A true and powerful story shocking and heartbreaking in its naked honesty.Author Clarissa Smith grew up along the Labrador/Quebec border in the 1950s and 1960s. Broken Wings is a story about love, hate and abandonment. Clarissa’s mother died when she was 14 and she was left to care for her younger siblings. Alone, with their father gone, the family almost starved to death. The book is Clarissa’s telling of a promise to her dying mother that she couldn’t keep. Clarissa’s story is one...

This book examines ways of developing research on young people’s sexual cultures in the context of a media-saturated and technology-focused contemporary culture, an area of study that remains relatively unexplored despite heightened concern about young people, sex and culture. Unlike the widespread sensationalist reporting about the ‘pornification’ of young people’s lives and the policy documents which have emerged on ‘sexualization’, the book foregrounds the need for a critical approach w...

Game of Thrones was an international sensation, and has been looked at from many different angles. But to date there has been little research into its audiences: who they were, how they engaged with and responded to it. This book presents the findings of a major international research project that garnered more than 10,000 responses to an innovative 'qualiquantitative' questionnaire. Among its findings are: a new way of understanding the place and role of favourite characters in a...

Clarissa Smith is a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Sunderland, United Kingdom.

This is a concise and accessible introduction into the concept of objectification, one of the most frequently recurring terms in both academic and media debates on the gendered politics of contemporary culture, and core to critiquing the social positions of sex and sexism.Objectification is an issue of media representation and everyday experiences alike. Central to theories of film spectatorship, beauty fashion and sex, objectification is connected to the harassment and discriminat...

Sexuality is an integral part of our lives, and our identities. But how do we study it? Written in a lively and accessible style, Studying Sexualities aims to introduce students to the critical study of sexuality, taking a look at the major theories, media representations, and cultural practices.After having carefully explained the key theoretical and empirical debates on the subject – outlining Foucauldian Constructionism, Psychoanalysis, and Queer Theory - the authors draw on the...

The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality is a vibrant and authoritative exploration of the ways in which sex and sexualities are mediated in modern media and everyday life.The 40 chapters in this volume offer a snapshot of the remarkable diversification of approaches and research within the field, bringing together a wide range of scholars and researchers from around the world and from different disciplinary backgrounds including cultural studies, education, his...

British culture today is the product of a shifting combination of tradition and experimentation, national identity and regional and ethnic diversity. These distinctive tensions are expressed in a range of cultural arenas, such as art, sport, journalism, fashion, education, and race. This Companion addresses these and other major aspects of British culture, and offers a sophisticated understanding of what it means to study and think about the diverse cultural landscapes of contemporary Brit...

Sexualised Masculinity: Men’s Bodies in 21st Century Media Culture explores evolving portrayals of masculinity in contemporary media, focusing on the increasing eroticisation of the male body.This book examines how traditional and digital media – from films and television to social media platforms and fashion – have transformed the ways masculinity is represented and perceived. Through a wide array of case studies, it highlights how male bodies are now sites of erotic valu...

This anthology takes the ever-controversial discussion of pornography out of solely academic circles; it expands the questions about porn that academics might tackle and opens the conversation to those who know it best—the creators and users of porn.Features essays on non-traditional issues in porn, including celebrity sex tapes, virtual sex, S&M, homosexual porn, and technology’s impact on the porn industryFeatures fascinating insights from psychologists, a lawyer,...

For all its vaunted attention to sexuality, queer theory has had relatively little to say about sex, the material and psychic practices through which erotic gratification is sought. In Orgasmology, Annamarie Jagose takes orgasm as her queer scholarly object. From simultaneous to fake orgasms, from medical imaging to pornographic visualization, from impersonal sexual publics to domestic erotic intimacies, Jagose traces the career of orgasm across the twentieth century.Along...

Terry Goldie is the author of two previous non-fiction books, and the editor of the anthology In a Queer Country: Gay & Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001). He is a professor of English at York University in Toronto, where he teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures with particular interest in gay studies, literary theory, and cinema.