Susanna Paasonen

Media history is still written largely from national perspectives so that the role of import and export, translations and franchises is seldom foregrounded. On geographically and linguistically limited markets, imported materials have nevertheless been crucial parts of popular print culture. This paper explores the market of ‘sex edutainment’ magazines in 1970s Finland, zooming specifically in on Leikki (‘Play’, 1976), a sex magazine for women translated from the Norwegian Lek (first launched in 1971) that provided knowledge on topics ranging from marriage to masturbation and lesbian desire. Through contextual analysis of Leikki, a marginal publication that has basically faded from popular memory, this article attends to ephemeral and even failed print media in order to account for the heterogeneity of the 1970s sex press market as it intermeshed with sex advice and education. In so doing, it adds new perspectives to a field largely focused on successful periodicals and addresses knowledge gaps resulting from the exclusion of the sex press from mainstream media historiography.

This article examines the appeal of extreme imageries through a 2017 journalistic survey of 2438 participants on Finnish women's approaches to, opinions on and preferences in porn, with a specific emphasis on responses addressing preferences deemed extreme. The respondents regularly positioned these pornographic fantasies in relation to the assumed tastes of other women while also addressing the complex and ambivalent roles that porn played in their ways of making sense of their sexual selves. By focusing on disconnections articulated both towards the category of women and within one's sexual self when accounting for the attractions of extremity, this article also questions the 'will to knowledge' underpinning popular queries into women's pornographic likes, asking how such data can be productively explored without reproducing the binary gender logic that structures it.

Shadowbanning is a light censorship technique used by social media platforms to limit the reach of potentially objectionable content without deleting it altogether. Such content does not go directly against community standards so that it, or the accounts in question, would be outright removed. Rather, these are borderline cases – often ones involving visual displays of nudity and sex. As the deplatforming of sex in social media has accelerated in the aftermath of the 2018 FOSTA/SESTA legislation, sex workers, strippers and pole dancers in particular have been affected by account deletions and/or shadowbanning, with platforms demoting, instead of promoting, their content. Examining the stakes involved in the shadowbanning of sex, we focus specifically on the double standards at play allowing for ‘sexy’ content posted by or featuring celebrities to thrive while marginalizing or weeding out posts by those affiliated with sex work.

This article investigates the affective power of social media by analysing everyday encounters with parenting content among mothers. Drawing on data composed of diaries of social media use and follow-up interviews with six women, we ask how our study participants make sense of their experiences of parenting content and the affective intensities connected to it. Despite the negativity involved in reading and participating in parenting discussions, the participants find themselves wanting to maintain the very connections that irritate them, or even evoke a sense of failure, as these also yield pleasure, joy and recognition. We suggest that the ambiguities addressed in our research data speak of something broader than the specific experiences of the women in question. We argue that they point to the necessity of focusing on, and working through affective ambiguity in social media research in order to gain fuller understanding the complex appeal of platforms and exchanges.

Academic debates on shame and the involuntary networked circulation of naked pictures have largely focused on instances of hacked accounts of female celebrities, on revenge porn, and interconnected forms of slut-shaming. Meanwhile, dick pics have been predominantly examined as vehicles of sexual harassment within heterosexual contexts. Taking a somewhat different approach, this article examines leaked or otherwise involuntarily exposed dick pics of men of notable social privilege, asking what kinds of media events such leaked data assemble, how penises become sites of public interest and attention, and how these bodies may be able to escape circuits of public shaming. By focusing on high-profile incidents on an international scale during the past decade, this article moves from the leaked shots of male politicians as governance through shaming to body-shaming targeted at Harvey Weinstein, to Jeff Bezos's refusal to be shamed through his hacked dick pic, and to an accidentally self-published shaft shot of Lars Ohly, a Swedish politician, we examine the agency afforded by social privilege to slide through shame rather than be stuck in it. By building on feminist media studies and affect inquiry, we attend to the specificities of these attempts to shame, their connections to and disconnections from slut-shaming, and the possibilities and spaces offered for laughter within this all.

The value of print, the value of porn As the distribution of pornography has shifted online, the markets of DVDs and print magazines have drastically shrunk. At the same time, a range of independent and artistic magazines on pornography and sexual cultures has appeared, operating primarily on paper. By focusing on Ménage à trois (Mà3), a Finnish queer-feminist porn magazine (est. 2012) and Phile, a Toronto-based magazine on 'sexual curiosity' (est. 2017), this article inquires after the affordances, appeal, and value of physical print artefacts in a cultural context dominated by the imperatives of digital affordances. Through interviews with editors and designers, we ask how these magazines position themselves vis-à-vis the denominator of pornography in the content they publish and in the uses that they see the magazines as entering. They make it possible to consider both the issue of regional and language-specific reach in independent publishing and the different value that the editorial teams associate with pornography.

