CFP: Feminist Media Histories Special Issue on Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media

Call for papers: Feminist Media Histories special issue on Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media. 

Deadline: December 5, 2017

Guest editor: Elena Gorfinkel

We invite proposals for a special issue on Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media. This issue of Feminist Media Histories considers the role of women and gender in sex media, broadly defined. The issue aims to capaciously account for the labor and involvement of women in varied “adult” fields – as directors, actors, editors, exhibitors, promoters, cinematographers, photographers, and spectators, among other roles. This call seeks historical, archivally-oriented and materialist accounts that excavate feminist histories of varied pornographies, hard and soft, in sexually explicit independent film and video, as well as in more marginal or liminal zones of erotic film practice and visual and media cultures. We welcome varied considerations of the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class and ability, and approaches that employ diverse feminist and queer methodologies, across historical periods and in multiple locations. We also welcome and are very keen to include ephemera, archival materials, and/or interviews with women practitioners in sex media. The scope of the issue is necessarily global, with keen interest in practices and histories outside of the Anglo-European context.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:        

•Histories of women makers and consumers of hard-core  

•The sexually explicit avant-garde and the underground 

•Lesbian, gay, queer and trans sex cinema histories – makers, scenes, communities 

•1960s sexploitation cinema and overlooked labor – actors, directors, producers and other personnel 

•Filmmakers, actors and consumers of color in sex media 

•Global media practices and local sex scenes 

•Women in sexual print cultures – 19th-century to present (models, photographers, readers, writers)  

Interested contributors should contact guest editor Elena Gorfinkel directly at: elena.gorfinkel@kcl.ac.uk; Proposals of 300 words are due no later than December 5, 2017. Contributors will be notified January 15, 2018. Article drafts will be due by May 1, 2018 and will then be sent out for anonymous peer review.