John Mercer
The unifying focus of his research is an interrogation of the cultural construction of gender and sexuality across a variety of mainstream and marginal media texts. His interests in gender and sexual representation inform an ongoing body of work on the construction and performance of masculinity. His work examines the ways in which contemporary masculinities are constructed and performed across a range of cultural artefacts, as well as how male sexuality is situated in the contemporary context and manifested both in media representations and practices of self-representation.
His main research interests include performances of gender and sexuality online and in wider culture; the politics of representation, particularly sexual representation; the social and cultural construction of masculinities; and the connections between gay pornography and the construction of gay identity.
His research brings these strands together through the argument that contemporary masculinity has become saturated with competing meanings that are connected to broader social, cultural and political contexts. His work is grounded in the recognition that analyses of specific media materials, genres or forms must be situated within the complex networks of meaning that surround and contextualise all cultural artefacts, particularly when researching digital materials.
His current work builds on almost twenty years of research and writing on the connections between sexuality, iconography and questions of identity, and how these are articulated through representation across a range of materials, including those produced by the gay pornography industry. The scale, reach and penetration of pornography into the mainstream, alongside the perceived “sexualisation” of culture, mean that this work remains important for understanding the nature of pornography, the role of sexual representations in shaping sexual identities, and the construction of contemporary masculinities and their wider cultural impact.
He is an editor of the Journal of Gender Studies, co-editor of Porn Studies —both published by Routledge— and a member of the editorial board of Sexualities (SAGE). Together with Professor Clarissa Smith, he is editor of the Routledge monograph series Masculinity, Sex and Popular Culture and has been awarded an AHRC Network Grant in this field.