I am a writer, researcher and editor, with over thirty years experience of developing courses and teaching in English universities. I’ve organized events and presented my work all over the world.Â
Feona Attwood
​My work focuses on the ways that sex, sexuality and gender are experienced and understood today and how media and technology are becoming more central to this. My book Sex Media a brings together many of the issues that I’ve researched over the years in an accessible way and you can listen to me talking about this here. This book tackles ideas about ‘objectification’ - one of the most widely used terms in discussions of sex and sexism. This article summarizes its arguments about the way the term is used and why it’s not very useful.
I’m interested in how people engage with media. This book on the HBO series Game of Thrones is based on a study of more than 10,000 viewers. Another project asked more than 5,000 people about their experiences with and feelings about porn.
One of the things that I’ve worked hardest at is to bring together researchers from different backgrounds to work on questions about sex and media that are new, unexplored or controversial. My first edited collection explores ideas about the way culture is becoming more ‘sexualized’. This one is one of the first books to investigate online pornographies, while this journal special issue considers young people’s sexual cultures and this one examines how intimacy increasingly makes use of digital technologies. This companion h maps out how researchers are examining the numerous ways in which sex and sexualities are lived out in media and everyday life.
In 2014 I founded the journal Porn Studies with Clarissa Smith. Porn Studies is the first journal to critically examine porn products and services and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts. We publish innovative work examining sexual media forms, their connections to wider media landscapes and their links to broader spheres of work across historical periods and national contexts. Porn Studies focuses on pornographies past and present, in all their variations and around the world. This article summarizes what we’ve done in the past ten years and our plans for the future.
I manage and co-edit the journal Sexualities with Roisin Ryan-Flood and Travis Kong. Sexualities publishes research on the social organization of human sexual experience in the late modern world from the social sciences and beyond.
I am Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Gender Studies. JGS publishes original, critical and innovative work in gender studies that engages with the thinkers and movements that constitute feminist, queer and transgender theory. It is dedicated to the development of work investigating the intersections of gender with sexuality, race, class, ability, age, culture, politics, religion and location and engages with contemporary debates and developments in the theorizing and lived experience of people of all genders.
You can track everything I’ve written on Google Scholar here.
If you’d like to get in touch please email me at feona.attwood@gmail.com