Purpose-According to thesaurus definitions, the absurd translates as "ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous"; "extremely silly; not logical and sensible". As further indicated in the Latin root absurdus, "out of tune, uncouth, inappropriate, ridiculous," humor in absurd registers plays with that which is out of harmony with both reason and decency. In this article, the authors make an argument for the absurd as a feminist method for tackling heterosexism. Design/methodology/approach-By focusing on the Twitter account "Men Write Women" (est. 2019), the rationale of which is to share literary excerpts from male authors describing women's experiences, thoughts and appearances, and which regularly broadens into social theater in the user reactions, the study explores the critical value of absurdity in feminist social media tactics. Findings-The study proposes the absurd as a means of not merely turning things around, or inside out, but disrupting and eschewing the hegemonic logic on offer. While both absurd humor and feminist activism may begin from a site of reactivity and negative evaluation, it need not remain confined to it. Rather, by turning things preposterous, ludicrous and inappropriate, absurd laughter ends up somewhere different. The feminist value of absurd humor has to do with both its critical edge and with the affective lifts and spaces of ambiguity that it allows for. Originality/value-Research on digital feminist activism has largely focused on the affective dynamics of anger. As there are multiple affective responses to sexism, our article foregrounds laughter and ambivalence as a means of claiming space differently in online cultures rife with hate, sexism and misogyny.

According to diverse recurrent cultural diagnoses, networked media is atrophying our affective, cognitive and somatic capacities through its distracting, rapid speeds. Echoing critiques of modernity and media technology voiced since the mid-nineteenth century, these accounts are broadly premised on loss in arguing that a general disenchantment is hollowing out our sociability and personal experiences alike. Building on Jane Bennett"s critique of the modern narrative of disenchantment, this article explores ambiguity as a means of resisting totalising accounts of the present, as well as for accounting for the affective complexities involved in our engagements with devices, apps and platforms as these yield different rhythms and experiential horizons of possibility. In doing so, it asks what kinds of figures of the past narratives of loss evoke and what social hierarchies and contextual nuances are effaced when sketching out the mediated present.

In November 2018, after being suspended from Apple's App Store for hosting child pornography, Tumblr announced its decision to ban all NSFW (not safe/suitable for work) content with the aid of machine-learning classification. The decision to opt for strict terms of use governing nudity and sexual depiction was as fast as it was drastic, leading to the quick erasure of subcultural networks developed over a decade. This article maps out platform critiques of and on Tumblr through a combination of visual and digital methods. By analyzing 7306 posts made between November 2018 (when Tumblr announced its new content policy) and August 2019 (when Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic), we explore the key stakes and forms of user resistance to Tumblr "porn ban" and the affective capacities of user-generated content to mobilize engagement.

The so-called attention economy of social media relies on continuous attempts at capturing the ever fleeting and restless attention of users as they click away, move between tabs and refresh pages in the hope of novel titillating, amusing, interesting or distracting content. Its fast speeds and circulations have been associated with perpetual states of distraction where user attention is manipulated for the purposes of data extraction. Zooming in on this landscape, this article inquires after the price of social media as modes of exchange taking place between human and nonhuman actors consisting of individuals, corporations, algorithms and data, regularly within incommensurable scales of value and importance. It addresses the role of affect in the generation of both monetary and personal value, as well as the ambivalent sense of creepiness that the default leakiness of user data entail: here, affect emerges as fuel and motivator of user actions, as well as something that is increasingly tracked, analysed and manipulated as data for corporate profit. The article argues that considerations of price facilitate productive avenues into value alongside, and beyond, analyses of exploitation within new media economy and communicative capitalism.

This article explores shamelessness as a feminist tactic of resistance to online misogyny, hate and shaming within a Nordic context. In our Swedish examples, this involves affective reclaiming of the term “hagga” (hag), which has come to embody shameless femininity and feminist solidarity, as well as the Facebook event “Skamlös utsläckning” (shameless extinction), which extends the solidarity or the hag to a collective of non-men. Our Finnish examples revolve around appropriating derisive terms used of women defending multiculturalism and countering the current rise of nationalist anti-immigration policy and activism across Web platforms, such as “kukkahattutäti” (aunt with a flower hat) and “suvakkihuora” (“overtly tolerant whore”). Drawing on Facebook posts, blogs and discussion forums, the article conceptualizes the affective dynamics and intersectional nature of online hate against women and other others. More specifically, we examine the dynamics of shaming and the possibilities of shamelessness as a feminist tactic of resistance. Since online humor often targets women, racial others and queers, the models of resistance that this article uncovers add a new stitch to its memetic logics. We propose that a networked politics of reclaiming is taking shape, one using collective imagination and wit to refuel feminist communities.

