Mercer - Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity

John Mercer is Professor in Gender and Sexuality at the Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University.

Mercers book is dense and erudite, bedazzling in its connoisseurship, rich in the detail of case studies that ring a clear bell or make you wonder how you missed that one, as witty as it is weighty. Discerning contemporary gay porn or any porn for that matter through the vortex of saturated masculinity turns out to be immensely productive. Its all here, all of the inhabitants of the pornosphere from the 1970s celluloid twink to the 21st-century postporn amateur care bear virtual daddy, situated carefully in the astutely defined dynamics of fantasy and sociality that keep them all alive. Mercers central place in the still-proliferating field of porn studies across the board is guaranteed.

Thomas Waugh, Professor of Film Studies, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University

Hugely impressive, the most interesting thing Ive read on these areas for years; it will be enormously helpful for scholars of pornography and a real gift to students.

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

Library of Gender and Popular Culture

From Mad Men to gaming culture, performance art to steam-punk fashion, the presentation and representation of gender continues to saturate popular media. This new series seeks to explore the intersection of gender and popular culture, engaging with a variety of texts drawn primarily from Art, Fashion, TV, Cinema, Cultural Studies and Media Studies as a way of considering various models for understanding the complementary relationship between gender identities and popular culture. By considering race, ethnicity, class, and sexual identities across a range of cultural forms, each book in the series will adopt a critical stance towards issues surrounding the development of gender identities and popular and mass cultural products.

For further information or enquiries, please contact the library series editors:

Claire Nally: claire.nally@northumbria.ac.uk

Angela Smith: angela.smith@sunderland.ac.uk

Advisory Board:

Dr Kate Ames, Central Queensland University, Australia

Prof Leslie Heywood, Binghampton University, USA

Dr Michael Higgins, Strathclyde University, UK

Prof sa Kroon, rebro University, Sweden

Dr Niall Richardson, Sussex University, UK

Dr Jacki Willson, Central St Martins, University of Arts London, UK

Published and forthcoming titles:

Ageing Femininity on Film: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema

Niall Richardson

All-American TV Crime Drama: Feminism and Identity Politics in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit

Lisa Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti

Beyonc: Celebrity Feminism in the Age of Social Media

Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs

Female Bodies and Performance in Film: Queer Encounters with Embodiment and Affect

Katharina Lindner

Framing the Single Mother: Gender, Politics and Family Values in Contemporary Popular Cinema

Louise Fitzgerald

Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity

John Mercer

Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film and Television

Helen Davies and Claire OCallaghan (Eds)

The Gendered Motorcycle: Representations in Society, Media and Popular Culture

Esperanza Miyake

Gendering History on Screen: Women Filmmakers and Historical Films

Julia Erhart

Girls Like This, Boys Like That: The Reproduction of Gender in Contemporary Youth Cultures

Victoria Cann

Love Wars: Television Romantic Comedy

Mary Irwin

Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future

Marianne Kac-Vergne

Paradoxical Pleasures: Female Submission in Popular and Erotic Fiction

Anna Watz

Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Popular Culture of Post-Crisis

Dion Kagan

Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins

Darren Elliott-Smith

Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy

Shane Brown

Shaping Gym Cultures: Body, Image and Social Media

Nicholas Chare

Steampunk: Gender and the Neo-Victorian

Claire Nally

Television Comedy and Femininity: Queering Gender

Rosie White

Television, Technology and Gender: New Platforms and New Audiences

Sarah Arnold

Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture

Melanie Kennedy

Contents

Acknowledgements

Its taken a long time to reach the stage where writing this book could become a practical reality and there is a very long list of people who have helped me along the way, from my initial postgraduate research in this area, to developing a career as an academic, writing, in part at least, about masculinity and gay porn. This includes many colleagues (and now friends) who have offered help and expressed enthusiasm for the work I was trying to do, back in those days when writing about gay porn still seemed like an odd career choice.

This project would not have been possible at all without the support of the Faculty of Arts, Media and Design at Birmingham City University, an institution which has provided the resources and time that have enabled the research and writing of this book. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Professor Tim Wall, Associate Dean for Research, who has been a regular source of motivation and an invaluable supporter of my work over the years. I owe Tim a great deal.

I also want to thank my colleagues at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. A supportive, collegiate and enabling working environment really enables scholars to flourish and Ive been lucky to have those kinds of working conditions. Thanks in particular to the centre directors Nick Webber, for working so hard to cultivate those conditions, and Paul Long, for leading the centre and for reading through drafts of this book, and to my research cluster colleagues, especially Inger Lise Bore and my dear friend Oliver Carter.