The project was sponsored by the CRYSTAL-Alberta Science Education Centre.

Porn Studies CFP

I have recently had a chapter published in the Italian book The Piracy Effect, edited by Roberto Braga and Giovanni Caruso, that looks at how the giallo, a cycle of popular Italian, is reappropriated and distributed by fans on torrent file-sharing websites.  I argue that this is a response to the current market conditions that render the commercial release of currently unreleased gialli on DVD unviable.

This study gives attention to the fan production surrounding European cult cinema, low budget exploitation films often in the horror genre, that engage a high level of cultural commitment and investment from its fans.  It addresses wider issues of debate relating to why people are fans and whether they are anything more than obsessive in their consumption of media.  The academic study of fandom is relatively a new area, the formative year being 1992 when studies such as Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, Lisa Lewis’ The Adoring Audience and Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women approached fandom as a cultural activity.  Studies such as these celebrated fan activity and focussed on fan production being a symbolic activity rather than an economic activity.  Academics have only recently began to recognise the commitment, time and effort that fans invest when producing artefacts.

I explore the ways European cult cinema fandom might be understood as an alternative economy of fan production by looking at how fans produce artefacts and commodities.  It uses an innovative method of data collection which includes ethnographic observation and interviews, focused on public offline and online fan activities, and my own personal experiences as autoethnography.  The collected data is interrogated using a theoretical framework that incorporates ideas from cultural studies and political economy: using the concept of an ‘alternative economy’ of European cult cinema fan production.  The purpose being to interpret an object of fandom as a production of meaning, physical artefacts and commodities, therefore understanding fandom an both cultural and economic production.

I argue that, in this alternative economy, fans are ‘creative’ workers who are now using digital technologies to produce artefacts that are exchanged as gifts or commodities; this practice relating to repertoires of professionalism.  I find that fans are not just producing artefacts and commodities relating to European cult cinema, but that through these processes they are culturally and economically making what has become known as European cult cinema.

Oliver Carter and John Mercer presenting in Gorizia March 2013

The Italian Filmforum Festival is celebrating its 20^th anniversary this year and as usual has attracted an international audience of film scholars to the University of Udine to explore ideas around cinema and contemporary visual arts. The festival has always had a commitment to providing a venue for the discussion of emerging or marginal areas of debate including videogame studies, postcinema, film heritage and porn studies.

The programme for the festival can be found here:

http://www.filmforumfestival.it/?page_id=8

Since 2009 colleagues in the Screen Cultures team have been supporters of this festival and have presented at the annual Spring Schools superbly organized at the campus in Gorizia by the tireless Federico Zecca, Enrico Biasin and Giovanna Maina. This has become an important event for Screen Cultures colleagues as it’s an opportunity to meet up annually with scholars working in the same or similar fields and discuss plans for future collaborations.

This year, Oliver Carter and John Mercer have joined forces with Dr Sharif Mowlabocus from the University of Sussex, to present a panel on approaches to porn in the UK.

Oliver discussed a new piece of research that he is embarking upon that looks at the political economy of porn production in Britain during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. In particular he focusses on the work of a selection of key industry players including Mike Freeman the owner of the notorious Videx.

John talked about his ongoing research into gay pornography and the challenges of writing about a topic that is not only controversial but also ephemeral and changing at an increasingly rapid pace. Following on from an excellent panel earlier in the week convened by Feona Attwood (Middlesex), Clarissa Smith (Sunderland) and the porn director Anna Span about UK porn, John’s presentation made some observations about what Britishness and the idea of Europe means for gay porn.

Sharif Mowlabocus presenting at Gorizia 2013

Sharif gave a presentation about a major piece of research into attitudes towards bareback sex within the gay community in East Sussex that he has conducted in conjunction with The Terrence Higgins Trust. More information about the Porn Laid Bare project can be found here:

http://www.pornlaidbare.co.uk/

Presented at SCMS 2013, The Drake, Chicago, IL 9th March

Tall, dark and handsome, during the 1950s and 1960s Rock Hudson was the quintessential Hollywood ideal of American masculinity; an ideal that was to be questioned and ultimately undermined during the years to follow.

The often lurid posthumous accounts of his private life and the circumstances surrounding his death from AIDS related illness have tended to overshadow consideration of his career as an actor. Consequently Hudson has eluded the critical attention afforded to many of his contemporaries.

I’m writing a book for the new BFI series of studies of major film stars. My aim is to reassess Rock Hudson and to identify the specific iconographic qualities and the nature of his performances that together made him one of the most popular and successful film stars of his generation.

Hudson is not usually regarded as a ‘great actor’ in the generally understood sense, i.e. that he conspicuously demonstrated a virtuoso technique (even though he received an Oscar nomination for Giant in 1956.) He is however an important figure in cinema history for several reasons principally that his construction as a star, his performances and his career reveal a great deal about the nature of American popular culture and attitudes towards gender and sexuality during the 1950s, 60s and beyond. With his hysterically concocted screen name redolent with connotations of solidity and permanence and his equally scrupulously designed professional image Hudson seems like the supreme example of the manufactured Hollywood star from the era where the studio system was in rapid and terminal decline. It has become a commonplace to suggest that he is the epitome (alongside actors like Charlton Heston) of a moribund masculinity in the face of a more questioning model presented by James Dean, Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift and (of course) Brando. I am trying to interrogate and question some of these assumptions and to recuperate Hudson as a star who embodies the period of transition between the old Hollywood and the new and an actor whose signification reveals levels of representational and cultural complexity that is richer than the orthodox popular account of the period suggests.

