Professor João Florêncio
Honorary Professor
4334
01392 724334
Overview
I am a queer cultural theorist of the body rechearching visual cultures of sexuality, health and illness in relation to wider Western biopolitical, philosophical and technoscientific histories.
I am currently an Honorary Professor in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, and Professor of Gender Studies and Chair of Sex Media and Sex Cultures at Linköping University, Sweden.
My monograph Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (Routledge, 2020) analyses contemporary gay "pig" masculinities, which have developed alongside antiretroviral therapies, online porn, and new sexualised patterns of recreational drug use. It examines them and their pornographic representations, speculating on their ethical and biopolitical dimensions in relation to modern European histories, ideologies and conceptualisations of the male body.
Book reviews:
The work of João Florêncio, therefore, contributes to a widening and greater understanding of our conventions of gender and sexuality. […] Fleeing from simplistic answers and solutions, the author demonstrates how much the relationships between these elements are often contradictiory and with recurrent dislocations, and that the "norm" and the "transgression" can even walk together, inhabiting the same practice (or the same desire). And this is the power of the liminal and frontier space, since it is in these fissures that lines of flight are presented, alternative paths can be taken and new world(s) are possible. [Victor Hugo de Souza Barreto, Norma: International Journal for Masculinities Studies 16(2)]
While facing significant criticism both from national cultures that prefer their gay men sexlessly monogamous and from gay leaders who view pig sex as self-indulgent backsliding, gay "pig" masculinities, as Florêncio terms them, have enabled forms of queer world-making that harbor a potential for ethical and political transformation. Far from idealistic, Florêncio is in fact well aware that gay pig masculinities are inextricable from a mode of modern biopower that operates at the level not just of bodies and populations but also of hormones and molecules. Still, as he passionately and often convincingly argues, it's in the pig's creative use of antiretroviral drugs, and not in the screeds of Larry Kramer or the white papers of Mayor Pete, that many gay men have found what HIV and the phobic politics it inspired threatened to deny them: a queerer path to the future. […]
While there are moments when Florêncio's book feels a little too familiar, there is much to be excited about, including a valuable framework and a useful set of conceptual tools with which to take porn studies and masculinity studies into the next decade. [Steven Ruszczycky, Postmodern Culture 31(3)]
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I am currently finishing a new book project titled Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising to be published with Rutgers University Press in 2025. Co-written with artist Liz Rosenfeld, it will be part autotheoretical speculation, part critical reflection, on the ethics, politics and ecologies of the (chiefly) gay male practice of cruising for sex.
My new research project, entitled "The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000" will map the enmeshment of politics, transnational solidarity, community and the erotic in gay pornographic magazines circulating in postwar Europe. The research will take place beween 2023 and 2027, it is a collaboration between myself (Linköping University/University of Exeter), Professor Jana Funke (University of Exeter), Professor John Mercer (Birmingham City University), the Bishopsgate Institute (London), and the Schwules Museum (Berlin, and it has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through their Standard Research Grants scheme.
You can follow me on Twitter.
Research
My interdisciplinary research explores the ways in which sexuality and the body have been contested terrains at the centre of modern and contemporary culture. Fundamental preoccupations of modern Western thought, they have been understood, shaped, represented, regulated, and commodified through a series of discursive and technological apparatuses that have reflected and continue to reflect broader ideologies of what constitutes the normal, the natural, the human, the moral, the healthy, the sick, the national, the common. On the other hand, their place at the centre of how we experience intimacy and kinship, have also been fundamental to how we think the nation-state, society, the polity, community. Yet, sexuality and the body have different and complex histories and are lived in a myriad of ways that are intersected by technology, discouse, power, mattter and systems of value. My work draws, among others, from queer studies, the medical humanities, media studies, and art history to better understand the ways in which our bodies and our sexualities have been both written into and written by modern and contemporary visual culture.
Awards, Grants, and Prizes
- 2023-27: Principal Investigator, AHRC Standard Research Grant, The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000.
- 2019-21: Principal Investigator, AHRC Leadership Fellows, Masculinity and the Ethics of Porosity in "Post-AIDS" Gay Porn.
- 2016-17: Principal Investigator, AHRC Research Network, Rock/Body: Performative Interfaces Between the Geologic and the Body.
- 2009-13: Doctoral Scholarship, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal).
