Male homosocial bonds and perceptions of human–robot relationships in an online sex doll forum

Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136346072093238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Middleweek
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
White Male ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Online Interactions ◽  
Porous Interface ◽  
Robot Technology ◽  
Heterosexual Sex ◽  
Male Heterosexual ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Debates about human–machine relationships have intensified following the launch of the world’s first commercially available sex robot ‘Harmony’, a hyperrealistic sex doll with AI-capabilities. With the likely consumer market for these devices among white, male, heterosexual sex-doll owners, their views about sex robot technology and the niche online communities in which they discuss their doll relationships have received little scholarly attention. Through a qualitative analysis of the discursive practices of male users of a major sex doll forum, this study found complex and dynamic homosocial relations characterized men’s online interactions. In their discussion of a sex robot future, men negotiate competing structures of masculinity and sexuality and create a safe, online space for others to express their sexual desires and preferences. Using the concept of the ‘seam’ or join, the results reveal the way male users of sex dolls position themselves subjectively and are positioned by technology and the increasingly porous interface between human and machine.

Of Comics and Charisma: Representing Transpacific White Masculinities

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina D. Owens
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
White Male ◽  
English Teachers ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Madame Butterfly ◽  
White Masculinities ◽  
Male Heterosexual

AbstractThis article employs palimpsestuous reading practices to query the transpacific reach and imperial pedigree of the comic strip “Charisma Man.” Turning to Max Weber’s theory of “charismatic authority” to understand the comic’s humorous portrayals of white male heterosexual privilege in Asia, the article proposes that the comic strip illuminates the patterns of raced and gendered “hereditary charisma” that continue to haunt transpacific relations. “Charisma Man,” penned by a team of North American men living in Japan, links contemporary white migrants across Asia – especially native English teachers – with a longue durée of Euro-American imperial actors abroad and builds meaning through intertextual engagement with the iconic cultural texts Superman and Madame Butterfly. The article concludes that “Charisma Man” makes light of white male hereditary charisma in Asia through a layering of temporally-disjointed transpacific discourses and, in turn, adds one more layer to a palimpsestuous sedimentation of sexist and racist hierarchies, normalizing their continuation within contemporary globalization.

Becoming Citizens in the Age of Online Social Networks

2018 ◽  
pp. 280-302
Author(s):  
Ping Yang ◽  
Mito Ogawa
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Online Interactions ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Networked Society ◽  
Scholarly Attention

New media studies have attracted increasing scholarly attention as communication technologies become integrated into our everyday lives. New media provide unique contexts to share, record, and extend civic life and motivate civic commitment in the digital era. This chapter addresses the intersection of new media, culture, and political communication by exploring youths' civic engagement in China and Japan through individual voluntarism, civic participation, and political activism. It interrogates the civic use of social network sites in the digital age so as to increase our understanding of intercultural online interactions. Through the case studies of China and Japan, this research adds to the knowledge of intercultural communication in the networked society, with its potential to promote more democratic forms of engagement between citizens and states in the contexts of new media.

Nomadism and Decolonization: Cidade Correria

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-234
Author(s):  
CARMEN GADELHA
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
New World ◽  
White Male ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Colonial Mentality ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Dramatic Structure ◽  
Male Heterosexual ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Or History

The play Cidade Correria (City Rat Race) from Rio de Janeiro is my point of departure for a study of tragedy in contemporary theatre from the perspective of decolonization. A colonial mentality blanketed the New World with a white, male, heterosexual rationality whose universalizing pretensions would usher the native peoples ‘who had no writing or history’ into ‘civilization’. Dismantling this structure today requires connecting heterogeneities and dissonances. In the theatre, narratives demolish dramatic structure, proposing unstable compositions where figures pass by charting a cartography for today. Accordingly, Cidade Correria brings those from the periphery and the favelas, who have historically been excluded from mainstream narratives, into the urban fabric.

scholarly journals Redemption Contests

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 100-120
Author(s):  
Kyle B. T Lambelet
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Military Training ◽  
White Male ◽  
The Other ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Dead ◽  
School Of The Americas ◽  
Male Heterosexual ◽  
The Invisible

This article investigates the role theology plays in generating political action in las Américas through research on the School of the Americas Watch. It commends theopolitics as a lens for analyzing the competing projects of US military training and protests against that training, both of which work under the sign of redemption. The materiality of these signs can be apprehended by asking who is saving whom from what, by what means, and for what end. Anthropological analysis of these redemption narratives reveals the regimes of the invisible that animate opposing political projects—redemption for one through imperial formations enabled by the messianic figure of the white, male, heterosexual warrior, and redemption for the other through the agential presence of the dead who haunt empire’s wake.

