Erotic Economies Research Articles

‘WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?’: SEXUAL IMAGINARIES AND AFFORDANCES ON GRINDR AND SCRUFF

For queer men, sexual imaginaries have come to accomodate hybrid physical and digital location-based cultures (Miles, 2017). In short, what is possible in terms of intimate connections with other queer men has opened up in exciting, sometimes scary, and radical ways. However, this expanded imaginary of what is possible can also lead to an existential questioning of what an individual person wants—simply and nothing more than sex, a fleeting summer fling, a new group of friends, to fall in love? More? Less? A combination of all of these things at different moments in time? In the face of such uncertainty, we argue that queer men develop a range of practices as they negotiate their shifting relationships to sex and romance as mediated through virtual intimacies (McGlotten, 2013). In this study, we explore how queer men learn about, interpret, and reproduce sexual and romantic norms on two dating and hookup platforms, Grindr and Scruff. Our approach builds on Sharif Mowlabowcus’s (2016, pg. 60) notion of cybercarnality concerning the “erotic economy of gay male corporeality” and Pym et al. (2021, pg. 399) study of queer community “imagined as an affective sense of shared ethics” on intimate platforms. Drawing on our digital ethnographic and speculative design data, we develop the concept of _multivalent intimate interests_ to capture the ambivalent socio-cultural context and situated nature of queer men’s sexual and romantic practices.

"ОППЕНГЕЙМЕР" К. НОЛАНА: ПОЭТИКА И РИТОРИКА ПОСТУПКА

K. Nolan’s Oppenheimer subdues the biographical film to the poetics of the graphic novel: the rhetorical construction of the frame composition and the acceleration of the action are combined with the conventional roles of the characters. The film is framed by a double consequence: black-and-white shots of the official process include a public dispute (agora) and construct a simple protagonist, while imitating old film color shots of a biased conversation between professionals reconstruct him as a complex one and block crossexamination. Such ambiguity is also supported by the graphic novel-inspired unambiguity of the roles of his older colleagues: the brooding Einstein and the extroverted Niels Bohr. The erotic economy of the Los Alamos desert development allows us to organize most of the film’s scenes theatrically, in a stage box, thus postponing the resolution of the question of the fate of the Oppenheimer dossier. In doing so, often archaic mediums of information, subordinate to the medium of the railroad, prove key to understanding the protagonist’s actions. These mediums transform the rhetoric of the deed into the poetics of the deed.

How to creatively theorise the wonder of erotica: a womanist’s poetic manifesto on sexual desire and pleasure

ABSTRACT Theory provokes and stimulates. This theoretical essay blurs the boundaries between academic and creative non-fiction writing to illustrate Black women artists mining self-serving economies of embodied, affective pleasure by crafting womanist erotica, that is, Black woman/girl-centred, eros-charged art, music, and literature. I play with words to produce a polyvocal diptych essay theorising the wonder of womanist erotica and elucidating my politics, perspectives and practices as a Black woman(ist) creative writer and educator concerned with Black women and girls’ sex education. My illumination of, and indulgence in, corporeal pleasure is underpinned by knowledge of (a) the pain that characterises many Black women and girls’ educational and schooling experiences broadly, but also specifically with regards to sex education; and (b) the racialised, gendered, and culturally situated feeling of shame that arises for many during sexual play, that is, during our participation in sexually (self-)gratifying acts. Hence, I offer a potent(ially) viscerally pleasurable reading experience while aiming to deepen intellectual and embodied understandings of the empowering rapture that womanist erotica can ignite. In addition to naming and (re)claiming sexual desire as a prerogative, I think through womanist erotica as a tool for excavating a spiritually rooted erotic economy of (self-)pleasure.

Framing Agnes

Framing Agnes

“Business Inquiries are Welcome”: Sex Influencers and the Platformization of Non-normative Media on Twitter

By attending to the case of queer men’s sexual use of Twitter in China, this article analyzes how mainstream platforms provide underrepresented groups with unique opportunities in the erotic economy. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fourteen queer male “sex influencers”—people who capitalize on their erotic practices on Twitter and other platforms for economic and social perks—and a three-month digital ethnography, we probe how Twitter shapes sex media production in China and opens up multifarious modes of monetization. We suggest that Chinese queer sex influencers’ monetization practices not only construct vibrant sexual cultures, but also incentivize heightened cross-platform mobility, which serves as a strategy for coping with China’s precarious legal environment. Consequently, there has been a convergence of domestic and transnational platforms, which we argue showcases the vitality and creativity of Chinese non-normative media production and consumption in a globalized and platformized age.

