*CFP* “AUDIO PORN/PORN AUDIO”, SPECIAL ISSUE, PORN STUDIES JOURNAL

Forbes contributor Franki Cookney recently observed that Audio porn has been steadily growing in popularity over the last 15 years. In the same way that the inscrutability of the eReader was credited for the uptake in literary erotica, audio offers privacy. But it’s more than that: The beauty of audio is its intimacy, the chance to retreat to your personal bubble. That’s true whether you listen to politics, comedy or true crime, but in few genres is it more appealing than with porn (Cookney 2019).

Certainly audio porn seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance - it has become such an important segment of Audible’s output that it has its own subscription and rankings. Website Quinn recently relaunched and with Dipsea, Literotica and Reddit also producing sexually explicit audio it seems that there is a sizeable market for affective pleasures of the aural kind. Elsewhere on the web, community-orientated DIY audio such as r/GoneWildAudio offers forms of interactivity and new possibilities for communicating carnalities. Some formats and output are the revitalisation of that older service, the chat line, while others contribute to the podcast boom in commentary and analysis. From The Ersties through to My Dad Wrote a Porno, pornography has proved a fruitful and popular topic for podcasting.

Pornography is traditionally understood as a visual medium but more recently it seems we may have entered the era of the frenzy of the aural. The journal of Porn Studies invites original papers from a variety of perspectives, which may include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• audio streaming erotica
• narratology, seriality, and form in audio spaces
• podcasting about the porn industry
• podcasting from the porn industry
• confessional stories
• exploring audiences and listening publics
• monetising commentary
• monetising podcasts
• affect, intimacy and the voice
• aurality

Please send abstracts of up to 500 words and a short biographical note to editorspstudies@gmail.com by June 1, 2020.