Becoming Citizens in the Age of Online Social Networks

2022 ◽  
pp. 735-752
Author(s):  
Ping Yang ◽  
Mito Ogawa
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Online Interactions ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Networked Society ◽  
Scholarly Attention

New media studies have attracted increasing scholarly attention as communication technologies become integrated into our everyday lives. New media provide unique contexts to share, record, and extend civic life and motivate civic commitment in the digital era. This chapter addresses the intersection of new media, culture, and political communication by exploring youths' civic engagement in China and Japan through individual voluntarism, civic participation, and political activism. It interrogates the civic use of social network sites in the digital age so as to increase our understanding of intercultural online interactions. Through the case studies of China and Japan, this research adds to the knowledge of intercultural communication in the networked society, with its potential to promote more democratic forms of engagement between citizens and states in the contexts of new media.

scholarly journals The Mohajir Identity in Pakistan: The Natives’ Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Fouzia Rehman Khan ◽  
Fehmida Manzoor
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
Identity Constructions ◽  
Interpretive Analysis ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Linguistic Groups ◽  
A Site

Analysing narratives as a site of identity constructions and negotiation is an expanding genre in the field of linguistics. The present study explores the Mohajir identity of Urdu Speaking in Pakistan through the narratives of the natives. This research is a qualitative analysis of the narratives that are formed through the semi structured private interviews of Urdu Speaking Mohajir/ immigrants in Pakistan. The interpretive analysis of the interviews reflected the subjective reception of the discursive practices, which were found to be negative and the term “Mohajir” was declared to have an undesirable connotation with the associated discourses having a similar impact. The study recommends that the word “Mohajir” should be excluded from the everyday discourse. There is a need for avoidance of the racist, exclusionary and discriminatory discourses and discursive practices because such discourses eventually become public and generate anti-immigrant sentiments. At the same time discourses of unification should be promoted so as to establish harmonious discursive practices for a peaceful coexistence of different ethnic and linguistic groups living in Pakistan.

scholarly journals Audience Reactions to Climate Change and Science in Disaster Cli-fi Films: A Qualitative Analysis

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Lauren N Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Environmental Attitudes ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Audience Responses ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Little scholarly attention has been paid to how audiences interpret pop culture messages about climate. This paper addresses this issue by taking up the case of disaster cli-fi films and exploring how audiences react to film representations of climate change. It draws on data from focus groups to evaluate audience responses to disaster cli-fi films. Analysis reveals that by only briefly discussing climate change in their plotlines, the films weaken their environmental message. The paper concludes with a discussion of the effects of disaster cli-fi films on environmental attitudes and suggestions for further research.

Emotion in politics: Affective-discursive practices in UKIP and Labour

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Breeze
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The United Kingdom

Recent political trends in many countries have sparked renewed interest in populism. Despite general agreement that the affective/emotive aspects of political communication are particularly important in this, there is little recent analysis of how populists operationalise emotion or how they genuinely differ from mainstream parties in this sense. This article applies mixed methods to explore the ‘affective-discursive practices’ that characterise the discourses of two opposition parties in the United Kingdom: United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Labour. Comparison of the frequency of semantic subcategories related to emotion in corpora of press releases published by these parties on their websites is complemented by qualitative analysis of how specific emotional areas such as fear, anger and anxiety are invoked by the two parties. Different ‘affective-discursive practices’ underpin their discourses, since Labour characteristically frames reactions to social phenomena in terms of worry and concern, while UKIP legitimates fear and anger, but also projects more positive emotions.

scholarly journals Alien Invasions and Identity Crisis: Steven Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds (2005)

2016 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Rocío Carrasco Carrasco
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
White Male ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
Identity Crises ◽  
Alien Invasion ◽  
Post September 11 ◽  
Male Heterosexual

The idea of national identity as threatened by foreign invasions has been at the centre of many popular Science Fiction (SF) films in the United States of America. In alien invasion films, aggressive colonisers stand for collective anxieties and can be read “as metaphors for a range of perceived threats to humanity, or particular groups, ranging from 1950s communism to the AIDS virus and contemporary ‘illegal aliens’ of human origin” (King and Krzywinska, 2000: 31-2). Such films can effectively tell historical and cultural specificities, including gender concerns. In them, the characters’ sense of belonging to a nation is destabilised in a number of ways, resulting in identity crisis in most cases. A fervent need to defend the nation from the malevolent strangers is combined with an alienation of the self in the search of individual salvation or survival.The present analysis will attempt to illustrate how threats to configurations of power are employed in a contemporary alien invasion film: The War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005). Specifically, the film takes the narrative of destruction to suggest the destabilisation of US national power within the context of post September 11, together with a subtle disruption of the gender and sexual status quo. Indeed, new ways of understanding masculinity and fatherhood assault both the public and the private spaces of its white male heterosexual protagonist, Ray, performed by popular actor Tom Cruise. Ambiguous patriotism, identity crises and selfishness are at the core of this contemporary version of H.G. Wells’s landmark novel.

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