Journal Articles by Alex Dymock
Prurience, punishment and the image: Reading 'law-and-order pornography'
This article aims to expand interpretations of the representational and spectatorial politics of ... more This article aims to expand interpretations of the representational and spectatorial politics of images by investigating what Wacquant has termed 'law-and-order pornographies'. By this, he refers to images of crime and punishment accorded signifiers of the pornographic and the prurient in order to describe the fusion of the erotic and the punitive. The first part of the article brings into conversation the fields of porn studies and visual criminology. It examines more closely what is at stake in imbuing crime images with the grammar of the pornographic. The second part of the article argues that the application of the pornographic to images of law and order has been refracted back onto the sphere of adult entertainment, in particular, the phenomenon of 'revenge pornography'.
Towards a Consent Culture: An Interview with Kitty Stryker
Journal of the International Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics 2(1), Nov 2014
Kitty Stryker is a sex-worker, educator and activist currently based between San Francisco (CA) a... more Kitty Stryker is a sex-worker, educator and activist currently based between San Francisco (CA) and London, whose work on sexuality, community and consent has gained an international audience. Stryker’s work has been published in The Huffington Post, Salon.Com and numerous edited collections, and she regularly receives invitations to speak about her projects across a range of community, sexual health, and academic settings.
Stryker has been particularly instrumental in contributing crucial activist energies to questioning the ethics and politics of so-called ‘sex-positive’ communities and subcultures through her project, Consent Culture, and it is her work on this theme that this interview explores. Previously, critical scrutiny of the ways in which consent is constructed in these communities has only emerged from the ‘outside’, particularly through two recent ethnographic studies (Weiss, 2011; Newmahr, 2012). Kitty’s project, having been part of both London and San Francisco’s sexual subcultures for many years, is to confront and educate these communities directly from ‘within’ them, initiating a conversation that invites communities to be self-critical, and address the ethics and politics of BDSM spaces and practices. In particular, her work has been instrumental in challenging the ‘safe, sane and consensual’ (SSC) mantle that has previously been heralded as the gold-standard for engaging in ethical BDSM practices, and that often shields such communities from legal intervention.
While Consent Culture began, as Kitty tells me, with a single workshop called Safe/Ward in San Francisco, the project has begun to receive global attention from bloggers, academics and mainstream media, and a new book is in the works. In this interview, Kitty tells me about the aims of the Consent Culture project, as well as the events and experiences that have informed her work.
Sexualities 16(8), Dec 2013
This article offers a critical reading of the Fifty Shades phenomenon by situating the novels as ... more This article offers a critical reading of the Fifty Shades phenomenon by situating the novels as works of transgressive erotic fiction that stimulate circuits of female consumption and the production of sexual identity as commodity. It submits a novel contribution to current scholarship on the mechanisms of sexual transgression by acknowledging its neutral or even reactive qualities, and by laying bare its relationship with disciplinary regimes of social power. It demonstrates that, rather than a politically progressive utopian strategy that might delimit the parameters of sexual desire, transgression now primarily functions as a mechanism through which capitalism is reinforced and the institutions of heteronormativity maintained.
But femsub is broken too!: on the normalisation of BDSM and the problem of pleasure
Psychology and Sexuality 3(1), Jan 2012
This article constitutes a theoretical critique of the limits by which BDSM is policed by law and... more This article constitutes a theoretical critique of the limits by which BDSM is policed by law and psychiatry from a feminist jurisprudential perspective. In particular, it discusses types of female masochism that disavow narratives of ‘safe, sane and consensual’ and BDSM’s transformative potential and instead makes an argument for a feminist ethics of female masochism. Through an engagement with psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan’s notion of jouissance, the essay makes a claim that law in this context functions as a kind of ‘pleasure principle’ and that the notion of ‘harmful’ consensual sexual experiences relies upon a normative tendency to relate feminine masochism with compliance, not only to the will of another, but with the social order of ‘reproductive futurity’.
Book Reviews by Alex Dymock
Unmastered: A Book On Desire, Most Difficult To Tell (Katherine Angel)
Journal of the International Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics, Sep 1, 2013
Other Writing by Alex Dymock
The question of regulating pornography: is criminalisation the answer?
Inherently Human: Critical Perspectives on Law, Gender and Sexuality, May 22, 2013
Extreme Porn Trial: Well, thank you for that interesting anatomical lesson
The Guardian, Aug 9, 2012
Prosecutors, extreme porn and Fifty Shades of Grey
politics.co.uk, Aug 8, 2012
Invited Talks by Alex Dymock
Speaking of the Perverse Female Criminal
Automatonomy: Notes on Marie Calloway's 'What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life'
Desiring the law? BDSM, the sexual contract and the socio-legal imaginary
Criminalising Extreme Pornography: 5 Years On
Conference Papers by Alex Dymock
Under lock and key?: the place of heterosexual sado-masochism in the socio-legal imaginary
Reading across queer and feminism in the case of R v Lock
Submission by choke: Mixed Martial Arts, Sadomasochism and the Law
Shutting the Floodgates: Regulating Female Ejaculation in England and Wales
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Journal Articles by Alex Dymock
Stryker has been particularly instrumental in contributing crucial activist energies to questioning the ethics and politics of so-called ‘sex-positive’ communities and subcultures through her project, Consent Culture, and it is her work on this theme that this interview explores. Previously, critical scrutiny of the ways in which consent is constructed in these communities has only emerged from the ‘outside’, particularly through two recent ethnographic studies (Weiss, 2011; Newmahr, 2012). Kitty’s project, having been part of both London and San Francisco’s sexual subcultures for many years, is to confront and educate these communities directly from ‘within’ them, initiating a conversation that invites communities to be self-critical, and address the ethics and politics of BDSM spaces and practices. In particular, her work has been instrumental in challenging the ‘safe, sane and consensual’ (SSC) mantle that has previously been heralded as the gold-standard for engaging in ethical BDSM practices, and that often shields such communities from legal intervention.
While Consent Culture began, as Kitty tells me, with a single workshop called Safe/Ward in San Francisco, the project has begun to receive global attention from bloggers, academics and mainstream media, and a new book is in the works. In this interview, Kitty tells me about the aims of the Consent Culture project, as well as the events and experiences that have informed her work.
Book Reviews by Alex Dymock
Other Writing by Alex Dymock
Invited Talks by Alex Dymock
Conference Papers by Alex Dymock