Call for Papers: Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies
and Technology
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Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies
to be published March 2017 edited by Alison Winch, Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim.
We are looking for 7000 word completed essays by 31st
December 2015
In what ways does media convergence culture represent,
intervene in, exploit and enable intimate relations? How is intimacy being
reconfigured under neoliberalism?
On the one hand we are living in atomized and
individualistic times where relationships are increasingly strategic and
competitive. On the other the media has become, as Beverly Skeggs argues,
intensely intimate. This special issue on mediated intimacies aims to explore
how understandings of intimacy are (re)constructed and experienced,
particularly in digital cultures. In addition, we are interested in the ways in
which the apparently alienated entrepreneurial self is constructed through and
by forging intimate connections and simultaneously how these networks are mined
and monetized by corporate culture.
This special issue of Journal of Gender Studies is developed
from a symposium held in July 2014 on Mediated Intimacies where the speakers
explored, among other topics, girls’ online friendships, ‘expert’ sex advice in
printed media, male seduction communities, and how pornography reconceptualises
the very idea of intimacy itself.
Potential papers could explore the affective dimensions of
intimate practices reflecting the pleasures and pains of life lived under
neoliberalism, including how precarity and class impact on the ways in which
intimacy is forged. Because digital culture is primarily corporate driven
(Taylor 2014) we are interested in how user-generated media employs
self-branding strategies. For example, in the refashioning of the body or
gendered and sexual identities, or the ways in which intimacy can be a form of
self-promotion.
Feminist and queer perspectives seek to expand the reach of
what is constituted as belonging, love, connection and intimacy. Whereas
recession culture has reestablished normative gender categories (Negra and
Tasker 2014) contemporary digital cultures have the potential to challenge and
rework gender and sexual identities (McGlotten 2013). This issue hopes to
explore these productive tensions.
Potential papers could also explore how sexuality, sex,
sexual knowledges and sexual pleasure function by looking, for example, at
Do-It-Yourself porn, sexual subcultures and alternative sex practices. A final
consideration underpinning this issue is how different intimacies intersect
along axes of class, race, disability, age and geographical location.
Possible topics could include:
- adapting and resisting gendered and sexed identities
- forging new normative gendered identities
- mediatised kinship (families, parenthood and fertility)
- geolocation technology
- dating and hook up apps, sex dating and relationship cultures
- selfies
- role of experts (e.g. sex advisors and agony aunts), including their changing meaning in peer-driven contexts
- mediated romance
- fitness apps and body culture
- use of social networking sites, including instagram, Facebook, Twitter
- self-branding
- the mediation of friendship
- rebranding feminism
- pornography
- monetization of intimacy, including big data, content generation and PR/advertising
Please send 7000 word completed essays by 31st December 2015
through Scholar One Manuscripts: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjgs20/current.
Please direct enquiries to Alison Winch (a.winch@mdx.ac.uk<mailto:a.winch@mdx.ac.uk><mailto:a.winch@mdx.ac.uk<mailto:a.winch@mdx.ac.uk>>), Feona Attwood
(f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk<mailto:f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk><mailto:f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk<mailto:f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk>>) and Jamie
Hakim (j.hakim@uea.ac.uk<mailto:j.hakim@uea.ac.uk><mailto:j.hakim@uea.ac.uk<mailto:j.hakim@uea.ac.uk>>)
Publication schedule:
31 December 2015: Papers to peer reviewers
March 2016: Comments to authors
June 2016: Authors final revisions
September 2016: Final acceptance