This article makes a theoretical argument for the productivity of the notions of playfulness and play in feminist and queer studies of sexuality. Defined as a mode of sensory openness and drive towards improvisation, playfulness can be seen as central to a range of sexual activities from fumbling, random motions to elaborate, rehearsed scenarios. Play in the realm of sexuality involves experimentations with what bodies can feel and do. As pleasurable activity practiced for its own sake, play involves the exploration of different bodily capacities, appetites, orientations and connections. Understood in this vein, play is not the opposite of seriousness or simply synonymous with fun. Driven by the quest for bodily pleasure, play may just as well be strained, dark and hurtful in the forms that it takes and the sensory intensities that it engenders. This article argues that the mode of playfulness and acts of play allow for pushing previously perceived and imagined horizons of embodied potentiality in terms of sexual routines and identifications alike. It examines the productive avenues that the notions of playfulness and play open up in conceptualising the urgency of sexual pleasures, the contingency of desires and their congealment in categories of identity.

With the ubiquitous presence and accessibility of online pornography and the gradual yet drastic rise of porn studies as an interdisciplinary field of investigation, pornography has become a recurrent theme in media studies, gender studies, sociology, and cultural studies curricula. Existing literature on pornography and university pedagogy nevertheless makes it evident that this is not simply a topic among others but a potential source of tension in the classroom, within the university, with the media and public opinion. Drawing on my own experiences of teaching pornography in Finnish universities since 2005, this article examines the reasons for including pornography in the curriculum (the basic question as to “why”) and the different ways of doing this (the questions as to “how” and “what”). This pedagogical focus is tied to exploration of both the ethical concerns and affective dynamics involved in bringing porn to the classroom, namely the questions of how the affective dynamics of pornographic materials may be handled and how this translates as, or connects to academic teaching as affective labor.

The uses of social media can be seen as driven by a search for affective intensity translating as moments of paying attention, no matter how brief these instances may be. In the framework of attention economy, attention has been discussed as a valuable commodity whereas distraction, involving both pleasurable entertainment and dissatisfactory disorientation, has been associated with cognitive overload and the erosive lack of focus. By discussing clickbait sites and Facebook in particular, this paper inquires after the value of distractions in and for social media. Understanding distraction, like attention, as both affective and cognitive, this article explores its role in the affective capitalism of clicks, likes, and shares. Rather than conceptualizing attention and distraction as mutually opposing, I argue for conceptualizing them as the two sides of the same coin, namely as rhythmic patterns in the affective fabric particular to the contemporary landscape of ubiquitous networked connectivity.

This article draws on a memory-­‐work project on the childhood experiences and memories of pornography in Finland to argue that the autobiographical younger self used in these reminiscences is a creature distinct from the cultural figure of a child at risk, and that the forms of learning connected to pornography are more diverse and complex than those limited to sexual acts alone. The notion of an asexual child susceptible to media effects remains detached from people's accounts of their childhood activities, experiences and competences. By analyzing these, it is possible to critically reexamine the hyperbolic concerns over the pornification and sexualization of culture.

Network connections failing, logins not functioning, and servers not responding evoke both affective sharpness and disturbing itchiness that cannot be easily smoothed out. This article draws on forty-five student essays describing the sensations evoked by technological failure and explores them as vignettes into the affective dynamics evoked by constant connectivity to, and dependency on, network media. By asking how the essays articulate and configure the notion of " the user, " the article suggests that devices and applications are the loci of potentiality that may or may not be available and which impact—increase, sustain, or diminish—the users' capacity to act. Furthermore, it argues that visceral responses to technological failure are intimately tied to the uncertainty and instability of users' sense of control in ways that call into question the very notion of " the user " itself.

