good sex’ and how these understandings impact on the delivery of sexual health services for young people. She is interested in the ways in which ideas about sexual pleasure can be incorporated into research and practice with young people. Ester is an experienced youth practitioner and continues to work in both youth and sexual health services.
Alan McKee is Professor in Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has written six books on media culture, including Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments (2001), The Public Sphere: An Introduction (2005), and Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (2006). He was the Chief Investigator of ‘Understanding pornography in Australia’, the first comprehensive examination of the production and consumption of pornography in Australia. This research was published (with Catharine Lumby and Kath Albury) in The Porn Report in 2008.
Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of eleven books on a wide range of media and culture-related topics including journalism, political communication, sexuality and the media, and journalism in the former Soviet Union and Russia. He is a regular contributor to the press, broadcast and online media. His books include Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture (1996) and Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire (2002).
Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cult Film Archive and Lecturer on the Film and Television Studies degree at Brunel University, UK. He is the editor of The Cult Film Archive’s book series, AlterImage, and has developed a broadcast documentary series on cult film figures and traditions in conjunction with Hem Productions. He has published on a wide variety of cult and horror film traditions. His publications include Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics (2000), Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (2002), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (2004), and Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (forthcoming).
John Mercer is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at Staffordshire University, UK. His research focuses on questions of gender and sexuality, film style and aesthetics, and representations of the body. He is the author (with Martin Shingler) of Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (2004). His published work has appeared in a range of international journals and edited collections dealing with sexuality, pornography and celebrity culture.
Andy Miah is Professor of Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of the West of Scotland, UK, Fellow for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Fellow at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), and Global Director for the Centre for Policy and Emerging Technologies. His research focuses on ethical and cultural issues arising from new technologies. He has published widely, both in the press and in academic journals, is a member of the Organizing Committee for the Abandon Normal Devices festival of new cinema and digital culture, a cultural programme related to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. His publications include Genetically Modified Athletes: Biomedical Ethics, Gene Doping and Sport (2004), (with Emma Rich) The Medicalization of Cyberspace (2008), and Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (2008).
Mireille Miller-Young is Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, US. She researches and teaches about race, gender and sexuality in media and sex economies in the US. She is currently working on a manuscript titled A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography which examines black women’s representations, performances and labour in the adult entertainment industry.
Sharif Mowlabocus is Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. His research interests lie in the intersection between queer studies and digimedia studies and include the production, maintenance and consumption of online identities in gay male cyberspaces; the use of digital space by the ‘barebacking’ community; the relationship between gay male pornographic genres and online identity formation; the use of digital spaces for the formation of ‘counter-knowledges’ surrounding HIV prevention; and the relationship between sexuality and class. He is a member of the research team for the ‘Count Me In Too’ project that contributes to progressive social change for local LGBT people in the Brighton and Hove area and is involved in ongoing research into safer sex education within gay male culture. He is the author of Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age (2010).
Wencke Mühleisen is Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. From 1978 to 1989 she was active as a performance artist, dealing with issues around gender, the body, sexuality, feminism and politics. Her areas of interest are feminist theory; queer theory; feminist media theory and analysis; and understandings of gender and sexuality in film, television, popular culture and contemporary art. Her publications include (with Jørgen Lorentzen) Gender Studies: An Introduction (2006), Ponderings about Sex and Sexuality in Culture and Media (2007), (with Christel Sverre) The Meaning of Sex (2007) and (with Annie Røthing) Norwegian Sexualities (2009).
Becky Munford is Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University, UK. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century women’s writing; gender and sexuality; and feminist history and theory. She is the co-editor of the Journal of International Women’s Studies special issue on ‘Third Wave Feminism and Women’s Studies’ (2003). Her publications include (with Stacy Gillis and Gillian Howie) Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (2004, 2007), Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts (2006), and Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and the European Gothic (forthcoming).
Roshan das Nair is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, and a Research Tutor on the Trent Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has previously worked in the areas of sex, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in Zambia and India. He has been the Editor of the Psychology of Sexualities Review, and is currently the Book Reviews Editor of the Review. His publications include (with Catherine Butler) Intersectionality, Sexuality and Psychological Therapies: Working with Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Diversity (2011). His research focuses on intersectionality, ethnicity, and culture.
Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. Her research on pornography has appeared in Feminist Theory, European Journal of Cultural Studies and Velvet Light Trap. She is the author of Figures of Fantasy: Internet, Women and Cyberdiscourse (2005), (with Mia Consalvo) Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency and Identity (2002), (with Kaarina Nikunen and Laura Saarenmaa) Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (2007), and (with Marianne Liljeström) Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (2010).
Julie Peakman is Honorary Fellow and Tutor at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Her research interests are in gender; sexuality; the eighteenth century; medicine; the body; and social history in Britain. Her publications include Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth Century England (2003), Sexual Perversions 1670-1890 (2009), and a six volume survey, A Cultural History of Sexuality (2010).
Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies and co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television and New Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, US. Her research interests are film history and theory; feminist theory; cultural studies; contemporary art; and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies. Her publications include Feminism and Film Theory (1988), The Future of An Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (1989), NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (1997), (with Lisa Cartwright and Paula Treichler) The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender (1998), and (with Raymond Bellour) The Analysis of Film (2001). Her collaborative art projects include MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee and Biospheria: An Environmental Opera, on which she was co-librettist. She is a 2009 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award for ‘DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea’.
Julian Petley is Professor of Film and Television at Brunel University, UK. His interests span the cinema, television and the press, with a particular emphasis on policy, regulation and freedom of expression. His interest in horror cinema and other disreputable genres has led to a strong concern with censorship. His publications include (with Martin Barker) Ill Effects: the Media Violence Debate (1997, 2001), (with James Curran and Ivor Gaber) Culture Wars: the Media and the British Left (2005), (with Philip French) Censoring the Word (2007), Censoring the Moving Image (2008), A Beginner’s Guide to Censorship (2009), and The Censorious Press (2009). He was Chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom and actively involved in the debates around the 2003 Communications Act and he is principal editor of the Journal of British Cinema and Television.
Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK. He has researched and written widely on sexuality, especially lesbian and gay studies, and since the late 1980s, queer studies. His research interests include humanism; intimacies and sexualities; the sociologies of ‘suffering’ and ‘well being'; medicine, narratives and transplants; and sociology. He is the editor of the journal Sexualities. His publications include Sexual Stigma (1975), The Making of the Modern Homosexual (1981), Telling Sexual Stories (1995), Sexualities: Critical Concepts in Sociology (2001), Intimate Citizenship (2003), and (with John Macionis) Sociology: A Global Introduction (4th edition 2008).
Jo Phoenix is Reader in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University, UK. Her research interests are youth justice and sex and regulation. She has written extensively on various prostitution policy innovations and reforms. Her publications include Making Sense of Prostitution (2001), (with Sarah Oerton) Illicit and Illegal: Sex, Regulation and Social Control (2005), and Regulating Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Policy Reform and the UK (2009).
Giovanni Porfido is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research focuses on gay visibility politics in mainstream culture, and in particular on the visual construction and representation of homosexual identity in British public service broadcasting. He is currently working on the in/visibility of queer teens in the televisual arena and (with Catherine Palmer) on the exclusion of queer people from mainstream sport culture and the creation of homosexual countercultural sport organizations. He is co-editor (with Roisin Ryan Flood) of the ‘Intimate Visions: Sexuality, Representation and Visual Culture’ special issue of Sexualities journal (2009).
Annie Potts is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Canterbury University, Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies. She has a PhD in Psychology and teaches in the areas of Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Human-Animal Studies. She is the author of The Science/Fiction of Sex: Feminist Deconstruction and the Vocabularies of Heterosex (2002) and co-editor of Sex and the Body (2004). Annie was the principal investigator on a project funded by the Health Research Council of NZ which explored the use of Viagra within relationships. She is currently investigating the perspectives and experiences of ‘vegansexuals'; and also researching the historical sexual exploitation of nonhuman animals in science and psychological research.
Emma Renold is Reader in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Her research focuses on the primary school as a key site for the production and reproduction of children’s sexual and gender relations; in particular, the pressures of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ in children’s constructions of their gender identities; sexual bullying and harassment; the impact of gender and sexuality upon children’s learner identities; developing methods and methodologies of researching children and ‘challenging’ young people; and ethical dilemmas in sensitive research. Her publications include Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities: Exploring Children’s Gender and Sexual Relations in the Primary School (2005) and (with Carolyn Jackson and Carrie Paechter) Girls in Education 3-16: Continuing Concerns, New Agendas (2010).
