Every Detail Counts: Robert Stoller, Perversion and the Production of Pornography

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-52
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Escoffier

After the publication of his pioneering book Sexual Excitement in 1979, Robert Stoller devoted the last 12 years of his life to the study of the pornographic film industry. To do so, he conducted an ethnographic study of people working in the industry in order to find out how it produced ‘perverse fantasies’ that successfully communicated sexual excitement to other people. In the course of his investigation he observed and interviewed those involved in the making of pornographic films. He hypothesized that the ‘scenarios’ developed and performed by people in the porn industry were based on their own perverse fantasies and their frustrations, injuries and conflicts over sexuality and gender; and that the porn industry had developed a systematic method and accumulated a sophisticated body of knowledge about the production of sexual excitement. This paper explores Stoller's theses and shows how they fared in his investigation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-87
Author(s):  
Shain A. M. Neumeier ◽  
Lydia X. Z. Brown

Far too many—if not most—of us in the legal profession who belong to both the disability and LGBTQ+ communities have known informally, through our own experiences and those of others like us, that workplace bias and discrimination on the basis of disability, sexuality, and gender identity is still widespread. The new study by Blanck et al. on diversity and inclusion in the U.S. legal profession provides empirical proof of this phenomenon, which might otherwise be dismissed as being based on anecdotal evidence.1 Its findings lend credibility to our position that the legal profession must make systemic changes to address workplace ableism, heterosexism, and transmisia.2 They also suggest possibilities as to where and how it might start to do so through providing information on who employers discriminate against most often and in what forms.3


Author(s):  
Lynette Chua

This chapter introduces an anthropological inquiry into human rights activism, sexuality, and gender, and proposes taking an ethnographic approach grounded in love, agency, and humanity to do so. Such an inquiry brings together queer anthropology and the anthropology of human rights to analyse the intersection of human rights and social justice activism for people with non-normative sexualities and genders. Although queer anthropology has illuminated the contingent and multiple ways of doing sexuality and gender, it usually does not examine the processes and patterns that arise out of human rights or the actions and experiences of activists. On the other hand, anthropologists of human rights have generally not focused on non-normative genders or sexualities. The proposed ethnographic approach does not merely pay attention to the interpretation, adaptation, and circulation of the substantive meanings of human rights and such affiliated identities as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT); it also analyses the emotions and interpersonal relations that give rise to and emerge from those processes and treats them as inherent to the practices of human rights and LGBT identities. Additionally, this approach is motivated by compassion for the agency and empirical realities of their research subjects. Taking this approach to develop research at the intersection of human rights activism, sexuality, and gender, the field of anthropology can further influence theories of social movements and collective action in the broader social sciences.


Author(s):  
Patrick Colm Hogan

The introduction first sets out some preliminary definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender. It then turns from the sexual part of Sexual Identities to the identity part. A great deal of confusion results from failing to distinguish between identity in the sense of a category with which one identifies (categorial identity) and identity in the sense of a set of patterns that characterize one’s cognition, emotion, and behavior (practical identity). The second section gives a brief summary of this difference. The third and fourth sections sketch the relation of the book to social constructionism and queer theory, on the one hand, and evolutionary-cognitive approaches to sex, sexuality, and gender, on the other. The fifth section outlines the value of literature in not only illustrating, but advancing a research program in sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this volume.


Author(s):  
Pawan Singh

If the elaboration of LGB identities is predicated on the development of binary sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual, or Western and non-Western, research at the dawn of the twenty-first century has turned decidedly to the fluidity of sexuality and the various ways that sexual behavior is situated in social relationships and as social identities. This chapter turns to the persistence of alternative sexualities outside of or beyond the construction LGB, interrogating the links between sexuality and gender, the various reactions to the global diffusion of homosexuality (and homophobia) as cultural forms predicated on Western binaries, and the possibilities inherent in a world of diversely constituted sexualities.


Sexualities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 516-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Toft ◽  
Anita Franklin ◽  
Emma Langley

Contemporary discourse on sexuality presents a picture of fluidity and malleability, with research continuing to frame sexuality as negotiable, within certain parameters and social structures. Such investigation is fraught with difficulties, due in part to the fact that as one explores how identity shifts, language terms such as ‘phase’ emerge conjuring images of a definitive path towards an end-goal, as young people battle through a period of confusion and emerge at their true or authentic identity. Seeing sexuality and gender identity as a phase can delegitimise and prevent access to support, which is not offered due to the misconception that it is not relevant and that one can grow out of being LGBT+. This article explores the lives of disabled LGBT + young people from their perspective, using their experiences and stories to explore their identities and examine how this links to the misconception of their sexuality and gender as a phase. Taking inspiration from the work of scholars exploring sexual and gender identity, and sexual storytelling; the article is framed by intersectionality which allows for a detailed analysis of how identities interact and inform, when used as an analytic tool. The article calls for a more nuanced understanding of sexuality and gender in the lives of disabled LGBT + young people, which will help to reduce inequality and exclusion.


Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Ackermann ◽  
Christian Zimmer

Abstract Our article is dedicated to the relation of a given name’s phonological structure and the gender of the referent. Phonology has been shown to play an important role with regard to gender marking on a name in some (Germanic) languages. For example, studies on English and on German have shown in detail that female and male names have significantly different phonological structures. However, little is known whether these phonological patterns are valid beyond (closely related) individual languages. This study, therefore, sets out to assess the relation of gender and the phonological structures of names across different languages/cultures. In order to do so, we analyzed a sample of popular given names from 13 countries. Our results indicate that there are both language/culture-overarching similarities between names used for people of the same gender and language/culture-specific correlations. Finally, our results are interpreted against the backdrop of conventional and synesthetic sound symbolism.


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