Gender and Sexuality

Researchers in sexuality and gender are part of the Screen Cultures research group part of the Birmingham Centre for Media Cultural Research (BCMCR) who investigate and write about screen-based media ranging from film and television to computer games, animation and the internet. Our research is necessarily diverse and explores all aspects of the production, distribution and consumption of screen media. You will be supervised by researchers with an international reputation for their research into gender and sexuality.

Dr John Mercer focuses on issues of gender and sexuality in popular culture in particular sexual representation. John is recognised as one of the leading voices in the study of gay pornography and gay culture and is one of the founding editors of the Porn Studies journal. He is also interested in the relationships between aesthetic and stylistic tropes and emotional affects across media texts but especially in the form often described as melodrama. John is the author (with Martin Shingler) of Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility a publication that is used internationally on Film Studies courses dealing with melodrama. He is also the editor of the Journal of Gender Studies and on the editorial board of Sexualities and Cine Excess.

Dr Inger Lise Bore is particularly interested in how audiences articulate cultural identities through their engagement with screen texts, and in how they express ideas of gender and nationality by talking about film or TV. Two of the issues she has focused on are perceptions of women in comedy and of national and transnational comedy.

We are particularly keen to attract students who wish to work on projects related to sexual representation and the pornography debate, gay representation and gay culture, film and television melodrama.