Juhannuksena 2012 We Love Helsinki-kollektiivin avoimella Facebook-tapahtumasivulla käytiin kiivasta keskustelua heteronormatiivisuudesta, syrjinnästä, klubikulttuureista, suvaitsevaisuudesta ja suvaitsemattomuudesta. Viisi päivää kestänyttä debattia kommentoitiin laajalti sosiaalisessa mediassa ja se nousi jopa pienimuotoiseksi kansalliseksi uutiseksi. Artikkeli esittelee debatin keskeisiä teemoja painottuen verkkokeskustelujen tunnedynamiikan käsitteellistämiseen. Aineistona on arkistoitu, 728 kommentin mittainen juhannustanssi-keskusteluketju sekä sitä koskevat uutis- ja blogitekstit. Verkkokeskustelujen intensiteetti kasvaa nopeasti komment-tien kärjistyessä ja tunneilmaisujen roihahdellessa. Artikkeli esittää, että tällainen affektiivinen tahmeus saa kävijät viipymään keskustelun parissa ja osallistumaan siihen: niinpä myös toisten käyttäjien tietoinen provo-sointi eli trollaus kasvattaa keskustelun tahmeutta. Samalla nettikeskustelun tunnedynamiikat liittyvät myös nettialustojen – tässä tapauksessa Facebookin – rajoituksiin, mahdollisuuksiin ja erityispiirteisiin. Artikkeli erittelee juhannuskeskustelun dynamiikan erityispiirteitä väittäen tunneintensiteettien sekä ajavan verkkokeskusteluja, fragmentoivan niitä että kiinnittävän käyttäjiä tiettyihin alustoihin, ketjuihin ja ryhmiin. Netin käyttäjälojaalisuuteen ja huomiotalouteen yhdistetty termi "tahmea sisältö " onkin hedelmällisesti yhdistettävissä affektiivisen tahmeuden käsitteeseen nettisisältöjen koukuttavien – niin viihdyttävien kuin häiritsevienkin – piirteiden analyysissä.

The blurred boundaries between producers and consumers and the increased centrality of user-generated content have been seen as characteristic of Web 2.0 and contemporary media culture at large. In the context of online pornography, this has been manifested in the popularity of amateur pornography and alt porn sites that encourage user interaction. Netporn criticism has recently formed an arena for thinking through such transformations. Aiming to depart from the binary logic characterizing porn debates to date, netporn criticism nevertheless revokes a set of divisions marking the amateur apart from the professional, the alternative from the mainstream and the independent from the commercial. At the same time, such categories are very much in motion on Web 2.0 platforms. Addressing amateur pornography in terms of immaterial and affective labor, this article argues for the need to find less dualistic frameworks for conceptualizing pornography as an element of media culture.

In a media culture saturated with depictions of young, or at least youngish, fit and able bodies, the parameters of sexual desirability appear to be very narrowly drawn. For its part, pornography has been perennially accused of its narrow and stereotypical cast of body types, despite both the factual heterogeneity of sub-categories and fringes that make up the genre, or

This chapter explores some of the friction that emerges between the work of cultural studies and the posthuman turn in cultural theory. Despite the dramatic urgency suggested by yet another theoretical "turn", a move beyond the uniquely human has long been underway in cultural inquiry, from actor-network theory to critical animal studies and conceptualisations of cybernetic embodiments (e.g. Haraway 1987; Zylinska 2002). The interconnected yet also divergent strands of new materialist, posthuman, nonhuman and post-humanist theory and object-oriented ontology all involve fundamental challenges to intellectual inquiry focusing primarily on human action. In fact, they question the very notion of culture as starting point for intellectual inquiry, given its exclusively human bent and focus. This involves an obvious point of friction in terms of the practice and tradition of cultural studies, focused as it is on discursive formations, social relations of power and resistance, politics of identity and difference within contemporary culture. Cultural studies have, by and large, been interested in what people do.

In an era of clickbait journalism, Twitter storms, and viral social media campaigns varying from social protest to commodity promotion, it has become strikingly clear that networked communications are not merely about critical rational exchange or functional information retrieval, but equally-and perhaps even more explicitly-an issue of affective exchanges and connections of both the fleeting and more lasting kind. As argued in this chapter, the notion of affective resonance provides a means of accounting for encounters with the world in which bodies move from one state to another, and possibly become transformed in the process. This conceptualization is hardly specific to online phenomena as such, and it is used here to explore affective encounters between people, networks, interfaces, apps, devices, digital images, sounds, and texts in the context of social media. Moving from my own considerations of resonance in connection with online pornography to examinations of the role, both pronounced and not, that affect has played in Internet research, this chapter asks how affect matters and makes things matter in a contemporary media landscape driven by the quests for attention, viral circulation, and affective stickiness.

