Repetition and seriality are inherent in pornography and is constitutive for its functionality as a film genre, an industry, and an area of gender studies. By linking the styles of the genre to processes of serial production, consumption, and discussion, Schaschek questions the dominant assumptions about pornography and the stability of the genre.

Repetition and seriality are inherent in pornography and is constitutive for its functionality as a film genre, an industry, and an area of gender studies. By linking the styles of the genre to processes of serial production, consumption, and discussion, Schaschek questions the dominant assumptions about pornography and the stability of the genre.

Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes examines how sexiness, sexuality and revisited sexual politics are used to modernize film and TV remakes. This exploration provides insight into the ever-evolving—and ever-contested—role of sex in society, and scrutinizes the politics and economics underpinning modern media reproduction. More nudity, kinky sex, and queer content are increasingly deployed in remakes to attract, and to titillate, a new generation of viewers. While sex in this book refers to increased erotic content, this discussion also incorporates an investigation of other uses of sex and gender to help a remake appear woke and abreast of the zeitgeist including feminist reimaginings and ‘girl power’ make-overs, updated gender roles, female cast-swaps, queer retellings, and repositioned gazes. Though increased sex is often considered a sign of modernity, gratuitous displays of female nudity can sometimes be interpreted as sexist and anachronistic, in turn highlighting that progressiveness around sexuality in contemporary media is not a linear story. Also examined therefore, are remakes that reduce the sexual content to appear cutting-edge and cognizant of the demands of today’s audiences.

A leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern period In Pleasure and Efficacy, Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms “trans pragmatism”—the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens. With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture—poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving—even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history.

Media are central to our experiences and understandings of sex, whether in the form of familiar 'mainstream' genres, pornographies and other sex genres, or the new zones, interactions and technosexualities made possible by the internet and mobile devices. In this engaging new book, Feona Attwood argues that to understand the significance of sex media, we need to examine them in terms of their distinctive characteristics, relationships to art and culture, and changing place in society. Observing the role that media play in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality, this book considers the regulation of sex and sexual representation, issues around the 'sexualization of culture', and demonstrates how a critical focus on sex media can inform debates on sex education and sexual health, as well as illuminate the relation of sex to labour, leisure, intimacy, and bodies. Sex Media is an essential resource for students and scholars of media, culture, gender and sexuality.

Gay pornography, online and onscreen, is a controversial and significantly under-researched area of cultural production. In the first book of its kind, Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity explores the iconography, themes and ideals that the genre presents. Indeed, John Mercer argues that gay pornography cannot be regarded as one-dimensional, but that it offers its audience a vision of plural masculinities that are more nuanced and ambiguous than they might seem. Mercer examines how the internet has generated an exponential growth in the sheer volume and variety of this material, and facilitated far greater access to it. He uses both professional and amateur examples to explore how gay pornography has become part of a wider cultural context in which modern masculinities have become 'saturated' by their constantly evolving status and function in popular culture.

What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.