Home on the Rage: Nudity, celebrity, and ordinariness in the Home Girls/Blokes pages

Barcan, Ruth

doi:10.1080/713657710

Cited by 26 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The sexual home-videos I study only go further with the same logic of the commercial 'reality porn', namely the 'eroticization of the idea of reality itself': Authenticity itself has become an 'erotic stimulant'. Like the Reality genres in general, these documentary videos extract pleasure from the meeting point of indexicality and intimacy, quasi-scientific accuracy and voyeuristic pleasure (Barcan, 2002;Dovey, 2000). If sex was indeed integrated into the economy of mediated-experiences, then watching videos/photos may be seen as a secondary-consumption of the same sexual encounter, thus a more efficient/economic exploitation of the encounter, related to the secondary-consumption of vacations through photos and souvenirs.…”

Section: A Typology Of Photographed Sexmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Modern sexuality has been turned into a reflexive rational project of selfimprovement (even if, like reflexivity in general, sexual reflexivity is characteristic of habituses of specific classes and groups; Adams, 2006). Women's magazines, for instance, present sexuality as a form of psychological, bodily and emotional work, a process of never-ending self-improvement (Barcan, 2000). Utilizing a camera for this project is a self-initiated technique of self-improvement and self-surveillance, creatively taking sexual reflexivity in unpredicted directions, unguided by cultural authorities like self-help literature.…”

Section: Knowledge Assessment and Self-improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Going to bed with a camera

Schwarz

2010

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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Many sexual encounters are nowadays photographed by the participants. The paper examines the photographed sex in the historical contexts of the visualization of sexuality, pleasure and desire; and the new norms of photographed self-documentation. Based on research conducted in Israel, I show that photographed sex produces new sorts of not only pleasure, but knowledge: about one's self, partner, sexuality and relationship. This "objective", visual knowledge is often privileged over subjective, haptic knowledge. Photography also introduces new peformativities, encourage borrowing from media-representations of sex and rational self-improvement.Sex has always been a site for production of pleasure and knowledge, yet the kinds of pleasure and knowledge produced are historically contingent. For example, as Foucault demonstrated, the quest to extract hidden truths concerning one's core of subjectivity from one's sexuality and establish subjectivity as sexuality's effect is emphatically modern. This article surveys contemporary practices of non-commercial sex photography in Israel. Video-and still-photography of sexual encounters has gradually become a mainstream practice. This paper explores how it turns sexuality into a production site of visual (and in some senses objective) knowledge produced by prosthetic vision-aids, transcending the subjective-somatic knowledge traditionally associated with carnal knowledge.The study relies on online self-completed questionnaires. Respondents were recruited by messages left in Israeli sexuality-oriented web-forums, and by e-mail (in a snowball method, asking people to forward the request). This method was aimed at obtaining a large and heterogeneous group of respondents despite the topic's sensitivity. 60 respondents who were engaged in photographed sex filled the questionnaire (31 females, 29 males). They were asked detailed open questions concerning practices of sex-life documentation, archiving, sharing and viewing/watching the materials, and the subjective/emotional aspects of these practices. The data refers almost exclusively to mundane "home mode" photographed-sex (for partners' and self-consumption), which appears as much more common than "home porn" par excellence, aimed at wide audiences (mentioned only by one male respondent). The respondents' ages ranged from 18-50, ca three-fourths heterosexuals (others declared themselves as 'mostly-straight', 'bisexual', 'queer', etc.). Although representing various classes and occupations, the middle classes (hi-tech, academic, artistic, and managerial occupations) are over-represented. The survey data was supplemented by excerpts from in-depth interviews and other surveys conducted for a wider project on the sociology of photography, not focused on sexuality.On the theoretical level, I wish to analyze practices of photographed sex in terms of their 'relation to the formation of a sensorium' (Hirshchkind, 2001) and production of knowledge. While practice theory made great progress in jettisoning culture-as-text models and intention...

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Section: A Typology Of Photographed Sexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Knowledge Assessment and Self-improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%