Sexual Representation and Visual Communication in the Editorial Design Space

• In Event: Making & Doing Exhibition

Abstract

This media exhibit and presentation brings together a sexuality scholar and a graphic designer to examine a cultural space where public intellectual work meets the creative industries. Through a monitor-based slideshow that combines images and text, we examine the relationship, and occasional tension, between sexual representation and visual communication in the editorial design space of alt-weekly magazines in Las Vegas, a city that is both highly sexualized and surprisingly sexually conservative. How, we ask, do the politics of sexual representation play out in the world of general interest magazines? In this creative collaboration we explore the line between sexual decorum and excess, and discusses what constraints, as well as possibilities, exist for the cultural production of sex-positive discourses, images, and interventions in the popular media sphere.

Authors

• Lynn A. Comella, U Nevada - Las Vegas

• Ryan Olbrysh, N/A