I’m really pleased to share my latest article with Gareth Longstaff. The piece follows our first collaboration published last year which considered ‘gay sex’ amidst COVID-19 and the impersonal intimacy of the gloryhole. This latest piece forms part of a special issue in the Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities, guest edited by Andrea Waling and Jennifer Power. The special issue addresses the theme of ‘Masculinity, Sex and Dicks: New Understandings of the Phallus’
As with our previous collaboration, this piece brings together Gareth’s culture, media, and heritage expertise together with my own in socio-legal studies. We share a queer theoretical outlook and this piece was incredibly fun for forcing us to really thrash out our theoretical thinking. By the end of the process, it became difficult to tell who had written what and no sentence is the product of a single author. It was an invigorating and exciting process and I’m really pleased with the end result which – we think – makes an important original theoretical contribution. The piece is open access and you can read it here.
Abstract
Law arguably shapes contemporary culture and phallic politics. In England and Wales, like much of the Global North, the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century saw a general shift from a criminal legal framework that understood sexuality as sexual acts to a civil law framework that seeks to privilege institutions – notably marriage – and lifestyle as signifiers of sexuality. This article contributes to legal and cultural understandings of the phallus, specifically the “raw dick,” as key to understanding the self-representational spaces of “authentic” and “alt” selves on social media. It situates the “raw dick” as the locus of this cultural, legal, and social exchange in which the legal outlaw of male phallic desire has been incorporated into queer citizenship. We argue that the aesthetics of the alt-self provides us with new and important ways to understand the phallus and its relationship to sex and sexuality.
Law and Sexuality 