[ecrea] CFP Mediated Intimacies Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies

CFP Mediated Intimacies DEADLINE EXTENDED

Mediated Intimacies
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies to be
published in March 2017
edited by Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim, Alison Winch
EXTENDED DEADLINE - 30th January 2016
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 30th January 2016 through
Scholar One Manuscripts:  http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjgs20/current.
Please direct enquiries to Alison Winch, Feona Attwood and Jamie Hakim
(a.winch /at/ uea.ac.uk)
(f.attwood /at/ mdx.ac.uk)
(j.hakim /at/ uea.ac.uk)

Publication schedule:
30th January - deadline for submissions

February: Papers to peer reviewers

April: Comments to authors

September: Authors final revisions

December 2016: Final accepts


Feona Attwood
Professor of Cultural Studies, Communication and Media
Middlesex University, UK

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