Cultural Citizenship and the Communicative Space of Mediated Sexual Expressivity

• The role of pornography in contemporary media societies constitutes one of the underresearched areas in media and communication studies. The purpose of this article is to explore the potentiality latent in the user-porn-related Internet domains, blogs and forums – as extensions of offline agency and sociality – for motivating communicative action and engagement with civic practice in various forms. In this study, we utilize an interdisciplinary approach that feeds from social, political and cultural theory and we take ‘self-pornographic pursuit as cultural citizenship’ as a paradigmatic intersection. The discussion is based on our analysis of a variety of expressive venues (some purely online, some amalgamated with the offline) over the course of our preliminary research. Of these, we refer to two Swedish examples: Bodycontact, a sexual dating site, and Dirty Diaries, a feminist film project and the adjacent website, as illustrative of the theoretical arguments presented throughout our discussion.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

social theory

space

mediation

porn

sexual expressivity

cultural citizenship

Media and Communication Studies

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)