By Peter Berton

OXFORD, UK – Your father may have been lying when he said he read Playboy for the articles, but that won’t be the case with Porn Studies, a new academic journal dedicated to the study of pornography. Academic publisher Routledge plans quarterly issues beginning in Spring 2014.

Editors Professor Feona Attwood of Middlesex University and Dr. Clarissa Smith of the University of Sunderland have issued a call for scholarly papers [PDF] to grace the debut issue.

“Porn Studies is the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts,” the notice declares. “Porn Studies will publish innovative work examining specifically sexual and explicit media forms, their connections to wider media landscapes and their links to the broader spheres of sex work across historical periods and national contexts.”

So what kind of content will grace the pages of Porn Studies? According to the call for papers, the new academic journal will explore “the intersection of sexuality, gender, race, class, age and ability.”

Without explaining what such an intersection actually constitutes, the journal’s editors promise to focus “on developing knowledge of pornographies past and present, in all their variations and around the world.” [Ed.: Porn fans have been doing this kind of research on their own for centuries, without need of any scholarly support or intervention.]

Even before launch, the journal is winning approval from academics who have noticed, somewhat tardily, that sex and college tend to go together.

“We have waited a long time for an academic journal that treats the subject of the representation of human sexuality with the seriousness it deserves,” said Julie Peakman, a historian at the University of London and the author of Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in 18th-Century England. I look forward to a lively and disciplined debate across different disciplines.”

Maybe so. Still, one would hope that an academic journal dedicated to porn might actually contain some level of titillation. At the very least, some sort of centerfold, to give your father something to look at when he tires of the scholarly articles inside.

For those interested in contributing to Porn Studies’ inaugural edition, here are the rules: “Articles should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words. Forum submissions should be 500-1,500 words. Book reviews should be between 800 and 1,500 words. Submissions will be refereed anonymously by at least two referees.”

More information and contact information is here.

Routledge, a division of scholarly publisher Taylor & Francis Group, produces three other tangentially related journals: Early Popular Visual Culture, Feminist Media Studies and Journal of Homosexuality.

[SIZE=1]Image: Naughty America’s Naughty Bookworms.[/SIZE]