“Ach for It”: Anthony Leigh, Autonomy, and Queer Pleasures in the Restoration Playhouse

Anthony Leigh (d. 1692) built his career as a Restoration comedic actor by playing a combination of queer, lascivious, old, and/or disabled men to audiences’ great delight. In this essay, I key in on two plays that frame Leigh’s career: Thomas Durfey’s The Fond Husband (1677) and Thomas Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love (1690). In The Fond Husband, a younger Leigh plays a “superannuated,” almost blind and almost deaf Old Fumble who, in the first act, kisses a man because he cannot navigate the heterosexual erotic economy of the play (as over-determined by able-bodiedness). Over a decade later, in Sir Anthony Love, Leigh plays an aging, queer Abbé who is so earnestly erotically invested in Love’s masculinity (unaware that Love is a woman in drag) that he attempts to seduce Love with dancing. I bring the beginning and end of Leigh’s stage life together to argue that Leigh’s body, performing queerly, asks audiences to confront the limits of pleasure in sustaining fantasies of the abled, autonomous heterosexual self. Using these two Restoration comedies that bookend Leigh’s career, I trace pleasures and queer structures of feeling experienced in the Restoration playhouse. While Durfey and Southerne’s plays-as-texts seek to discipline unruly, disabled queer bodies by making Fumble and the Abbé the punchline, Leigh’s performances open up alternative opportunities for queer pleasure. Pleasure becomes queer in its ability to undo orderings and fantasies based on autonomy (that nasty little myth). In his Apology, Colley Cibber reveals the ways that Leigh’s queerly performing body engages the bodies of audience members. In reflecting on the reading versus spectating experience, Cibber remarks, “The easy Reader might, perhaps, have been pleas’d with the Author without discomposing a Feature; but the Spectator must have heartily held his sides, or the Actor would have heartily made them ache for it” (89). Spectatorship is not a passive role, but rather a carnal interplay with the actor, and this interplay has immediate, bodily implications. Audiences laugh. They ache. They touch. Whereas the reader of a play in private can maintain composure, audiences in the theatre are contrarily discomposed, non-autonomous, and holding onto their sides. Leigh’s ability as a comedian energizes the text and produces pleasure on an immediate, corporeal level for audiences. And that pleasure is generated through stage business built on touching, feeling, and seducing male-presenting characters. Spectatorship may, in fact, be a queer experience as Leigh’s queerly performing body exposes the limits of autonomy.

The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England by Diane Cady

Reviewed by: The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England by Diane Cady Rosemary O'Neill Diane Cady. The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. ix, 189. $84.99 cloth; $69.99 e-book. This innovative, engaging study explores how gender and economics are mutually reinforcing discourses in the literature of late medieval England, a time before the bifurcation of political economy from domestic economy [End Page 393] (a change Cady locates in the eighteenth century) occluded their interdependence (7). The book analyzes a wide range of poems in Middle English, from works by Chaucer and Gower to anonymous romances, to uncover a set of interlocking representations of gender and money. In text after text, Cady finds that wealth is a masculine prerogative, while poverty is emasculating; women are objects for possession, simultaneously untrustworthy and fickle like money itself. As she persuasively argues, these insights hold profound implications for how to think about both gender and economics, in the medieval period and also in the present day. Taking as its focus "gender as ideology" rather than embodied gender, Cady's analysis is particularly indebted to the work of Gayle Rubin ("The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" [1977]) and Jean-Joseph Goux (Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud [1973, trans. 1990]). The influence of the former resonates most strongly in the book's organization around narratives of heterosexual courtship, in which men's relationships to material goods are negotiated through their relationships to women, and vice versa. In the introduction, Cady situates her argument within the rich vein of recent work in Middle English on economics and literature (4). Yet in blending historicism with psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches, the book also harkens back to the New Economic Criticism of the 1990s (6). Chapter 2, the first body chapter, elaborates two main claims: "Money and women have a similar nature, one that is marked by instability and movement," and "the link between erotic and fiscal possession in the medieval cultural imaginary [is crucial to] the construction of male identity" (13). To develop these claims, Cady explores medieval theories of reproduction as well as monetary value, before offering a series of close readings that illustrate the fickle qualities of female characters and their role as repositories of value in a series of representative texts, including the Lady Meed episode of Piers Plowman, Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal, and The Reeve's Tale. The book's third chapter attends to a single text, the anonymous late medieval/Tudor romance The Squire of Low Degree, to explore how the text "enact[s] … fiscal and sexual fantasies" (33) that are essentially intertwined as the Squire seeks both love and money in the King of Hungary's court. Cady reads the king's daughter's seven-year retreat to her chamber in the company of a dead body as a refusal to participate in the erotic economy in lieu of a more transgressive expression of libidinal energy. The daughter ultimately returns to circulation through her [End Page 394] father's power, revealing both a conservative gender ideology that reserves power and wealth for the sovereign patriarch, and the conservatism of the romance genre more generally. Chapter 4 announces a new section, which turns to the notion of value itself and "how gendered notions of economy inform the ways we think about value, especially in realms that the West often treats as 'value free' or beyond economy, such as friendship, love, and poetics" (51). The three chapters that follow are an especially coherent and successful section of the book, perhaps because they mark a concurrent narrowing in focus to the nature of masculinity within the gendered economy. The fourth chapter, on Lydgate's Fabula duorum mercatorum, takes up friendship and its discontents within the context of the interested exchanges of goods that the characters' livelihoods comprise. The flow of goods between the narrative's two merchants allows us to chart an anxious masculinity, hemmed in by dangers: to trade in goods is to risk loss, yet to be too free with...