Sarah Riley is Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Aberystwyth, UK. Her work is often interdisciplinary, drawing on a range of social sciences including psychology and sociology, and takes a social constructionist approach to explore personal, social and political identities in relation to gender, the body and youth cultures. With Adrienne Evans she has been exploring how British women are negotiating the sexualization of culture,with the aim of offering a nuanced analysis of women’s sexualized identities. She is the co-editor (with Maree Burns, Hannah Frith and Pirkko Markula) of Critical bodies: Representations, Practices and Identities of Weight and Body Management (2008).
Niall Richardson is Lecturer in Film at the University of Sussex, UK. His research focuses on Queer Cinema, the body, especially extreme bodybuilding and body manipulation; and the representation of gender and sexuality in film and popular culture. His publications include The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman: Critical and Cultural Readings (2009), Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (2010), (with Clarissa Smith and Angela Werndly) Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Practices (2011), and (with Adam Locks) Critical Readings in Bodybuilding (2011).
Jessica Ringrose is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Gender and Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. She researches young people’s uses of social networking sites, particularly their online/digitial sexual identities; gendered and sexualized bullying; cyberbullying; and aggression and conflict in school. She is also interested in young people’s negotiations of processes of (hetero)sexualization and pornification, including psychological impacts and sexual health. She is the author of Post-Feminist Education? Girls and the Sexual Politics of Schooling (forthcoming). She is co-organizer of the ESRC Research Seminar Series (with Rosalind Gill and Emma Renold), ‘Pornification? Complicating the debates about the sexualization of culture’.
Lauren Rosewarne is a lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has written widely on gender, the media and culture. Her publications include Sex in Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy (2007), Cheating on the Sisterhood: Infidelity and Feminism (2009), and Part-Time Perverts: Sex, Pop Culture and Kink Management (2011).
Róisín Ryan-Flood is Lecturer in Sociology and Director of the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship at the University of Essex, UK. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, citizenship, kinship, and migration. She is the author of Lesbian Motherhood: Gender, Families and Sexual Citizenship (2009) and co-editor (with Rosalind Gill) of Silence and Secrecy in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections (2009). She has edited several journal special issues on topics such as sexuality and social theory, visual culture, and feminist epistemology.
Teela Sanders is Reader in Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research has focused on various aspects of the British sex industry and explores the inter-relationship between human sexuality and socio-legal structures. Her publications include Sex Work: A Risky Business (2005), Paying for Pleasure: Men Who Buy Sex (2008), (with Maggie O’Neill and Jane Pitcher), Prostitution: Sex Work, Policy and Practice (2009), and (with Jane Scoular) Regulating Sex/Work: From Crime Control to Neo-liberal Regulation (2010).
Jane Scoular is Reader at the University of Strathclyde, UK. Her research is concerned with the intersection of theories of gender and law and her publications have focused on informal justice, domestic violence and prostitution. She is a member of the Scottish Parliament’s Expert Panel on Prostitution. Her publications include (with Jane Pitcher, Rosie Campbell, Phil Hubbard and Maggie O’Neill) Living and Working in Areas of Street Sex Work (2006), The Subject of Prostitution: Sex/work, Law and Social Theory (2009), and (with Teela Sanders) Regulating Sex/Work: From Crime Control to Neo-liberal Regulation (2010).
Lisa Z. Sigel is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at DePaul University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Chicago, US. Her research interests are European women’s history and the history of sexuality. Her publications include Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England 1815-1914 (2002) and International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography 1800-2000 (2005).
Cory Silverberg is a certified sexuality educator, author, media contributor, and researcher. He is a sexuality media consultant, a founding member of a worker co-operative sex store, a sex educator, and a frequent contributor to national media. He has conducted workshops across North America on the topic of sex and technology, sex toys, sexual communication, and sexuality and disability. He is the co-author (with Miriam Kaufman) of The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability (2007). He sits on the board of Internet Sexuality Information Services (ISIS). His guide to sex, sexuality and sexual health is at http://sexuality.about.com.
Clarissa Smith is Professor of Sexual Cultures at the University of Sunderland, UK. Her research focuses on the expanding sexual sphere for heterosexual women: its institutional practices, representational strategies, uses and meanings. Her publications include One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Pornography for Women (2007), (with Michael Higgins and John Storey) Cambridge Companion to Contemporary British Culture (2010), and (with Niall Richardson and Angela Werndly) Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Practices (2013).
