The price of pulchritude, the cost of concupiscence: how to have sex in late modernity

Dowsett, Gary W.

doi:10.1080/13691058.2014.959563

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(16 reference statements)

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“…The phallus (i.e. the penis)—the male sexual organ—forms an important aspect of sexual practices and gender relations (see Butler, 1993; Dowsett, 2015; Ratele, 2011) and raises questions about choices, i.e. what is the penis, what form should it take, and who has (owns) it?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phallocentricism, female penile choices, and the use of sex toys in Ghana

Fiaveh

2018

Sexualities

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Although the penis forms an important aspect of sexual practices, we know little about how women and men construct the penis in relation to sex and gender in Africa. In this exploratory study from urban Ghana with 34 interviewees, I argue that the changing notions of sex and the penis, in terms of the form they take and in terms of ownership, offer women and men the space to negotiate sexual scripts and to highlight women’s penile preferences. The findings show that while women and men emphasize a biological representation of the penis (due to cultural and religious values), there are nuanced narratives that also acknowledge the social and symbolic importance of the penis to include self-sexual gratification and the use of sex toys. The study contests notions that project female vulnerability vis-a-vis male dominance in matters of sex and that project female sexual choices in Africa.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phallocentricism, female penile choices, and the use of sex toys in Ghana

Fiaveh

2018

Sexualities

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“…This shift from the taxonomic preoccupation of early-modernity and its pathologisation of sexual deviance to the sexualisation of healthy living has been a dramatic achievement. One must give some credit to second-wave feminist and gay/lesbian/queer activism and scholarship for that achievement, but much is also due to amoral nature of the capitalist commodification of things sexual (see Dowsett 2014). However, that achievement may not 536 G.W.…”

Section: Whither Health?mentioning

confidence: 95%

“…There are two related fields: sexology and critical sexuality studies. The first, as noted earlier, refers to scholarship that regards sexuality as a biological/genetic, medical or psycho-neurological phenomenon and privileges cause-and-effect origins in an ahistorical entity (Dowsett 2014). This paper arises from the second of these, from scholarship that explores a social, cultural, historical and political ontology.…”

Section: Sex In/as the Popular Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 97%

‘And next, just for your enjoyment!’: sex, technology and the constitution of desire

Dowsett

2014

Culture, Health & Sexuality

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In the 1976 sci-fi film Logan's Run, actor Michael York, relaxing in a fetching caftan after a day hunting 'Runners', logs-in to the 'Circuit', a de- and re-materialisation technology that allows those seeking sex to select partners. Logan's first candidate, a young man, is passed over with a smile. The second is co-star Jenny Agutter; she is accepted and we join a sexual ride in the future. Online dating sites such as Gaydar® and RSVP® would seem to have a long way to go to achieve that, and Microsoft™ needs some fast apps development to get us there. Against this background, this paper examines some starting points in our fascination with technosex, long before the Internet, in books and magazines, the creative arts and other media and cultural forms. It focuses upon gay men's contribution to this fascination, and looks at the queering of heterosexuality and the part technology has played in that process. Online technologies are examined, particularly in relation to the 'publicisation' of sexual life and to shifts in sexual identity and practice related to changing processes of sexual objectification, self-objectification and subjectification. Finally, the transformation of sex into health and healthy sex is discussed.

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“…Social media, as Hjorth and Arnold (2013, p. 125) argue, 'constitute a new socio-technical institutionalisation of public intimacy'. Some scholars have suggested that new modes of intimacy and visual sexual practices are emerging due to a confluence of social, historical, material and design 'actants' (Race, 2015;Dowsett, 2015;Cover, this volume;Hart, this volume). In more mundane, less spectacular, ways the social and cultural meaning of 'intimacy' is currently being contested and struggled over via debates about and use of social media.…”

Section: Excessive and Ambivalent Publicisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media: Towards Theorising Public Lives on Private Platforms

Dobson

Carah

Robards

2018

Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change

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We usually think about intimacy as to do with our private, personal lives, as describing feelings and relationships that are most inner, most 'inward to one's personhood' (McGlotten, 2013, p. 1), and concerned with relationships that are most important to us. Sociologists have theorised intimacy as centrally involving mutual self-disclosure (Giddens, 1992), time spent in co-presence, physical affection, and acts of practical care (Jameison, 2011). But, as queer theory and sexuality studies tell us, intimacy is very much socially sanctioned, defined by institutions, laws, and normative social pressures (Berlant, 1998; Plummer, 2003). The sociology of intimacy helps illuminate what, specifically and empirically, is involved in the doing of intimacy in different places and cultures, and for different genders, classes, and social groups. Queer and feminist critical cultural theorists like Berlant have explained how, in late-modern cultures, having a 'life' has become equated with having an intimate life (Berlant, 1998, p. 282). Further, as Cefai and Couldry note, 'What queer theory has taught us is that heteronormativity shapes what can appear to us as "intimate" even in settings where questions of sexual identity are typically not articulated as such' (2017, p. 2). Understandings of intimacy are culturally and socially specific, rather than 'global' or 'universal' (Jameison, 2011). However, in many places right now intimacy names 'the affective encounters with others that often matter most' (McGlotten, 2013, p. 1). From the perspective of poststructuralist queer and feminist theory, producing intimacy can be understood as part of subjectification processes that centrally involve the hierarchical ordering of relationships and psychic concerns, in socially legible ways, in order to make sense of ourselves and those around us. How social media figures in such processes of psychically and materially ordering relationships and shaping what appears as intimate is part of what we consider in this collection. In this chapter, and this collection more broadly, we are interested in how social media practices challenge and disrupt, as well as how they reinforce and concretise (hetero)normative notions of intimacy as a concept that creates boundaries around certain relationships and ethics of care. Social media are now centrally involved in processes whereby pedagogies of intimate life as life itself are learnt, reproduced, given value, contested, and exploited.

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The price of pulchritude, the cost of concupiscence: how to have sex in late modernity

Cited by 10 publications

References 26 publications

Phallocentricism, female penile choices, and the use of sex toys in Ghana

Phallocentricism, female penile choices, and the use of sex toys in Ghana

‘And next, just for your enjoyment!’: sex, technology and the constitution of desire

Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media: Towards Theorising Public Lives on Private Platforms

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