It is certainly true to say that Hudson more than almost any other actor of his generation was presented as the paradigmatic example of the all American heterosexual male; handsome, athletic, impeccably groomed, solid and dependable, a strong deep voice and a performance style that embodies stoicism, he was all things that men were expected to aspire to and women it was assumed adored. The perceived disparity between his public persona and what was later revealed to be his ‘true’ nature as a promiscuous homosexual male and the first Hollywood star to succumb to AIDS is a subject that my book will engage with and explore. My final aim is to interrogate the extent to which Hudson’s radically altered signification and the process by which he was claimed as a text for analysis by queer theorists offers new understandings of his meaning and the construction of masculinity.

As an academic researcher I (like the rest of academia) am always looking for ways to get my work ‘out there’. With a call for papers for a book solely focused on The L Word I found an ideal and exciting opportunity. My doctoral thesis focuses on the seminal lesbian TV drama and its surrounding discourses. In effect the PhD looks at the public discursive reasoning given for production choices (via publically available material and interviews), resultant textual discourses and also the audience reaction to various aspects of the show throughout its run from 2004 to 2009.

The aim of my doctoral thesis is to map the development, meaning and reception of the production. In order to make sense of my results in my overall thesis I have interpreted my findings through queer theory perspectives and assess whether meanings made and reactions formed can be related to assessing whether The L Word constitutes a political challenge through an opposition to or integration into mainstream societal ideas; a key area of debate in queer theory.

My forthcoming chapter in Loving The L Word: The Complete Series in Focus (Heller, 2013) is a small reworked part of my overall thesis and explores the audience reaction to the narrative of the show in the final series.

My initial focus on The L Word came from it being the first television series which focused solely on lesbian lives and culture. This wasn’t a show which merely focused on homosexuality, bisexuality and trans-sexuality as a ‘problem’ as in many television shows which had been broadcast throughout television history. Neither were the characters involved in narratives which focused only on their sexuality. Instead we saw characters that lived their lives: drinking coffee, having relationships, having families and developing careers. Although the women involved in the narrative just happened to be glamorous residents of Los Angeles, The L Word was still a key moment in LGBT television history.

However, my chapter in The L Word: The Complete Series in Focus doesn’t focus on this celebratory moment in lesbian culture. Instead it addresses the final sixth season of the show and the rather negative fan reaction to the lack of narrative closure. Season six involved a ‘whodunit’ plot, with the narrative promise of resolution, a promise which remained unfulfilled. The research was a vast undertaking as I had chosen the Showtime fan forum as my primary source, this was a site which was shared in a crossover with Facebook and involved me analysing over 11,000 forum postings. This was evidently challenging and involved the organisation of data into thematic strands in order to make any sense of the fan reaction and to proved evidential quotations that could be used to formulate a key argument about fan considerations and the context of cultural frameworks in media reception.

There were also vehement audience reactions to a selection of ‘Interrogation Tapes’ which were not part of the broadcast series but offered ‘extra’ narrative material (although this didn’t close the narrative referred to in the promo above). For example, in the character Tina Kennard’s Interrogation Tape we learn that one particular character’s first lesbian relationship was an incestuous one with her sister, potentially reverting to lesbianism as a social problem and linking it with ideologically perverse actions; seemingly a return to television lesbians as a moral and social problem. Viewers reacted angrily to feeling used and betrayed; in terms of their fandom and their lesbian identity.

Those viewers who enjoyed the finale chose to ignore the lack of narrative closure or ‘promise’ of answers. Others also ignored the lack of conventional televisual resolution, or labelled it ‘creative’ and defended against any issues with the fact that The L Word was the ‘first’ lesbian drama; this was something which should never be forgotten. Yet these perspectives were few in number compared to those who felt betrayed and, on occasion, insulted.

Overall, the research evidenced and reiterated the perspective that audience and fan cultures are diverse in nature. Cultural frameworks have an enormous impact on our ability to read and make meaning about television narratives. Politically marginalised audiences are particularly affected by messages which involve their personal identities and have the potential to challenge oppressive political ideologies. These factors can impact on the emotional response from viewers to both media texts and the producers’ justifications and defences for production choices.

Loving The L Word: The Complete Series in Focus is edited by Dana Heller and published by IB Tauris. It is available from March 30^th 2013.

My research tends to focus on audience responses to comedy, but this study meant I had to take a step back and think more carefully about a wider range of issues surrounding the The Office. I’m considering how it can be seen as a product of the British TV industry while also belonging to a wider trend of mockdocumentaries that includes shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Kath and Kim.  I’m thinking about how The Office uses documentary conventions for comedic effect, and how that contributes to the laugh/cringe response it encourages in audiences. And I’m pondering the role of political correctness and superiority (or even cruelty) in comedy – an issue @rickygervais repeatedly deals with on Twitter:

How did this show become so popular? And why was it seen to be so important? While we often see critics and mainstream audiences divided over what is funny (see the recent debate around Mrs. Brown’s Boys, for example), The Office managed to win favour with both sides – as well as with buyers representing broadcasters in other countries.

My focus group study indicated the significance of the (then) unfamiliar use of documentary conventions, the combination of subtle and clearly cued comic situations, viewers’ emotional engagement with characters like Tim and Dawn, and Ricky Gervais’s rich performance of David Brent – full of nuances like little looks at the camera and adjustments of his tie. Throughout each episode, The Office invites audiences to respond with quite different emotions – amusement, embarrassment, dread, hopefulness, sadness – and this viewing experience seemed to be appreciated by many of my respondents.