Debates about human–machine relationships have intensified following the launch of the world’s first commercially available sex robot ‘Harmony’, a hyperrealistic sex doll with AI-capabilities. With the likely consumer market for these devices among white, male, heterosexual sex-doll owners, their views about sex robot technology and the niche online communities in which they discuss their doll relationships have received little scholarly attention. Through a qualitative analysis of the discursive practices of male users of a major sex doll forum, this study found complex and dynamic homosocial relations characterized men’s online interactions. In their discussion of a sex robot future, men negotiate competing structures of masculinity and sexuality and create a safe, online space for others to express their sexual desires and preferences. Using the concept of the ‘seam’ or join, the results reveal the way male users of sex dolls position themselves subjectively and are positioned by technology and the increasingly porous interface between human and machine.

In the bulk of popular, media and scholarly discourse on Azaria Chamberlain's disappearance there is overwhelming consensus that the sensationalist reporting of the event convicted parents Michael and Lindy of their daughter's murder outside official court processes. In feminist scholarship in particular, the infant's disappearance in August 1980 has been read according to a "trial by media" frame. This frame persists despite altered perspectives about the role of the Australian public whose punitive and collectively hostile response to a "media-driven hysteria" has been replaced with the portrait of a kinder and more compassionate nation. The objectives of this article are three-fold: to demonstrate the persistence of the trial by media frame in popular, media and academic discourse; to consider assumptions of a monolithic and hostile media, and by examining a previously unanalysed archive to suggest that these arguments overlook the existence of sympathetic voices in mainstream media as well as the dialogic connection between media and counter publics mutually supporting the Chamberlains' bid for innocence. This research offers an alternative view to scholarship on a landmark event in Australian history and has broader implications for the way we view the media in trial by media situations.

In the field of celebrity studies much has been written about the superficiality of contemporary celebrity culture in which ordinary individuals are recognised as exceptional or worthy of public attention in the absence of any particular talent, contribution or achievement (

The use of selfies as a political tool is critical to the form, shape and expression of online activist networks. In the trending Twitter #FacesOfProstitution, such self-presenting practices challenged the prevailing politics of anonymity around sex work and articulated new modes of political organizing, agency and information dissemination within a networked online community. Analysing the sex worker online campaign using feminist materialist approaches to the body this interdisciplinary article contributes to current discussions about selfies and embodied forms of activism in online spaces and addresses a gap in sex advocacy literature on digital protest cultures.

Within the domain of film studies, the recent surge in films depicting graphic and high-impact sex and sexualized violence has been variously classified under the terms transgressive, brutal, provocative, real sex, and extreme cinema. These classifications, however, tend to underplay the films’ sociohistorical contexts and reflexive struggle for meaning. We argue that the similarities and differences between these real or simulated sex films are determined and mediated within geographical space and historical time. But every film book has its own personal historical starting point: in our case, this is the coming together as intertexts of the real sex film Intimacy with a major academic text, The Transformation of Intimacy, and as authorial agents of a television and documentary film producer and a media academic. This book argues that the meanings we attach to “real sex” cinema are discursively constructed not only by academic experts but by filmmakers, performers, audiences, and film reviewers. Debates about the meaning of real sex cinema are best understood in dialogue, and for the first time in interdisciplinary studies, we foster “mutual understanding” and “critical extension” among new risk sociology, feminist mapping theory, feminist film studies, and film reviewers, while also embracing film/media studies concepts of production, social audiences and spectators, genre, narrative, authorship, and stars. Above all, this is an interdisciplinary book, which engages with, supports, critiques, and extends each of these professional fields of discourse, each with its own schema of filmic understanding.