Antu Sorainen is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include gender studies, queer studies, anthropology, law, and sexuality. Her recent research projects focus on the politics of the paedophile and decency and sexuality in Finnish criminal law. Her publications include Criminals by Accident: Court Cases on Women’s Same-Sex Fornication in Eastern Finland in the 1950s (2005).
Adam Stapleton is a PhD student at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, where he is a lecturer and research assistant in the School of Communication Arts and a member of the Centre for Cultural Research and the Writing and Society Group. His research interests include erotica, pornography, and obscenity; and particularly the emergence of child pornography as a form of obscenity.
Rebecca Sullivan is Associate Professor in Communications at the University of Calgary, Canada, specializing in feminist film and media studies. Her interest in the popular and legal discourses of sexuality extends through reproductive technologies, sexual education, virginity and celibacy, and pornography. She is the author of Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and American Postwar Popular Culture (2005), the co-author (with Bart Beaty) of Canadian Television Today (2006), and co-author (with Neil Gerlach, Sheryl Hamilton and Priscilla Walton) of the forthcoming Becoming Biosubjects: Contemporary Canadian Biotechnology Discourse.
Leonore Tiefer is an author, educator, researcher, therapist and activist based in the US. She is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and Albert Einstein College of Medicine and has a private psychotherapy and sex therapy practice in Manhattan. She has written widely about the medicalization of sexuality and her website, newviewcampaign.org, is a major resource on this topic. She received the Alfred C. Kinsey Award in 1994, and in 2004 the Distinguished Lifetime Scientific Achievement Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and the Lifetime Career Award from the Association for Women in Psychology. She is Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Coalition against Censorship (ncac.org), co-editor (with Ellyn Kaschak) of A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems (2002), and author of Sex is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (2nd edition, 2004).
Greg Tuck is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of the West of England, UK. His research interests are focused on philosophical and political readings of sexuality and how sexual embodiment interacts with wider economic, historic and social issues. He has published on film and philosophy, CGI, the representation of men’s bodies, the sexuality of serial killers, the phenomenology of film editing, the representation of virginity, and the relationship between sex and technology. His publications include (with Mark Bould and Kathrina Glitre) Neo-Noir (2002), and Philosophy, Cinema and Sex (forthcoming).
Tiina Vares is Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Her research addresses a broad range of areas, including violence, sexualities, ageing and media reception, underpinned by a focus on the cultural reception of popular texts. Recent research projects include (with Sue Jackson) ‘Girls, Tween Popular Culture and Everyday Life’, (with Annie Potts, Meika Loe, and Merryn Gott) ‘Seniors Read Popular Cultural Representations of Sex in Older Age’, and (with Sue Jackson) ‘The Social Impact of Viagra’.
Liesbet van Zoonen is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University, UK, and Professor in Media and Popular Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. For more than 20 years she worked at the University of Amsterdam, most recently as head of the Department of Communication and she has been a Professor at Oslo University, and Visiting Professor at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and the Hochschüle für Film und Fernsehen, Germany. Her current research is on media and religion, a topic explored in her book Entertaining the citizen: when politics and popular culture converge (2005). She is internationally known for her work on gender and media, especially for her book, Feminist Media Studies (1994). She is the editor of the European Journal of Communication.
Caroline Walters is a Ph.D. student in the department of Sexuality and Gender Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. Her thesis provides a discursive history of female masochism, and more broadly her research examines the intersection between literary, filmic, theoretical and scientific texts as they formulate discourses of sexuality, particularly in its ‘non-normative’ forms.
Thomas Waugh is Professor of Film Studies and Sexuality at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He is a film and video programmer, and an expert in queer/LGBTQ culture, and relations between Canada/Quebec and India. He has made a number of documentary films and videos and his books include Show Us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (1984), Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall (1996), The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (2000), Outlines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall (2002), Gay Art: A Historic Collection (2004), and The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Sexualities, Nations, Moving Images (2006).
Dennis D. Waskul is Associate Professor of Sociology at Minnesota State University, Mankato, US. His research has explored internet sex, sexual embodiment, sociology of the body, sociology of the senses, fantasy role-playing games, and chronic illness. His publications include Self-Games and Body-Play: Personhood in Online Chat and Cybersex (2003), net.seXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography, and the Internet (2004), and (with Phillip Vannini) Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body (2006).