The so-called affective turn has been diagnosed in cultural inquiry for soon two decades. In studies of gender, media, and communication, it has allowed for investigations of public sentiment, the force and appeal of media images, texts, and sounds, as well as the entanglement of human and nonhuman bodies in everyday practices of communication. In its diverse manifestations, the turn to affect has shifted analytical attention away from issues of representation and psychology towards questions of materiality and sensation. It has also challenged rational models of communication, as suggested in the influential notion of the public sphere. Considerations of affective online publics formed through public accounts of sentiment, the melodramatic templates of reality television, or the affective appeal of fake news all suggest the importance of expanding lines of inquiry into the interconnections of sense and sensibility, the semiotic and the somatic. At the same time, studies of affect remain divided in their theoretical approaches, from new materialist interest in abstract, pre-personal qualities of affect to more psychological accounts of embodied affective capacities and states. The turn to affect has been critiqued for short-circuiting considerations of social power just as it has been seen as affording novel points of entrance into understanding the affective ecologies of ubiquitous network connectivity. In their focus on bodies encountering and affecting one another, considerations of affect foreground materiality and, in doing so, push against inquiries into gender, media, and communication that address human actors alone.

As a media genre, pornography aims to move the bodies of those watching, reading, and listening through depictions of bodies moving. Such motion, or animation of bodies, can be conceptualized through the concept of resonance as a dynamic sensory relation of varying intensity, rhythm, and speed where the affective and the emotional cohere and which becomes registered in bodies as they move from one state to another. This chapter argues for the productivity of the concept of resonance over that of identification in studies of pornography through an exploration of animated pornography. In their depictions of monstrous, impossible bodies, hyperbolic scenes of domination and submission, Japanese hentai and 3D monster porn both follow the representational conventions and push them on overdrive. The stiffness of character's motions and gestures, combined with their affectless facial expressions and regularly fantastic embodiments leave little for viewers to literally identify with. Since that which people enjoy in pornography may be disconnected from their sexual preferences, as practiced with other people, the notion of resonance opens up avenues for addressing gaps and frictions emerging between pornographic preferences and sexual identities. In doing so, resonance helps in conceptualizing the appeal of pornography beyond the notion of identification.

Monster (car)toon porn is a genre of three dimensional (3D) computer-generated pornography that focuses on depictions of sexual encounters of the impossible and improbable kind. In monster toon porn, demons, zombies and hulk-like creatures copulate with elves, Hollywood starlet look-alikes and female game characters, huge bodies penetrate tiny ones and human-like bodies sprout novel sexual organs. Broadly building on the combined traditions of Western cartoon porn, Japanese hentai and ero-manga (pornographic anime and comics) and machinima (3D videos generated in real time with game engines), monster toon porn is often classified as hentai, independent of its factual geographical origins. Its imageries are characteristically fantastic and excessive in their displays of spectacularly incompatible bodies engaging in penetrative sex, in its scenarios of control and submission and in its displays of lust and disgust seemingly knowing no bounds. These images and videos originate from the efforts of amateur fans, commercial studios and crowdfunded non-profit enterprises alike. This chapter explores monster toon porn in terms of both its irregular embodiments and their uncanny lack of affect, and considers how these nonhuman displays of sexualised and gendered dynamics of control connect to game culture. These considerations are tied in with a discussion on the specificities of digitally generated and distributed pornography in terms of media technology, labour and ethics. Specific focus will be paid on the oeuvre of Studio FOW specialised in crowdfunded Source Filmmaker (SFM) hentai monster videos set in game worlds.

In discourses academic and popular, pornography stands for that which disturbs: it disturbs individual people, social norms, boundaries between the public and the private, various codes of appropriate behaviour and good taste. Feminist scholars have investigated pornography primarily in terms of its disturbing, enraging and repugnant aspects. Holding pornographic texts, their producers and consumers at an arm's length, the affective range of analysis has been mainly confined to the negative (see Paasonen 2007). Recently, the increased cultural visibility of all kinds of pornographies affected by online distribution, as well as the ubiquity of popular representations citing the codes and conventions of soft-core porn, have given rise to claims of not wanting to be disturbed by pornography (Rossi 2007). While these claims for consumer agency are undoubtedly justified, it is also important to ask more precisely what is considered disturbing in pornography, and what such disturbances may affect. Following Roland Barthes' discussion on photography (1981: 99), one might also consider being disturbed as something connected to the appeal of, attraction to or even fondness for specific images – that is, a broader and more complex range of affect.

