Stephen Maddison

In this chapter I use porn as an opportunity to consider the relationship between agency and affect. I do so through an assessment of two alternative porn sites: FuckforForest, a non-profit site that subverts the commercial model of online porn to raise money for eco-activism, and MakeLoveNotPorn.tv (MLNP.tv), a pay porn venture launched in 2012 by Cindy Gallop, a former brand adviser to Coca-Cola and Levi Jeans, which makes money by offering the experience and affect of alternative porn. Gallop’s injunction “Make Love Not Porn” serves as her rallying cry to make contemporary porn feel “real” and “authentic” at the very moment when we must work harder within the neoliberal ideology of the enterprise society and therefore have less time and emotional energy for fulfilling sex. Such circumstances encourage the demand for greater pornographic realism for which consumers must pay; affect is the lubricant that encourages them to pull out their wallets.

Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has acquired an impressive critical reputation and acquired a favored role in British culture as a social commentator. This essay attempts to link the pleasures associated with the trilogy with the politics inscribed in them, and consider both in the context of Pullman's role in the civil society. The essay suggests that The Northern Lights offers pleasures in fantastical and metaphysical possibilities, and social confederacies that potentially offset the affective privations of neoliberalism. These possibilities are set in the context of recent theories of the "enterprise society." The essay draws attention to a number of discontinuities that unfold as the trilogy progresses, and suggests that these undermine the possibilities inherent in the first novel. These discontinuities throw the role of fantasy and alternative universes into question, and reveal the limitations of Pullman's fiction. The essay considers the limit and scope of Pullman's political vision, both as a function of his fiction and his public engagement with social issues, and suggests that he exemplifies Raymond Williams's concept of "bourgeois dissent" in which political critique and a continuing investment in traditional institutions and class hierarchy can be mutually reinforcing.

Gay effeminacy has historically been associated with deferential class identifications, pathologising medical discourses, lingering intimations of self-loathing and restrictively safe and desexed images of our acceptability. It has also, crucially been associated with an extraordinary range of dissident opportunities.

Thirty years of academic and critical scholarship on the subject of gay porn have born witness to significant changes not only in the kinds of porn produced for, and watched by, gay men, but in the modes of production and distribution of that porn, and the legal, economic and social contexts in which it has been made, sold/shared, and watched. Those thirty years have also seen a huge shift in the cultural and political position of gay men, especially in the US and UK, and other apparently 'advanced' democracies: we have moved from pariah status in the late eighties, at the low point of the AIDS crisis in the global 'north', to celebrated symbols of the apparent 'civilization' and social liberalism of the neoconservative and neoliberal governments of that same 'north' in 2015. In the context of these changes, the meanings of gay porn have necessarily also changed; I don't intend to do justice to the full scope of those changes here. But, mindful of John D'Emilio's assertion that lesbians and gay men 'are a product of history…their emergence is associated with the relations of capitalism' (1983, 468), my aim is to consider the current conditions in which porn consumption in gay cultures produces particular kinds of subjectivity. As I shall demonstrate, thirty years of scholarship on the topic of gay porn has produced one striking consensus, which is that gay cultures are especially 'pornified'. Given the wider consensus about the apparent sexualization and pornographication of culture generally (see amongst others: Maddison

This essay aims to explore the relationship between neoliberal ideologies and sexuality, by considering questions of criticality and political agency in relation to pornography. The essay identifies a trend in contemporary porn studies work towards a ‘constrained optimism’ that also expresses a wider deadlock in cultural and media studies. This arises from a need to protect the concept of individual agency against reactionary movements, alongside a tendency to elide the implications of consumerism in neoliberal cultures. Much porn studies work is critical of tendencies in altporn, most significantly around questions of labour and commodification. Yet work in this area also tends to remain invested in the promise of agency, where this agency is a function of the expansion of the technological resources available in a networked culture, the proliferation of choice, and the blurred boundary between consumer and producer. This essay seeks to move beyond this deadlock by drawing on recent work on the concept of the enterprise society, elaborated by Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics, and taken up by writers such as McNay, who have suggested that Foucault’s insight fundamentally challenges the relationship between individual autonomy and political resistance, where that autonomy guarantees not liberty but responsible self-management. The essay considers the figure of the entrepreneurial voyeur, in the light of concepts of immaterial labour offered by Lazzarato and critiqued by McRobbie, and goes on to make a sustained reading of the film Made in Secret in order to map ways in which we might be able to imagine how the affective pleasures of pornography might not simply underwrite alienated and competitive modes of being but might help us to imagine more radical forms of sociality.

This paper identifies concurrent trends in the forms of representation found in contemporary pornography, and in the kinds of ideology produced by the biomedical industry, specifically in relation to the form and function of the penis. The rise of Viagra culture has been described as the second sexual revolution and promises the availability of phallic embodiment for all men. In recent years, with the rise of gonzo genres and independent modes of production and distribution, hard core pornography increasingly offers an industrialized understanding of sexual bodies, and a narrative of sexual acts no longer determined by Kinseyian logic, where detumescence doesn’t exist and penises are always hard, and always large. This paper argues that the logic informing sexual biosciences is pornographic rather than medical, and that the logic informing the pornographic penis is economic rather than libidinal. The paper concludes with an attempt to map a contemporary biopolitics of the penis.

The Edge of Reason: the Myth of Bridget Jones Stephen Maddison & Merl Storr Abstract In this chapter we attempt to uncover some of the political myths that underpin the popularity of the character of Bridget Jones, in both the two novels by Helen Fielding, and in the film of 2001. Our ...

8 Small towns, boys and ivory towers: a naked academic Stephen Maddison Mother will never understand Why you had to leave But the answers you seek Will never be found at home The love that you need Will never be found at home Run away, turn away, run away, turn ...