Jeffrey Weeks is Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, UK. His research interests include the history and social organization of sexuality and intimate life, especially the development of distinctive lesbian and gay identities; the social regulation of sexuality; the policy implications of the recent rethinking of sexual values; and changes in the patterns of family life and relationships He is the author of Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977, 1990), Sexuality and its Discontents (1985), Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (1981, 1989), Sexuality (1986, 2003), Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (1991), Invented Moralities. Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (1995), and The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (2007).
Ronald Weitzer is Professor of Sociology at The George Washington University, Washington, US. His primary area of research is criminology and he is an expert on the sex industry, with particular expertise on American policies and law enforcement on prostitution and sex trafficking. His publications include Deviance and Social Control: A Reader (2002), Current Controversies in Criminology (2003), and Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry (2nd Edition, 2009). His current research includes (with Charis Kubrin) a study of sexism in rap music and a book based on a comparative examination of government policies on prostitution in several nations.
Monica Whitty is Reader in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University, UK, where she teaches on the MSc Cyberpsychology. Her research focuses on online self and identity; video games; internet relationships; online deception; internet scams; and internet infidelity. Her publications include (with Adrian N. Carr) Cyberspace Romance: The Psychology of Online Relationships (2006), (with Andrea J. Baker and James A. Inman) Online Matchmaking (2007), and (with Adam Joinson) Truth, Lies and Trust on the Internet (2008).
Eleanor Wilkinson is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests are in intimacy, queer theory, love, and queering methodology. Her published work includes writing on non-monogamy and representations of sadomasochism.
Linda Ruth Williams is Professor in the English Department at the University of Southampton, UK. She teaches and researches film and is interested in all aspects of classical Hollywood and post-classical American cinema. Her particular research interests are in popular genre cinema, censorship, stardom, gender and sexuality. Her publications include Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject (1995), The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (2005), and (with Mike Hammond) Contemporary American Cinema (2006).
Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, US. Her books include Figures of Desire (1981), Re-vision (1984), Viewing Positions (1993), (with Christine Gledhill) Reinventing Film Studies (2000), Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989, 1999), and Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001). Her most recent publications include a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies (2004), and Screening Sex (2008), a history of the revelation and concealment of sex at the movies.
Kevan Wylie is Consultant at the The Porterbrook Clinic, Sheffield and the Directorate of Urology, Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield, UK, Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry and Honorary Clinical Lecturer in Urology, University of Sheffield, UK. He specializes in the psychotherapy of relationships and psychosexual disorders, in sexual medicine, and andrology. He has held positions on many national and international scientific committees relating to sexual health, including the British Society for Sexual Medicine, the European Federation of Sexology, and the World Association for Sexual Health. He lectures to general practitioners, physicians and surgeons, psychotherapists and family planning staff, and has written fact sheets and guidance notes for websites and educational journals on sexual problems.
Majid Yar is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hull, UK. His research interests are in the internet and new media, particularly issues of crime, deviance, and regulation; intellectual property and the cultural commons; and popular culture, including the cultural construction of sex and sexuality. His publications include Cybercrime and Society (2006), (with Yvonne Jewkes) The Handbook of Internet Crime (2009), and (with Simon Thompson) The Politics of Misrecognition (2010).
Federico Zecca obtained his Ph.D. in Audiovisual Studies at the University of Udine, Italy, in 2009. He teaches ‘Languages of Theatre’ at the University of Cagliari and has taught ‘Film and New Media Semiotics’ at the University of Trieste. He is a member of the editorial staff of CinémaandCIE: International Film Studies Journal and Cinergie: Il cinema e le altre arti. He is a member of the Organization Committee of the Udine International Film Studies Conference and of the MAGIS Gorizia International Film Studies Spring School, University of Udine. He has published in national and international journals and edited (with Riccardo Costantini)Tullio Kezich, il mestiere della scrittura (2008), (with Enrico Biasin and Roy Menarini) Le età del cinema (2008), and (with Laura Ester Sangalli and Leonardo Quaresima) Cinema e Fumetto/Cinema and Comics (2009).
Matthew Zook is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, US. His research focuses on technological change and shifting geographies of globalization, particularly the geography of e-commerce, software created spaces, internet geographies, global air travel geographies, and Estonia’s information society and economy. He is the author of The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture Capital, Dot-coms and Local Knowledge (2005)