Membership of Professional Bodies
- Performance Studies International
- Association for Cultural Studies
- Fellow of AdvanceHE
External impact and engagement
I believe academics have a duty to engage audiences beyond the so-called "ivory towers" of academia. Such dialogues will benefit academic work, institutions, and the various different communities and "ecologies" we inhabit.
As such, besides the media engagements below, my work has been featured in the catalogues of art exhibitions such as Field Static (Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago, 2012), Ghost Nature (Gallery 400, Chicago and La Box, Bourges, 2014), and the Venice International Performance Art Week.
Given my interest in collaborating with creative practitioners and exploring different modes of knowledge production and circulation, I have contributed work to various art and performance events, most recently the performance If/Then by Lisa Alexander and Hari Marini (Camden People's Theatre, September 2016; Royal Festival Hall, August 2017) and the online exhibition Institutional Garbage (Sector 2337, Chicago, September-December 2016). I have also co-devised a performance piece with Chicago-based artist and poet Devin King, entitled Of Things in Motion and Things at Rest, which we presented at ]performance s p a c e[ in London in October 2012, as part of Performance Matters' "Potentials of Performance."
Further to that, and within the scope of my AHRC-funded research network Rock/Body, I have curated an exhibition and performance programme featuring work by artists exploring the interfaces between the human body and the geologic (University of Exeter, September, 2016).
In 2020, as part of my AHRC Leadership Fellows project "Masculinity and the Ethics of Porosity in 'Post-AIDS' Gay Porn," and in collaboration with Rob Eagle (director), Rufai Ajala (cinematographer), Liz Rosenfeld (editor), Liam Byrne (composer), Dominic Deane (sound mixer), Jack Offord (colourist), and Ben Miller (assistant producer), I have produced a short experimental documentary film entitled OINK! exploring the contemporary gay male "pig" sexual imaginary. The film premiered in November 2020 at Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Festival, and was subsequently selected for screening at various international film festivals.
The film is available worldwide via institutional subscription or individual streaming here, as part of the Pleasure Shorts collection distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute.
I regularly collaborate with non-academic partners, chiefly within LGBTQ+ communities, to programme and/or participate in events exploring queer bodies and sexual subcultures in relation to their histories, politics, and ethics. Most recently (Summer 2021), I co-programmed a two-day public event with Ben Miller (Freie Universität Berlin), which explored queer bodies and spaces as utopian topoi. The event was organised by the Berlin clubnight Cocktail d'Amore and funded by a grant from the Berlin Senate and Clubcommission. It included film and videoart screenings, DJ sets, talks and panel discussions on topics ranging from sex and community; queerness, race and gentrification; the histories of queer clubbing and utopia on the dancefloor; trans and technologies of gender; and sexualised drug use, harm-reduction and the production of queer selves.
I am a member of the Critical Friends of the Scwhules Museum, an international advisory board of academics, artists and curators tasked with advising Berlin's LGBTQ+ museum—and one of the world's foremost LGBTQ+ archives—with their strategic vision.
Media
My latest media contributions include:
- "Between Victories and Their Shortcomings: On Larry Kramer's Sexual Politics." (Los Angeles Review of Books, 26/07/2020)
- "Grindr's HIV data problem began when it asked users to disclose their status." (The Conversation UK, 06/04/2018)
- "Glass talks representations of HIV/AIDS in gay pornography with Dr Joao Florencio." (Glass, 03/04/2018)
- "De choreografie van het ziek zijn" ["The chorepgraphy of being ill"] (Metropolis M, April 2017)
- "Who needs another AIDS movie? The crisis isn't over." (The Conversation UK, 29/03/2017)
- "Wolfgang Tillmans poignantly explores the role of photography today." (The Conversation UK, 01/03/2017)
- "La tuerie d'Orlando, une attaque homophobe sans l'ombre d'un doute." (The Conversation France, 21/06/2016)
- "Reduzir Orlando a um ataque terrorista é fechar os olhos à homofobia" (Interview with Portuguese newspaper Expresso, 19/06/2016)
- Interview in the aftermath of the mass-shooting at Club Pulse, Orlando (Up All Night, BBC Radio 5 Live, 14/06/2016)
- "Let's not get confused about this: Orlando was a queerphobic attack" (The Conversation UK, 13/06/2016)
- "Chemsex: why is gay sex causing straight panic?" (The Conversation UK, 12/04/2016)