Contributors

Sarah Arnold

Sarah Arnold is Lecturer in Gender and Production Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland. She is currently preparing the book Television, Technology and Gender: New Platforms and New Audiences. Her previous books include Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood and the co-authored The Film Handbook. Her research focuses on viewing spaces and environments of television and film, particularly in the context of gender and emergent technologies. She is also a regular contributor at CST Online. 

Colette Balmain

Colette Balmain is a specialist in Asian cinemas and cultures, particularly East Asia. She is currently writing a book on East Asian Gothic Cinema and the second edition of An Introduction to Japanese Horror Film. Colette is interested in how gender, race and sexuality are represented in horror and gothic cinemas.

Katie Barnett

Katie Barnett is a lecturer in Film Studies and Media and Culture at the University of Worcester, UK. Her research focuses broadly on representations of the family within Hollywood cinema, with particular interest in examining fatherhood and masculinity through the queer theoretical standpoint of reproductive futurism.

  • Down the Rabbit Hole: Sex and Grief on Screen. October 2017.

Ruth Beresford

Ruth Beresford is a PhD student researching women’s experiences of pornography with a particular interest in how new methods of knowledge production can be developed for researching the field. She draws on feminist and participatory research methods which inform her Living With Porn(ography) project which has now launched. More details can be found via livingwithpornography.com.

Lynn Comella

Lynn Comella, Ph.D. is an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies in the department of interdisciplinary, gender, and ethnic studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. An expert on the adult entertainment industry, her research explores a number of broad sociological themes, including the relationship between sexual politics and consumer culture. She is the author of Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure (2017) and co-editor of New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law (2015).

Marc Démont

Marc Démont received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of South Carolina where his dissertation focused on queer theory and French contemporary philosophy. He is currently working on two different projects. The first one is a study of the horror genre and more particularly the New French Extremity cinema, and the second one develops a queer psychoanalysis of touch.

Martin Fradley

Martin Fradley is Lecturer at the University of Brighton and has taught widely across the UK university sector. He is a regular contributor to Film Quarterly and his work has also appeared in Screen, Journal of British Cinema and Television and Film Criticism. He is co-editor of Shane Meadows: Critical Essays (2013) and has published work in Post-Feminism and Contemporary American Cinema (2013) and Directory of World Cinema: American Independent 3 (2016).

Melissa Hair

Melissa Hair is a PhD candidate at Northumbria University. Her research is concerned with the on and off screen presence of women in contemporary American indie cinema, and examines the work of directors such as Miranda July, Lena Dunham and Nicole Holofcener. She has presented papers on the representation of abortion in American cinema and the construction of ‘quirky’ femininity in popular culture.

I.Q. Hunter

I.Q. Hunter is Professor of Film Studies at De Montfort University, UK, and the author of Cult Film as a Guide to Life (2016) and British Trash Cinema (2013), editor of British Science Fiction Cinema (1999) and co-editor of British Comedy Cinema (2012) and The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History (2016).

Neil Jackson

Neil Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is co-editor of Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (2016) and his article on ‘Exhausted: John C Holmes the Real Story’ (1981) appears in Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street and Beyond (edited by Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker 2016). He is currently preparing a study of the representation of the Vietnam War in exploitation cinema.

Darren Kerr

Darren Kerr is Senior Lecturer and Head of Film at Southampton Solent University, UK. He is a member of the editorial board for Porn Studies, co-editor of Hard to Swallow: Hard-core Pornography on Screen (2012), Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversion (2017) and co-curator of Screening Sex. Darren has also written and published research on transnational horror, screen violence and literary adaptations.

Gary Needham

Gary Needham is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at The University of Liverpool. His research cuts across film, television and contemporary art; sex and sexuality has featured strongly in a lot of that work. He is the co-editor of volumes on Asian Cinemas (2006), Queer TV (2009) and Warhol in Ten Takes (2013), a monograph on the film Brokeback Mountain (2010), and is co-editor of two book series: American Indies (Edinburgh University Press) and Hollywood Centenary (Routledge). He is currently working on a new monograph on Andy Warhol and his collaborative relationship with Edie Sedgwick (Bloomsbury) and other research that explores sex and film form in contemporary gay cinema.

Susanna Paasonen

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in Internet research, sexuality, affect theory, and media culture, she serves on the editorial boards of e.g. the journals New Media & Society, Social Media + Society and Sexualities. Susanna is most recently the author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MITP 2011), co-author of Not Safe for Work: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media (forthcoming, with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light), as well as co-editor of Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (2010, with Marianne Liljeström) and Networked Affect (2015, with Hillis and Petit). Her two current book-length projects explore the dynamics of distraction and boredom connected to social media (with Michael Petit) as well as the applications of the notion of play in studies of sexuality.

Donna Peberdy

Donna Peberdy is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Southampton Solent University. She is the author of Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema (2011), co-editor of Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversion (2017) and co-curator at Screening Sex. Donna has written about acting and performance in contemporary US film and television, film noir, transnational cinema, voice and vocal performance, the performance of sex and sexuality, bipolar masculinity and celebrity autoerotic asphyxiation. She is particularly interested in the relationship between screen acting and the performance of identity. Donna also blogs from time to time at Improv: Reflections on Screen Acting and Performance. 

Carol Siegel

Carol Siegel is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the representation of sexuality in literature, film, television, and popular music. Her book publications include Sex: Radical Cinema (2015), Goth’s Dark Empire (2005), New Millennial Sexstyles (2000), Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love (1995), Lawrence Among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions (UP of Virginia, 1991) and the co-edited collections The Gay ’90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies (1997), Sex Positives?: The Cultural Politics of Dissident Sexualities (1997), Forming and Reforming Identity (1995), and Eroticism and Containment: News from the Flood Plain (1994). She also co-edits with Ellen E. Berry the online journal Rhizomes. Her current projects are a collection of essays co-edited with Lindsay Coleman – Sex and Excess on Film – and a monograph on the representation of Jewish sexualities in cinema and television.

Caroline West

Caroline West is a PhD researcher at Dublin City University, Ireland. Her research focuses on the experiences of women working in the American porn industry and how these experiences are discussed by the feminist movement. This also involves examining the history of pornography and the relationship between power, sex and knowledge. She also holds an MA in Sexuality Studies.

Connor Winterton

Connor Winterton is currently a PhD researcher at the Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University. His thesis is concerned with the representation of ‘queer sex’ in contemporary American and European cinema, in a wave of filmmaking he labels ‘Neo-Queer Cinema’. The thesis will critically discuss what queer sex may be defined as, whilst also examining the stylistic and narrative representation of queer sex acts, and how they have or have not changed since the 1990s (or more precisely since New Queer Cinema). He is also currently writing a chapter on female heroines in Tarantino’s films (more specifically Kill Bill and Death Proof), which analyses on-line responses to the women in on-line spaces such as blogs and community forums.

Ellen Wright

Ellen Wright is the VC2020 Lecturer in Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University in Leicester. She writes on the material culture around the American film industry between the 1920s and the 1960s. Her PhD was on the British reception of the Hollywood film star pin-up during WWII and she has published work on Hollywood and the swimsuit, on the pin-up marketing and camp performances of Monroe and Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the star persona and work of pin-up photographer and exploitation film star Bunny Yeager. She has a regular blog and podcast on the intersection of performance, spectatorship, gender and sexuality called Here’s Looking at You.