Feona Attwood is the co-editor of Sexualities journal and founding co-editor of Porn Studies. Her research focuses on the changing place and significance of gender and sex and their representation in contemporary society. It examines the ways in which sexual practices and representations are caught up in wider debates around bodies, media and technologies, and the emerging centrality of new technologies in conceptions of gender and sexuality. She is the author of Sex Media (2018), co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality (2017) and Controversial Images: Media Representations on the Edge (2012) and editor of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (2009). John Mercer is Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Birmingham City University. He is the Principal Investigator (with Clarissa Smith) of the Masculinity, Sex and Popular Culture AHRC research network and is co-editor with Clarissa Smith of the Routledge book series of the same name. He is the author of Gay Porn: Representations of Masculinity and Sexuality , I.B.

Tauris 2017, Rock Hudson , BFI publishing 2015 and of Melodrama: Genre Style Sensibility (with Martin Shingler) Columbia University Press 2004. He is co-editor of the Journal of Gender Studies , Porn Studies , and editorial board member of Sexualities and Celebrity Studies . He has written about film and television genres, celebrity and stardom, the pornography debate, the sexualisation of contemporary media culture and contemporary masculinity.His research interests concern the politics of representation, in particular sexual representation, the connections between gay pornography and the making of a gay identity, the social and cultural construction of masculinities, performances of gender in the media and the wider culture, and melodrama, emotion and affect in the media and their gendered modes of address. Alan McKee is an expert on entertainment and healthy sexual development. He holds an Australian Research Council Discovery grant entitled ''Pornography''s effects on audiences: explaining contradictory research data''. He recently completed a Wellcome Grant entitled ''Investigating mediated sex and young people''s health and well-being'' and an ARC Linkage grant with True (previously Family Planning Queensland) to investigate the use of vulgar comedy to reach young men with information about healthy sexual development. He was co-editor of the Girlfriend Guide to Life and co-author of Pornography: structures agency and performance (Polity, 2015).

He has published on healthy sexual development, and entertainment education for healthy sexuality in journals including the Archives of Sexual Behavior , the International Journal of Sexual Health , the Journal of Sex Research and Sex Education . Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in studies of sexuality, networked media, and affect, she is the PI of both the Academy of Finland research project, Sexuality and Play in Media Culture and the Strategic Research Council funded consortium, Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture . She is e.g. the author of Who''s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (MITP forthcoming, with Jenny Sundén), NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (MITP 2019, with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018) and Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MITP 2011). Clarissa Smith is a Professor in the Media School at Northumbria University. A founding co-editor of the Routledge journal Porn Studies, Clarissa''s research is focused on representations of sex and sexuality, their production and consumption.

Publications include numerous articles and chapters exploring the specificities of pornographic imagery, forms of stardom, production and regulation. She is interested in media consumption and how different audiences engage with and make sense of popular representations; she is also engaged in research to explore young people''s practices of digital self-representation and participation.