Porn Studies

Porn Studies is calling for papers reviewing the current state of research on pornography in the quantitative social sciences – including but not limited to communication science, quantitative sociology, neuroscience, and social, clinical, cognitive, behaviourial, developmental, or forensic psychology.

Papers may be broad overviews, or may focus on a particular trend or issue.

Papers should be written in a way that is accessible to an interdisciplinary audience who may have no training in statistics or any of the methods or paradigms of quantitative social sciences.

We particularly welcome papers that are critical, in the sense that they take a self-reflexive approach to the subject matter and realise that there are a variety of ways of thinking about pornography and sex more generally, including queer approaches, anti-heteronormative approaches, sex-positive approaches and work that actively rejects whorephobia.

Possible topics might include the major questions that have animated quantitative social science research on pornography, or the important questions that have typically been left out of that work. We welcome contributions that describe the heterogeneity of conceptual and operational definitions of pornography, or its use, or the nature and use of specific types of content, and the implications of such heterogeneity for cumulative science in quantitative pornography research. We are also interested in the assumptions of quantitative social science research on pornography with respect to what counts as healthy sexuality, and what alternative versions of healthy sexuality have traditionally been excluded. We would be interested in research that considers a number of aspects of sexuality where some disciplines have seen them as unhealthy while others have seen them as healthy, including casual sex, consensual non-monogamy, sex work, BDSM and fetishes. We would be interested to see work on consent as a point of tension between different disciplinary approaches to porn, some of which attend to consent in definitions of sexual aggression while others do not. Articles interrogating assumptions of causality and the implications of such assumptions in quantitative social science research about pornography are also welcome.

If you would be interested in submitting an article for consideration, as a first step please submit an abstract of up to 200 words by the 31^st October to [email protected] and [email protected].

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article