Technologies of Sexiness: Sex Identity and Consumer Culture
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 11595354
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780199914760
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Technologies of Sexiness is an 80,000-word monograph published by Oxford University Press. It responds to growing anxieties around a ‘sexualisation of culture’ that has been the focus of media panic and policy responses. These anxieties produce what Evans and Riley term a double stagnation between celebration and concern. The book identifies two connected research problems, where 1) research had largely focused on school-aged girls, and 2) research on adult women had focused largely on media analyses of specific texts (e.g. Sex and the City, Bridget Jones’ Diary).
The research asks: How do adult women make sense of their own feelings of sexiness in the context of a sexualisation of culture? How does generation shape how they feel? It is the first book to analyse how adult women understand sexiness. Drawing on a poststructuralist feminist methodology, it proposes a ‘technologies of sexiness’ to make sense of how doubly stagnated anxieties create deep emotional attachments.
The method was a series of cooperative inquiry-inspired discussions with two groups of women, whose age placed them as either living through or born after the first wave of feminism. The book drew together their discussions with analysis of sexualised media culture. In the foreword to the book, Prof Hammack (University of California, Santa Cruz) defined this method as providing a blueprint for researchers ‘interested in linking societal discourses of gender and sexuality, embodied in artifacts such as media representation, to personal narratives of sense-making and self-understanding’.
Technologies of Sexiness is interdisciplinary and has been applied broadly across the humanities and social sciences. Dissemination included keynotes (e.g. Gender and Visual Representation, Winchester University); YouTube interviews and blog posts for Oxford University Press; and media coverage (e.g. Times Higher Education). It was reviewed in journals, including Gender & Society and Consumption, Markets & Culture.
The research for this monograph covers the period from 2007 onwards. Preliminary outcomes and theoretical methodology introducing the framework of “technologies of sexiness” for analysis of qualitive data were presented in two journal articles submitted to REF2014, and these have been substantially developed throughout the book. The framework has been revised as the research has progressed in order to conduct the analysis in chapters 4 and 5. These are now integrated alongside further research insights in order to develop a larger, sustained, more complex and in-depth argument.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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