December 21, 2025 · 6:23 pm

hot connections

Our book, Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter, coauthored with Jenny Sundén and Katrin Tiidenberg, will be out in March on open access with the MIT Press: very exciting conclusion to what has been such an enjoyable collaboration within the Rethinking Sexuality project. As has been the case with my previous books with the publisher, the cover design is fabulous. This is the summary:

A rethinking of “the social” in social media which includes the sexual.

What can we learn from including sexual platforms in definitions of social media and, by extension, from including sex in definitions of “the social” itself? Hot Connections explores three locally operating sexual platforms: the Swedish Darkside, used by kink and BDSM practitioners; the Estonian Libertine Center, used mainly by nonmonogamous people; and the Finnish Alastonsuomi, used for a wide variety of nude and sexual displays of self-expression. What avenues do these platforms open for understanding the role that sexuality plays in people’s networked routines, social bonds, and forms of relating?

Sexual social media affords freedom of worldmaking, belonging, and a right to sexually exist. While providing vital spaces for sexual self-expression—and indeed, hot connections—platform connectivity also involves friction as expectations, wishes, and desires clash and collide.

Intervening in debates on the value of sexual social media, Hot Connections discusses what it means to research sexuality when sexual data is understood as sensitive by default, what platform governance may look like if viewed from the margins, and how sex and intimacy are not the same thing in networked sexuality.

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Filed under academic pleasures, feminist media studies, internet research, NSFW, sexuality

September 4, 2025 · 5:21 pm

absurdity, Twitter comedy, and humor bots

It is no breaking news that, in internet research, things very quickly become recent history. Especially when it comes to handbooks that take some years to put together. Hence, behold!, our chapter with the excellent Jenny Sundén on Twitter’s (now X) humor bots (out of operation since 2023) for The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy edited by Peter C. Kunze and William V. Constanzo. The abstract goes like this:

This chapter explores the world of Twitter bots (on the verge of Elon Musk’s rebranding and decision to charge for the platform’s API) from a particular angle: that of absurd humor. It builds on and advances discussions of absurd humor in general—and feminist and queer humor and absurdity in particular—by studying Twitter bots as part of a landscape where absurd humor is generated in algorithmic assemblages of human imagination and nonhuman repetition and randomness. It explores a strategic selection of humorous Twitter bot accounts, combined with background interviews with two of their creators, operating with slightly different logics: Gender of the day (@genderoftheday), which generated imaginative, poetic, and charmingly nonsensical takes on what the gender of the day could be when capaciously envisioned; a bookish kind of humor generated by Victorian queerbot (@queerstreet), which scoured digitized nineteenth-century novels for the terms “gay” and “queer”; and the eerie flora and fauna coined by the fabulously surrealist poetry bot British Gardens (@GardensBritish). The absurd represents the opposite of reason, rationality, and meaning, as its etymological Latin root, absurdus (“out of tune, uncouth, inappropriate, ridiculous”), suggests. Following this semantic route, absurd humor is out of harmony with reason and notions of decency. The chapter focuses on what happens to such incongruity when it involves not only people but algorithms, and what may be learned about the pleasures of repetition, randomness, and surprise and the minor mundane affective lifts this affords by studying the bots’ output.

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Filed under academic pleasures, data culture, humor, internet research, media studies

January 31, 2025 · 3:29 pm

a roundtable on the future of porn studies

Our roundtable discussion, Shaping Pleasure, Shifting Boundaries: A Roundtable on the Future of Porn Studies with Peter Alilunas, João Florêncio, Angela Jones and myself, is out as part of Porn Studies journal’s tenth anniversary thingie. And this is the abstract:

The roundtable, ‘Shaping Pleasure, Shifting Boundaries: A Roundtable on the Future of Porn Studies,’ took place in June 2024 via Zoom and was recorded, transcribed and then edited to cut digressions and repetitions for publication. The roundtable was intended to examine the transformative trajectory of porn studies over the last decade. With a focus on technological innovations, ethical challenges, and the labour dynamics reshaping the field, the following discussion explores how intersectionality and diverse methodologies have broadened perspectives within porn studies. Our participants also talked about the rise of platforms like OnlyFans, the impact of archival gaps, and the continuing critical tension between pleasure and danger in academic and cultural narratives. Their conversation underscores the necessity of rethinking traditional paradigms while advocating for inclusivity and the preservation of pornographic histories as part of broader cultural heritage. This conversation sets the stage for envisioning the discipline’s future as it navigates a rapidly evolving sociopolitical and technological landscape.