The Charismatic porn-star: social citizenship and the West-African Pentecostal erotic

ABSTRACTWork on the sexual dimension of citizenship in Africa has privileged the way contemporary struggles over sexualities and sexual identities have opened up tensions over belonging and civic mattering. This article focuses on how political subjectivity is shaped and determined against the backdrop of the erotic economy between the pastor and his congregation. Mobilizing the idea of a Pentecostal erotic economy to evoke a debate around gender, patriarchy, affect, and social control, the article uses a relatively neglected aspect of contemporary Pentecostal praxes to introduce a different approach to the study of citizenship in Africa.

Intimate Navigations, Refracted Perspectives

Intimate Navigations, Refracted Perspectives

After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post‐Soviet Cuba by Noelle M.StoutDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 248 pp.

After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post‐Soviet Cuba by Noelle M.StoutDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 248 pp.

After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. By Noelle M. Stout. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.From Cuba with Love: Sex and Money in the Twenty-First Century. By Megan Daigle. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era. By Elise Andaya. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewAfter Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. By Noelle M. Stout. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. From Cuba with Love: Sex and Money in the Twenty-First Century. By Megan Daigle. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era. By Elise Andaya. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014.Karina L. CespedesKarina L. CespedesColorado State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 42, Number 2Winter 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688273 Views: 182Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba, written by Noelle M. Stout

After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba, written by Noelle M. Stout

"Yo paresciera cobdicioso mercader": Aristocratic Economics in El Abencerraje

Set during the fifteenth-century Christian Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the Moorish novel El Abencerraje articulates a meticulously stratified system of contractual exchanges in which the aristocracy's symbolic economy of honor functions in counterpoint to the warrior economy of kidnapping and ransom, the erotic economy of love, and the mercantile economy of the commercial class. These economic divisions transect both Christian and Muslim spaces, transcending ethnic and religious distinctions and reinforcing a shared aristocratic identity that supplants financial greed and violence along a military border. While this hierarchy of value exists in all three surviving iterations of El Abencerraje , it is particularly developed in the version of the text included in Antonio de Villegas's Inventario , a miscellany published in Medina del Campo in 1565. Medina del Campo was then the site of the most important merchant fair in Castile and the hub of financial activity in the Peninsula, at a time when increasingly globalized commercial and currency exchange markets provided unprecedented opportunities of enrichment to those merchants in a position to profitably exploit them. This economic context, therefore, may have been determinative of some of the distinctive aspects of the Inventario version of the text, which contrasts the financial disinterestedness of its noble Christian protagonist, Rodrigo de Narvaez, with the figure of the greedy merchant. The Inventario variant of El Abencerraje is therefore less a plea for interfaith tolerance than a didactic instrument for inculcating aristocratic values within a socially mobile merchant class with pretensions to nobility.

Book Review: After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba

Book Review: After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba

Stout, Noelle M. After love: queer intimacy and erotic economies in post-Soviet Cuba. ix, 238 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2014. £15.99 (paper)

Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteVolume 22, Issue 2 p. 436-437 Book review Stout, , , Noelle M. After love: queer intimacy and erotic economies in post-Soviet Cuba. ix, 238 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2014. £15.99 (paper) Mark Graham, Mark Graham Stockholm UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Mark Graham, Mark Graham Stockholm UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 April 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12416Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume22, Issue2June 2016Pages 436-437 RelatedInformation

After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba

Book Review| February 01 2016 After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. By Noelle M. Stout. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014; pp. 238, $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper. Lisa M. Corrigan Lisa M. Corrigan University of Arkansas, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2016) 3 (1): 160–162. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.3.1.0160 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lisa M. Corrigan; After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 February 2016; 3 (1): 160–162. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.3.1.0160 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Regulating the Desire Machine

Exploring the short and largely forgotten history of adult-oriented 8-bit video games produced for the Atari 2600 home game console, this essay argues that the games represent an important attempt by media producers to bridge the adult film and interactive entertainment industries. Although American Multiple Industries, Playaround, and Universal Gamex failed to establish a market, their titles nevertheless demonstrate how adult games function as desire machines within an erotic economy that sells a host of anticipatory pleasures. Indeed, the resulting public outcry not only led to the game industry’s first sex-based controversy, but the antagonism signals the desire to regulate sexual expression on a new media technology as game producers—following the lead of adult video professionals—attempted to transport users’ joysticks from living rooms into bedrooms.

