there are lots of reasons i like working for academic institutions. one of them is access to academic journals and research databases. as soon as i got set up at work i started diving into google scholar to see what neat things i could find … i looked up old professors and classmates who are now professors, did a scan of journal titles, and just generally searched about all kinds of interests i have …
now this is where my employer and parents should stop reading …
because one of the things i’ve been most interested in looking at academic research about is … porn. i mean obviously it’s just an interesting thing to think about … but i have always genuinely been interested in the sociology and anthropology of gay porn. my undergrad was around the same time as the rise of the “Amateur College Boy” style porn sites. conversations about gay-for-pay porn stars and the idea of “converting“ straight boys were all over the place, mostly gossipy and catty online snark … but there were those of us who wondered what they real experiences behind these boys were.
i had a mild fantasy of applying to grad school for some kind of graduate degree that would let me study these boys and learn more about what being in porn meant for them and how they would identify now and before they did porn.
did some mind mapping exercises …
so i opened up Google Scholar at work and searched the names of some porn studios and performers i thought might have been written about. I found a few things, and once i discovered the Porn Studies journal i just started following threads of citations out to other interesting work.
(but i can only get like a quarter of the articles published by Porn Studies Journal so if you have full access let me know!)
and of course i made a nice cover for my binder of articles
i’ve also been doing searches about interesting research methods and outputs … which eventually reminded me about my love of zines … i found lots of interesting articles about the value and adaptability of zines for making research available and understandable by a wider community
meanwhile, my actual job included cleaning out a bunch of old supplies and paperwork from the administrative office. this is my favorite kind of assignment because i always find neat stuff in the pile of things slated to get tossed.
… and for some reason we have like 5 reams of legal sized paper that i’m not sure we ever needed in the first place … and i can’t imagine we’ll ever need again … so, using a folded page gets me a 7 by 8.5 zine … 7 sheets gets me 28 pages …
the first issue is set to come out in September … so … watch this space i guess?