The chapter is partly motivated by the fact that public debates, moral panics, articulations of offence, and studies of online pornography have tended to focus on visual and audiovisual examples. The tendency to understand porn in terms of the visual is common, yet this ignores the fact that the history of pornography has largely been one concerning the written word. It also fails to account for the diversity of contemporary practices. While erotica writing has proliferated online since the mid-1990s, it has failed to evoke any significant public uproar. On the contrary, there has been some enthusiasm about the possibilities for exploring sexual expression and fantasy in “safe,” anonymous, and textual online spaces - particularly for women  (Leiblum, 2001: 398; Cumberland, 2004). In contrast to audiovisual pornography which is, at least to a degree, anchored in an indexical relationship to that which has been acted out in front of the camera, erotica -- often authored by women - has been understood more as a realm of fantasy, play, and experimentation and linked to aesthetic notions of quality (Juffer, 1998: 7; Kibby, 2001). Definitions of erotica and pornography are often political, aesthetic, and strategic, but here I consider them as categories with particular kinds of dynamics and affective power, and ones which invite and receive particular kinds of reader responses.

The cultural position of pornography has gone through evident and drastic transformations during the past decades. These transformations involve an increase in the public visibility of all kinds of pornographies that have, since the 1990s, been increasingly distributed through online platforms, as well as a wave of academic and popular titles diagnosing the mainstreaming of porn and sex in contemporary culture characterized as " pornified, " " porned, " and " raunchy. " 1 This chapter addresses these recent developments within the pornographic, as well as diagnoses thereof, from two intertwining perspectives. It starts by asking whether the term " pornification " can be put into productive analytical use that would not efface the complexity of the cultural tendencies involved, or truncate the potential meaning of the term " pornography " itself. This is followed by a brief discussion of the binary legacy of porn studies as it connects to diagnoses of pornification. The second part of the article investigates how the genre of porn has been transformed in the course of its digital production and distribution, and what challenges contemporary porn poses for scholarly analysis that still remains largely rooted in studies of print media, film, and video productions distributed as material commodities (such as magazines and DVDs). In sum, this chapter asks how transformations in the visibility and ubiquity of pornography have been diagnosed, how the genre itself has been transformed, and what kinds of modifications within scholarly investigation all this may necessitate.

Pornography is generic and predictable even in comparison with other popular genres. Familiar (stock) characters, phrases, scenarios, acts, expressions, shots and framings are repeated from one set of images or videos to another, from commercial to amateur productions and numerous things in-between. All this tends to involve a low degree of surprise. To the degree that repetition, predictability and hyperbole can indeed be considered as generic features of pornography, their role begs for closer consideration that goes beyond stating the obvious – namely that such characteristics do exist. This article draws on a content analysis of a sample of 366 porn spam email messages in an attempt to chart some of the key generic features of commercial heteroporn and its gendered underpinnings, as made accessible through this particular set of material. The article both investigates the specific modality of pornography and argues for the need to resist literal readings of its meaning. In the first part, I address the sample of porn spam email in order to map out some of the main generic features and dynamics of commercial pornography. The second part takes a broader look at online pornography and the ways in which the generic features and dynamics of porn (as mapped out in the first part) are played out in the case of viral videos displaying extreme porn, as well as what kinds of challenges are involved in making sense of such videos. All in all, the article suggests that feminist analyses should push beyond readings of pornography that are either literal (as in reading relations of control displayed in pornography as exemplary of social power relations, one-to-one) or symbolic (as in interpreting pornography as symptomatic of an ideology).

The figure of cyberspace, first introduced by cyberpunk author William Gibson in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome (or, depending of interpretation, his 1984 novel Neuromancer),
was soon adapted to describing the communicative and experiential possibilities of the Internet. More than a medium, the Internet of the early 1990s was seen to open up as a space,
an alternative reality or a society of the mind invested with novel possibilities of networking and exchange.i While cyberspace made its way to, and established its position in discourses both popular and academic in the English-speaking countries—and North America in particular—the term did not gain similar transparency elsewhere. In my native country of
Finland, cyberspace translations and various cyber prefixes were used up until the mid-1990s but the term has since become somewhat anachronistic and is uncommonly used.
Consequently, “cyberculture studies” require conceptual analysis and contextualization when discussed in the Finnish university classroom. In such moments of translation and reflection, research terminology loses its transparency: being made strange by local terminology, it is reframed as specific, limited and even problematic.

Derived from cybernetics—the study of communications and control in machines and organic systems—cyberspace is exemplary of how terminology travels across national and
disciplinary boundaries, crossing different genres and contexts of writing and publishing in the process. As terms travel, they are reworked, debated and redefined. Drawing on Mieke
Bal’s work on traveling concepts, this chapter investigates the travels and meanings of cyberspace as a research concept, as well as the kinds of shifts that have occurred during its voyages from casual use to research practices and back.ii Using the Finnish context as a point of departure and comparison, the chapter investigates the applicability of Anglo-American conceptualizations and the kinds of Internets that they give rise to.

