We are writing to announce a new book series on Adult Film and Media, published by Intellect Books, an internationally regarded independent academic publisher that specializes in film, media, and the creative arts. Please find the Call for Contributions attached and online: https://www.intellectbooks.
We invite contributions to an interdisciplinary book series dedicated to the study of adult film and media across global contexts. The series examines these forms as sites of cultural, technological, and social significance, with attention to their histories, industries, representations, aesthetics, labour, technologies, production, circulation, consumption, and publics. It considers their relationship to modern visual culture and media industries, as well as to censorship, law, sexuality, gender, race, colonialism, sexual economies, transnationalism, and changing social norms.
The series seeks to consolidate and expand adult film and media as a significant field of interdisciplinary scholarship, with particular attention to emerging and underrepresented areas of inquiry. We are especially interested in work that broadens the field through queer and trans media histories, race and colonialism, transnational circulation, fan and participatory cultures, and new archival, methodological, and theoretical approaches.
We seek historically grounded and/or theoretically rigorous scholarship that moves beyond reductive moral frameworks while remaining attentive to ethical questions. We welcome work that understands adult media as complex cultural forms shaped by specific historical, material, cultural, social, technological, and political conditions and that brings them into conversation with broader debates across the humanities and social sciences. We welcome scholarship from both established and emerging scholars.
The series publishes monographs, edited collections, readers, public scholarship, trade-academic crossovers, and short books. Monographs and edited collections will generally be 50,000 words or longer, while short books will be approximately 40,000 words. The short-book format offers an opportunity for focused studies of individual adult films, media objects, performers, events, archives, or controversies.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Histories and transformations of adult film and media, from cinema, photography, television, video, magazines, and animation to digital and networked media
- Internet pornography, platform economies, amateur and user-generated media, and participatory cultures
- Labour, performance, production, and the political economy of adult industries
- Ethical questions of consent, representation, and platform governance
- Feminist, queer, trans, intersectional, racial, colonial, and transnational approaches to adult film and media
- Censorship, obscenity, regulation, moral panics, exhibition, activism, and sexual publics
- Experimental and avant-garde practices, including art-world engagements with adult film and media
- Video games, virtual reality, animation, hentai, immersive technologies, and AI-generated sexual media
- Archives, libraries, museums, collecting, preservation, curation, exhibition, and the historiography of adult film and media
- Relationships between adult film and media and mainstream film, television, advertising, and digital culture
- Genre, aesthetics, spectatorship, affect, desire, and pleasure
To submit a proposal or express interest, please contact the series editors with a brief abstract of the project (300–500 words), author biography, and indicative table of contents. Full proposal guidelines can be provided upon request.
Editors:
Professor Peter Alilunas, University of Oregon: pka@uoregon.edu
Professor Patrick Keilty, University of Toronto: p.keilty@utoronto.ca
Professor Darshana Sreedhar Mini, University of Wisconsin–Madison: dmini@wisc.edu