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Filed under academic pleasures, media studies, NSFW, porn studies, sexuality

November 27, 2024 · 4:02 pm

in/conveniences

Screenshot 2024-11-27 at 17.54.40In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround edited Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg is out just now with the Insititute of Network Cultures’ Theory on Demand series. The collection covers a lot of ground and also includes my bit, “Platform economies, reputational stains, and the in/conveniences of porn”, a Lauren Berlant-inspired essay on porn’s current financial deplatforming and the moral platform imaginaries that this involves. All on open access!

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Filed under affect theory, data culture, feminist media studies, internet research, sexuality

September 17, 2024 · 5:13 pm

zoned in and out

Screenshot 2024-09-17 at 20.05.56The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences edited by Annette Hill and Peter Lunt is just out, or at least on preorder. The massive whopper includes my bit, titled “Bored audiences: Zoned in and out” which addresses casual gaming as oscillations of interest and boredom in order to consider these concepts on less binary terms. The abstract goes like this:

As affective flatness entailing a sense of stuckness in the present, boredom is routinely cast as the conceptual and experiential opposite of interest indicative of the richness of experience. Taking a different analytical route, this chapter makes an argument for considering boredom and interest in dynamic relation with one another as oscillations in affective intensity. It further calls for adding nuance into what boredom actually means by addressing the dynamics of casual gameplay in the context of the limitations on mobility and stimulus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Characterised by mass appeal, short play sessions, clear rules, and ease of play, casual games are repetitive, and hence potentially boring, while also routinely used as escapes from boredom, and for filling up time. Starting with conceptualisations of boredom as a modern phenomenon, as the conceptual and experiential opposite of interest indicative of the richness of experience, and as a problem endemic to the attention economies of app culture, this chapter asks what the notion means in the current conjuncture of ubiquitous connectivity and mediated engagement. Through a discussion of casual gaming, it sets out to add nuance to what boredom stands for, and how it becomes diagnosed. Deploying ambiguity as an analytical lens, the chapter then addresses boredom as fluctuating rhythms of experience yielding languor, both pleasurable and very much not.

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Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, cultural studies, media studies

May 29, 2024 · 4:58 pm

sex at the borders / Monsieur Mosse

The special issue Sex at the Borders: Queering Transnational Histories that we edited for lambda nordica with Jenny Sundén and Katrin Tiidenberg, is just out, with great articles exploring lesbian networking across the Baltic Sea, smut peddling in Hälle, Sweden, as well as perceptions of Swedish homosexuality in Finland. All on OA! Plus issue also includes our article with Mari Pajala, Monsieur Mosse: A Bad Gay? Queer Celebrity in Finnish Print Media, 1960s to 1980s. The abstract goes like this:

Raimo Jääskeläinen, better known as Monsieur Mosse (1932–1992), was a hairdresser, makeup artist, gossip columnist, convicted blackmailer, and Finland’s first out gay male celebrity. The topic of endless articles, befriending and falling out with beauty queens and fashion models, publishing a tell-all memoir elaborating on his taste for luxury, working for straight porn magazines and briefly editing one, Mosse was both the subject and object of popular media and, in his flamboyance, a key domestic celebrity figure of the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, his relationship with the gay rights movement was frictional at best in that his brand was considered “dishonorable” vis-à-vis liberatory politics. Building on media historical inquiry and taking cue from Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller’s (2022) popular argument for studying “bad gays” – historical figures not fitting aspirational and inspirational narratives of queer activism and agency – this article examines Mosse’s trajectory as a celebrity, focusing especially on his 1980s collaborations with the sex press. We argue that Mosse’s particular brand of shameless extravagance and candid gossiping knowingly operationalized “badness” as a vehicle of distinction and visibility in a largely homophobic national context.

