[ecrea] Call for Papers: Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology

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 /at/ mdx.ac.uk)<mailto:(a.winch /at/ mdx.ac.uk)><mailto:(a.winch /at/ mdx.ac.uk)<mailto:(a.winch /at/ mdx.ac.uk)>>), 
Feona Attwood 
((f.attwood /at/ mdx.ac.uk)<mailto:(f.attwood /at/ mdx.ac.uk)><mailto:(f.attwood /at/ mdx.ac.uk)<mailto:(f.attwood /at/ mdx.ac.uk)>>) 
and Jamie Hakim 
((j.hakim /at/ uea.ac.uk)<mailto:(j.hakim /at/ uea.ac.uk)><mailto:(j.hakim /at/ uea.ac.uk)<mailto:(j.hakim /at/ 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

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