![]() ![]() Porn scholars routinely attend conferences where fellow attendees are embarrassed by their topics, and stories abound of young scholars who are advised to repackage their work in order to be taken more seriously or seem more “hireable.” In other words, assumptions exist that pornography studies are either too limited in scope or too contentious for the academy. ![]() ![]() The growth and solidification of porn studies notwithstanding, the field maintains a marginal status in academia. The growth of the discipline has been supported through debates and disagreements that allow for teasing out radical ethics and politics which, in turn, enable certain reading practices and representational schemas to persist. Porn studies have found that porn is indeed often formulaic, sometimes ritualistic its characters, events, locations, actions, interactions are often repetitious (Maina and Zecca 2016 Mercer 2017 Williams 1989 Zecca 2017) but recognising that also means recognising the insider knowledge possessed by those who consume porn.Īs a proliferating subfield of sexuality studies, porn studies has become a larger framework to understand sexually explicit media. Theories of media representation, production and consumption have all been deployed to analyse and contextualize pornographies in relation to other media genres (Albury 2009 Attwood 2017 Barcan 2002 Jones 2020 McKee 2016), forms and aesthetics (essays in Kerr & Hines 2012 Mercer 2017aMercer, 2017bPowell 2019 Tiidenberg and Paasonen 2019), exploring production histories (Carter 2018 Newton and Stanfill 2020 Strub 2019), interests among different sexual communities/orientations (Asman 2020 Gilbert 2020 Neville 2018 Robards 2018 Waling et al 2020), and in relation to cultural regulation (Freibert 2019 Stardust 2014) and value (Barker 2014 Ding 2020 Vörös 2015). Yet studies of the social and cultural significance of pornography are hardly new. Through these discussions, we direct attention to the situatedness of lived experiences of sexuality and advance the agenda of Asian porn studies by changing the focus from the existence and political significance of sexually explicit media to the transformations they bring to individual lives. The third is the digital sexual publics' ambivalent politics that at once transform sexual identities and constrain sexual imaginaries. The second is the emergence of a truly "digital" intimacy that produces flexible public spaces to embody queer desires. The first is a hybridity of media, where "old" and "new" digital technologies coexist to produce an array of sexual representations that creatively negotiate with censorship. We identify three characteristics of digital sexual publics. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 12 Chinese porn producers and consumers, we explore the relationship between digital media use and lived experiences of sexuality. This article puts forward "digital sexual publics" as an interpretive framework through which to understand do-it-yourself porn production and consumption practices that have recently proliferated on domestic and international digital platforms in China. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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