Dr. Kelsy Burke and graduate student Alice MillerMacPhee will present their paper on The Rise of Pornography Addiction.

As an industry that produces images of and ideas about sex, pornography and the debates that surround it contribute to the social construction of sexual norms and values, and by extension sexual politics. We examine how a medicalizing discourse about the harms of pornography (related to addiction and health) developed in three distinct but interrelated arenas: science, news media, and politics. We find that pairing pornography with “addiction” allows discourse from these arenas to implicate broader social and cultural values about gender, sex, and sexuality under the guise of objective science.