After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post‐Soviet Cuba.NoelleStout. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 238 pp.

American EthnologistVolume 42, Issue 3 p. 548-549 Book Review After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. Noelle Stout. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 238 pp. JOANN MARTIN, JOANN MARTIN Earlham CollegeSearch for more papers by this author JOANN MARTIN, JOANN MARTIN Earlham CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 August 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12_12146Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume42, Issue3August 2015Pages 548-549 RelatedInformation

More than Mojo: Gender, Sex, and the Racialized Erotics of Global ’68

Here we offer a transnational perspective on ’68 that takes sex, sexuality, and gender seriously. These factors are, we contend, critical to decoding the actions of rebellious youth and the elite panics that this youth activism provoked in a thoroughly racialized global arena. International dynamics of the sixties were themselves part of erotic economies of power often expressed in symbolically gendered and sexualized terms. They called attention to a modernist project premised on the global (already racialized) hierarchization of nations and peoples. National elites around the world were up in arms that the university children who had benefited from this modernizing project with the expansion of education were attempting to subvert it by flaunting its fundamental rule and engaging in cross-class and cross-racial sex. That is, the actions and rhetoric of both elites and youth reveal linkages between modernity, education, and the racialized erotics of ’68 movements. Hence, the political imaginaries animating social movements and sixties political culture writ large were gendered, sexed, racialized, and transnational. Taking racialized erotics seriously, we argue, reveals both the gendered and sexed nature of political agency, and the profound social, political, and cultural transformations many of the ’68 movements engendered. Sex, sexuality, and gender offer lenses into the workings of subjectivity, agency, memory, political cultures of the state, and contestatory social movements of the period, and show how the personal was (and still remains) political as a way of explaining ’68 as a pivotal year on a global scale.

Book Reviews | Reseñas

ERLACS – European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies is an Open Access, scientific journal. It publishes peer-reviewed articles in English and Spanish. Contributions reflect substantial empirical research and/or are theoretically innovative with respect to major debates within social science research (understood in the broadest sense, including history and economics) on Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to research articles, ERLACS includes 'Explorations' (a section in which new themes are presented and new debates are stimulated), review essays, book reviews, and film reviews. Articles are published online soon after they have been accepted.Sign up for our newsletter and read our latest issue!Special Collections:Heritage, protests and coloniality in contemporary Latin America, guest edited by Manuela Badilla, J. Renée Clark, Robert MasonViolent configurations of power in Mexico, guest edited by Adéle Blazquez, Romain Le Cour GrandmaisonVenezuela's crisis from global perspectives, guest edited by Benedicte Bull, Antulio RosalesElite and popular responses to a left in crisis, guest edited by Thomas Chiasson-LeBel, Manuel LarrabureMega-projects, contentious action, and policy change in Latin America, guest edited by Eduardo Silva, Maria Akchurin, Anthony J. Bebbington ERLACS – Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe es una revista científica de Acceso Abierto. Difunde artículos bajo la revisión de pares en inglés y español. Las contribuciones reflejan la investigación empírica sustancial y/o son teóricamente innovadoras con respecto a los grandes debates dentro de la investigación social (en el sentido más amplio, incluyendo la historia y la economía) en América Latina y el Caribe. Además de los artículos de investigación, ERLACS incluye 'Exploraciones' (una sección en la que se presentan los nuevos temas con el fin de estimular nuevos debates), ensayos de reseña, reseñas de libros, y críticas de cine. Los artículos se publican en línea poco después de haber sido aceptados.¡Suscríbase a nuestro boletín de noticias y lea nuestro último número!Números especiales: Heritage, protests and coloniality in contemporary Latin America, editado por Manuela Badilla, J. Renée Clark, Robert MasonViolent configurations of power in Mexico, editador por Adéle Blazquez, Romain Le Cour GrandmaisonVenezuela's crisis from global perspectives, editado por Benedicte Bull, Antulio RosalesElite and popular responses to a left in crisis, editado por Thomas Chiasson-LeBel, Manuel LarrabureMega-projects, contentious action, and policy change in Latin America, editado por Eduardo Silva, Maria Akchurin, Anthony J. Bebbington