New Media, Sex, and Culture in the 21st Century

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NmediaC, The Journal of New Media and Culture
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Special issue of NmediaC, The Journal of New Media and Culture
Topic: New Media, Sex, and Culture in the 21st Century
Submission Deadline: April 15, 2010

NmediaC invites submissions of research articles, essays, and web-based
art for a special issue on New Media, Sex, and Culture in the 21st
Century. Sex has a long history of being subjected to technologies of
observation, regulation, enhancement, and representation. Certainly
many of the discourses and technologies of the Internet have been
preoccupied with it, even though the U.S. government and other groups
have tried to make it harder for people to find sex online. One of the
messages of the "cyberporn scare" of the mid to late 1990s in the U.S.
was: It's here, and it's bad! But in the drawn-out process of letting
everybody know about it, online porn became somewhat normalized. As van
Doorn (2009) arguesProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

"pornography has been involved in a
'mainstreaming' proProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
ss over the past decade...simultaneously, the
public discourse on sex and sexuality has grown exponentially."
Foucault observes how sundry discourses of sexuality espouse a veil of
silence and prudishness towards sex while at the same time positioning
people to seek knowledge about it, observe it and talk about it. The
rhetoric of the cyberporn scare asked society to wall up and hide
pornography, but ended up forcing people to accept it and engage it
more directly, whether it is to talk about it, joke about it, actively
seek it, or actively avoid it. Web2.0 publishing tools and social media
networks have made it easier for people to publically talk about sex
and to publish their own sex online for anyone to see. Scholars and
artists who explore any aspects of online pornography, NetPorn, the
sexualization of Web2.0, sexual identities in postmodern society, and
many other subject areas are invited to submit their work.

This special issue of NmediaC will be launched in collaboration with a
juried art exhibit in Detroit, Michigan set for the summer of 2010. The
articles and web-art from the special issue will be featured in the
show.

Submission: Email submissions in Word, HTML or PDF to jlillie@loyola.edu
The editor for this issue will be Jonathan Lillie of Loyola University.

Submissions and inquiries about the on-site art show in Detroit should be directed to Steve Coy at: loucoy@hotmail.com