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Filed under academic pleasures, media history, sexuality

March 1, 2024 · 2:27 pm

objectionable nipples

Screenshot 2024-03-01 at 16.16.27Our chapter with the marvelous Jenny Sundén, “Objectionable nipples: Puritan data politics and sexual agency in social media,” is newly out in Queer Data Studies edited by Patrick Keilty for University of Washington Press’ Feminist Technosciences series. As the title suggests, we are intrested in the politics of nipples in a context where nudity and sexual content are aggressively and horizontally deplatformed on leading social media platforms, also attending to Puritan underpinnings of content policies and the unwillingness of “free the nipple” activism to address sexual desire.

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Filed under academic pleasures, data culture, feminist media studies, NSFW, sexuality

February 21, 2024 · 7:42 am

shifty meanings

My short article, Dick pics and the shifty meanings of porn, is freshly out with Porn Studies, and will be part of the journal’s tenth anniversary issue later this spring. The abstract goes like this:

Dick pics are ubiquitous objects in social media shared for the purposes of harassment, flirtation, suggestion, amusement, and titillation alike. Starting with the question of how dick pics are, or are not classifiable as porn, this article opens up lines of inquiry on the possibilities and limitations of porn as a genre marker, content classifier, and reference point in and for understanding sexual content distributed through networked means. In the contemporary moment when sexual content continues to multiply online even as most social media platforms vigilantly moderate and remove it, scholarly vocabularies risk either lagging behind or posing normative categorisation on the things published and shared, from dick pics to webcam shows and OnlyFans content. This article calls for contextual care in how the notion of porn becomes applied to networked sexual media, the shapes of continue to morph, as well as in how dick pics are made sense of as communication devices and cultural symbols.

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January 25, 2024 · 7:29 pm

cursed tweets

After quite a rocky history of rejects and revisions, our article with Elena Pilipets, Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump’s deselection, is out with The International Journal of Cultural Studies. Nice and quirky. With an abstract that goes like this:

On 7 November 2020, strange things were happening in the comments to @realDonaldTrump’s tweet erroneously arguing that he had won the US presidential election, ‘BY A LOT’. Posting quote tweets and replies in Armenian in tandem with ‘cursed images’, memes, and creepypasta, users engaged in a spam-like trollish intervention, even as Twitter kept removing the said content in real time. Exploring this online incident through various analytical techniques, this article first attends to absurdity and ephemerality within the polarized social media event. Second, it makes an argument for the productivity of digital methods in cultural studies inquiry aiming to understand the temporal, contextual, and infrastructural aspects of memetic commenting. Third, by focusing on the social (media) theatre of Armenian curses, we make a case for the analytical importance of studying materials deemed niche and anomalous in networked exchanges.

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Filed under cultural studies, data culture, internet research

January 3, 2024 · 1:05 pm

intimate infrastructures

An essay we did jointly with the IDA research team is freshly out with Media Theory’s special section edited by Carolyn Pedwell and Simon Dawes, “Lauren Berlant and Media Theory” (OA). Authored by Vilja Jaaksi, Anu Koivunen, Kaarina Nikunen, Karoliina Talvitie-Lamberg, Annamari Vänskä and myself, the piece is titled “Intimate infrastructures we depend upon: Living with data” and the abstract goes likes this:

This essay takes on Lauren Berlant’s mapping of intimacy as ‘connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living’ in order to address attachments, dependencies, and vulnerabilities in datafied contexts where digital platforms operate as infrastructures of everyday life. Building on interview material, we explore such intimate attachments as ones rife with friction and inconvenience, asking how vulnerabilities emerge and become differently distributed among our study participants. We argue that thinking about the datafied everyday in terms of intimacy opens up space for considering the fundamental ambiguities involved in what matters to people, what they are attached to, and what they simply need to live with. We further suggest that attending to the complexity and vitality of mundane relating, impacting, and world-making offers ways of exploring techno-capitalist infrastructures of data extraction and mass surveillance in tandem with other attachments and connections that bind, and matter.

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Filed under data culture, internet research, intimacy, media studies