In what follows, we investigate what the 1970s as a decade and pornography as a genre and industry are made to stand for in American films reminiscing porno-chic – how this golden era is constructed and for what ends it is remembered. Firstly, we argue that the 1970s are framed as an era of innocence, authenticity, and struggle for freedom of speech while structuring out perspectives not fitting in the narrative. These selective framings are intimately tied to our second question concerning the role of nostalgia in films depicting the 1970s. Thirdly, we address the meaning of temporal distance in porn histories. Films produced some three decades ago are categorized as classics in ways that further the selective styles of remembering and narrating porn histories. Shot on 35mm film, as opposed to 8mm film or video, these productions are identifiable through their producers, actors and directors whose biographies have been central material for films remembering the 1970s.

On November 22, 2004, bidding closed on eBay item #5535890757, “Virgin Mary In Grilled Cheese NOT A HOAX! LOOK & SEE!” The winning bid was 28,000 USD. The listing’s narrative indicated that the seller, Mrs. Diana Duyser of Florida, had made the grilled cheese sandwich in 1994. When she took a bite she saw grilled in the bread’s surface the apparent face of the Virgin Mary. Duyser packaged the sandwich in cotton balls, placed it in a plastic box, and kept it by her bed for the next decade. According to Duyser, it never molded or crumbled and she came to see it as invested with miraculous powers—or “blessings”—that over the years helped her win a total of 70,000 USD at a nearby casino. Duyser had to list the sandwich for auction a second time, as eBay removed the first listing, believing it to be a hoax. During the first auction bidding reached 22,000 USD. On second listing, after attracting considerable publicity, the sandwich received close to two million hits and was purchased by the internet casino GoldenPalace.com, a company known for its flashy promotional stunts and history of eBay purchases. 
Almost immediately, the sandwich inspired hundreds of spin-off listings ranging from Virgin Mary in Grilled Cheese (VMGC) domain names and e-mail addresses to display cases and rotating holy shrines. There were offers for specialty sandwiches and foods, including Hello Kitty cheese melts, toast in which one could see both Mary and Elvis (buyer’s picture optional), and a burned fish stick with the apparition of Jesus. Sellers offered VMGC T-shirts—“I Ate the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese . . . It was Sacrilicious!” “Got Mary?” “Is Heaven’s Kitchen Out of Cheese and Bread?” “The Father, The Son, and The Holy Toast”— along with the image of the sandwich printed on coffee mugs, bumper stickers, lunch boxes, tote bags, Christmas ornaments, and thong underwear. The VMGC inspired numerous arts and crafts items—watercolors, paintings, digital prints, statues, and drawings—and to attract notice and turn up on site searches, a number of sellers listed non-VMGC items with the disclaimer “Not Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich.” The VMGC auction was reported internationally as a peculiar internet incident and an oddity characteristic of U.S. popular culture.  In other words, the sandwich was an instant case of both eBay folklore and Americana. As was the case with earlier attempts to sell souls on eBay, the item quickly became famous: peculiar eBay listings can attract intense interest during their period of sale, but they also tend to be quickly forgotten. The VMGC, however, has enjoyed a more long-standing fame—in this sense, it has transcended the temporal limitations of eBay auctions.
The incident exemplifies a fusion of several categories that may appear incompatible at first glance: the sacred and the commercial, the sublime and the banal, the reverential and the parodic. In order to understand this fusion—or melting, given the material properties of the item—this essay explores the mutability of commodity value from four intertwining perspectives: commodified Christian iconography, the relationship between the sublime and the banal, eBay as a peer-to-peer value system, and how acts of interpretation allow a mundane snack to be read as a divine sign.

Since the 1990s, both journalists and scholars have greeted the accumulation of pornographies deemed alternative to the mainstream on online platforms with notable enthusiasm. While some critics might identify them as white-washing pornography as socially acceptable and hip without challenging its basic tenets, the most visible framing has been a much more positive one. Alt and indie porn have been seen to counter “porn industry’s images, ethics, and business practices” (Mies, 2006) and therefore to alter the landscape of the pornographic as we have come to know it. 

Alt porn involving the display of non-standard subcultural styles began circulating in print in the early 1990s (e.g. Blue Blood, est. 1992) yet gained broader attention with web sites such as Gothic Sluts (launched in 1999), Suicide Girls (2001) and Burning Angel (2002). The denominator “alt” refers to subcultural identifications, body styles and aesthetics that become marked as such against the bulk of mainstream pornography. At the same time, the mainstream has never been a particularly clear point of reference and it is even more difficult to pin down and identify in the context of contemporary online porn: on the one hand, the mainstream is ubiquitous and rather elusive, on the other. This article investigates the boundary work around the categories of the alternative and the mainstream by asking, what kinds of aesthetics, values and associations are clustered around the concepts, what kinds of norms, divisions and dynamics are at play in them and what analytical leverage they may have in investigating online pornography. By focusing on the alternative, the aim is equally to probe the mainstream.

