Special Issue of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture

Deadline: September 1, 2020

More here.

Guest Editor: Lori Hall-Araujo, Stephens College

Marginalized people led empowerment movements resulting in significant cultural transformations in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States and beyond. Among the fights for equality and calls for structural systemic change emerged a sexual revolution that found its way into the mainstream. In 1972, the topic of cinematic pornography entered public discourse when the feature-length hardcore heterosexual pornographic film Deep Throat (Damiano, 1972) debuted in Times Square.

For the first time in American cinema, sexual acts appeared on the big screen in legitimate theatres and broad swaths of the moviegoing public – including women and celebrities – boasted about having seen the film. So launched the 1970s era of ‘porno chic’ filmmaking and the trend for watching narrative hardcore films in theaters.

By the 1980s, home videos and eventually on-demand and streaming services made pornography more accessible and simultaneously a more private pursuit. Coinciding with this shift was the phenomenon of women in popular culture expressing their sexual empowerment through self-objectification. Fashion scholar Annette Lynch (Lynch 2012: 52) traces the origins of women and girls’ porn-inspired millennium styles to 1980s performers such as Madonna who used self-objectification to gain attention and power. Lynch notes the continued practice of female pop stars to market sexiness and inspire what she calls ‘porn chic’.

This special issue engages the topic of porn chic and addresses pornography’s historical and contemporary relationship to fashion. Porn Chic, Erotic Style and Fashion encourages consideration of erotic style broadly defined with an aim to build understanding of its cultural implications. Contributions are accepted from any discipline and methodological approach.

Potential topics might include but are not limited to:

• fashion trends in subcultural sexual communities
• production aesthetics, music styles, body types,
• fashion and costume tropes in pornography
• porn, fashion and cosmetic surgery/body modifications
• the public and private in porn and fashion
• queer fashion and style subversions of heteronormative porn
• heteronormative women’s sexiness: empowering or charade of authentic power?
• porn and fashion as capitalist productions
• porn and fashion’s relationship to race and fetishes
• lesbian porn for straight men and lesbian chic in fashion
• gay porn’s impact on mainstream men’s fashions
• porn’s influence on fashion photography
• BDSM style and mainstream fashion
• social media, free porn and body image among boys and young men
• incel ideologies, homoeroticism and changing notions of the ideal masculine physique
• Instagram, influencers and the demise of Playboy
• porn film style and fashion case studies.

Deadline for Submission is 1 September 2020. Publication 2021. For questions regarding submission topics please email guest editor Lori Hall-Araujo, Stephens College at lhallaraujo@stephens.edu

For questions regarding journal submission guidelines and standards please email or contact the Principle Editor Dr. Joseph H. Hancock, II at joseph.hancockii@gmail.com

FSPC takes submission on a rolling basis with reviews commencing immediately for acceptance to all guest issues. We do not make publication decisions on the submission deadline date. All manuscripts should expect review and turnaround within 60 days.