Taxpayer-funded Job of the Week: Gay Porn Researcher (£30k+)

Good news: there's also two of these positions to go around

I don’t normally post job adverts on my Substack, but simply couldn’t resist when I saw a fabulous opportunity to research gay porn.

The background

You may remember in March that I wrote about a research project titled The Europe That Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000, which was awarded £841,830 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a period of roughly three years (Nov 23-Oct 27).

Well now it’s hiring for two posts “to help with archival and oral histories research on the circulation and impact of post-war gay erotica and porn magazines in Europe”… for three years:

Tell me more

The adverts look largely the same, but “One, fluent in German (besides English), will focus research in Germany and the Netherlands” and “The other, fluent in Polish (besides English), will focus research in Poland and the UK.” The posts are at the University of Exeter with a starting salary “from £32,982”.

Here’s some bumf about the project:

“The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000" examines, for the first time, the ways in which postwar gay erotica and porn magazines helped forge a pan-European gay male constituency build on processes of identification, solidarity and subcultural distinction that we proposed to call "homoeuropeanism": a specifically homosexual and sexualised form of European identification that developed in the context of postwar geopolitics.”

And you don’t even need to like porn to apply. You can instead stare at the “beautiful campus set in the heart of stunning Devon.”

The people

The successful candidate will be supporting Professor Jana Funke, Associate Professor of English and Sexuality Studies at the University of Exeter.

According to her research profile (she has kindly pointed out her pronouns are “she/her”), Funke is “currently completing three monographs: Sexological Modernism: Queer Feminism and Sexual Science (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Sexperts: A History of Sexology (Reaktion Press, 2024) and a book on the interdisciplinary history of sexology jointly authored with Professor Kate Fisher.”

She has previously been awarded a National Lottery Heritage Fund for a project titled "Queering the Museum: Creating, Uncovering and Celebrating LGBTQ+ Heritage at RAMM (Royal Albert Memorial Museum)”, another great use of Brits’ money:

Another great mind on the project is Professor João Florêncio, “a queer cultural theorist of the body” whose “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.”

Florêncio hasn’t been too happy since I criticised The Europe That Gay Porn Built, 1945-200, and has been posting about me ever since:

With all this taxpayer money, hasn’t he got gay porn to be studying?

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The successful candidate can also work with Professor John Mercer, Director of Researcher Education and Development, Professor of Gender and Sexuality.

Here’s some of his groundbreaking research:

But clearly there’s so much more to discover about gay porn - hence why taxpayers need to spend £840,000 on the project in question.

So what are you waiting for? Here’s a link if you’d like to apply.