Hyvän komedian tarkoituksena on saada yleisö nauramaan. Hyvä kauhuelokuva nostattaa katsojan niskakarvat pystyyn ja saa tämän kämmenet hikoamaan. Hyväksi koettu porno puolestaan kiihottaa. Se, minkä yksi kokee kiihottavaksi, kuitenkin ällöttää toista ja huvittaa kolmatta neljännen painiskellessa kiinnostuksen ja ärtymyksen, uteliaisuuden, kyllästyksen ja nolostuksen tapaisten ristiriitaisten tuntemusten parissa. Kiihotus ja ällötys, huvitus ja ärsytys saattavat nivoutua toisiinsa niin peruuttamattomasti, ettei niiden välille voi tehdä selkeää eroa. Pornoa saatetaan myös katsoa enemmän ällistellen kuin kiihottuen. Pornoon liittyy se paradoksi, että yhtäältä kaikki oletettavasti tietävät, miksi pornoa katsotaan, mitä se on ja mitä se merkitsee: porno esittää seksiä, pyrkii kiihottamaan ja toimii masturbaatiovirikkeenä. Toisaalta pornoa ja sen kokemuksia on kuitenkin vaikea määritellä. Olen itse taipuvainen epäilemään, ettemme välttämättä tiedä pornosta kovinkaan paljon, vaan pikemminkin oletamme kaikenlaisia asioita niin pornon tekijöistä ja esiintyjistä kuin sen kuluttajistakin vaivaantumatta aina ankkuroimaan näitä oletuksia empiiriseen todistusaineistoon. Porno lajityyppinä Pornolla on monenlaisia määritelmiä. Ensimmäisen mukaan porno määrittyy aiheiden ja tyyliensä kautta seksuaalisesti eksplisiittisinä, sukuelimiä ja seksiakteja esittelevinä teksteinä, kuvina tai elokuvina. Toinen määritelmä yhdistää pornon tekijöiden aikomuksiin ja intentioihin sinä, mikä pyrkii kiihottamaan seksuaalisesti. Kolmas mahdollinen määrittelytapa liittyy kokemuksiin: tässä näkökulmassa porno on sitä, mikä kiihottaa lukijaansa tai katsojaansa seksuaalisesti. Määrittelyt ovat korostetun liukuvia ja epämääräisiä, sillä tekijöiden pyrkimykset eivät välttämättä välity ja vastaanottajat kykenevät kiihottumaan mitä moninaisimmista kuvista ja teksteistä. Tässä kirjassa viittaan pornolla historiallisesti rakentuneeseen mediakulttuurin lajityyppiin. Vaikka esimerkiksi Pompeijin seinämaalaukset määritellään joskus pornoksi, tarkoitan käsitteellä teollisen ajan massatuotettua ja laajalle yleisölle kohdistettua lajityyppiä. Historiallista rajausta puoltaa myös se, ettei pornografian uudissanaa tunnettu ennen 1800-lukua (sekä Pompeijin vasta löydettyjen seinämaalausten herättämää kohua ja niiden edellyttämiä sensuuritoimia). Pornografian käsite kehiteltiin 1800-luvun puolivälissä kreikan sanoista pornē (prostituoitu) ja graphein (kirjoittaa tai tallentaa). Etymologisesti se tarkoittaa siis prostituoitujen kuvaamista. (Kendrick 1997.)

The changing cultural role, visibility and meaning of pornography, particularly its increased accessibility and the sociocultural reverberations that this is seen to hold, have been lively topics of public debate in most Western countries throughout the new millennium. Concerns are routinely yet passionately voiced especially over the ubiquity of sexual representations flirting with the codes of pornography in different fields of popular media and children's exposure to hardcore materials that are seen to grow increasingly extreme and violent. At the same time, the production, distribution and consumption have undergone notable transformations with the ubiquity of digital cameras and online platforms. Not only is pornography accessible in unprecedented scales but it is also available in more diverse shapes and forms than ever to date. All this has given rise to journalistic and academic diagnoses on the pornification and sexualisation of culture which, despite their notable mutual differences, aim to conceptualize transformations in the visibility of sexually explicit media content and its broader socio-cultural resonances.