Exciting news, which got announced a little while back! I’ve been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant as part of their “Dangers & Opportunities of Technology” program. It gives me support to work on a large-scale project about LGBTQ live streaming. That’s exciting because it’s been a topic I’ve been chipping away at in smaller pieces over the last few years, but I haven’t had a chance to dig in deeply.

Thanks to my letter writers and my many collaborators on the live streaming research I’ve done so far – especially my wonderful co-editors on Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture, Johanna Brewer, Amanda Cullen, and Christopher Persaud.

The summer 2023 issue of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (62.4) is officially out! Even though Liz Ellcessor and I took over as co-editors back in November 2022, this is the first issue that is fully “ours” – which means that we saw all the pieces through developmental editing and production. As such, it has an opening “welcome” essay from Liz and myself, which we titled “Studying Media Now.”

I’m really fond of this piece because it’s bold, polemical, hopeful, and definitely runs the risk of stepping on some toes (in a good way). Liz and I both come to our roles as editors from non-traditional media studies backgrounds, and it’s exciting to get to challenge the norms of the field. Here are some bits I particularly enjoy:

“Media studies is changing… We are committed to making JCMS an ongoing force for shaking up media studies as we (think we) know it today and as we will know it in the future. If you are reading this now, know that a shift has come, and it will keep coming. If you are reading this long after publication of the issue, take this as an indication of a sea change that we embrace yet which extends far beyond us….. Whatever anyone may say, the media studies of today is ours. The media studies of today is yours.”

Our edited volume Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture is officially out now from MIT Press! It’s co-edited by Johanna Brewer, Amanda Cullen, Christopher Persaud, and myself. It has 20 chapters by a wonderful array of authors from across disciplines, and a foreword by the one and only T. L. Taylor. Plus the whole book is available to read for free online through MIT Press’s open access program. You can read about the book here and you read the book itself here.

I’m so proud of our editorial team and all of our authors. This book represents the first edited volume dedicated to cultural issues in live streaming, and I love that it both addresses games and pushes past the assumption that live streaming is all about video games. The idea for the project came in the first months of the pandemic, when 2020 conferences were being cancelled. So many scholars who were just embarking on their live streaming research lost their venue for sharing the work, and we wanted to create a home for these important conversations.

I had the pleasure of co-authoring the intro to the book, “The Revolution Is Streaming Live: Cultural Perspectives on the Age of Live Streaming,” and authoring a solo chapter, “How Camming Made Streaming: Retelling the History of Live Streaming through Webcam Modeling.” My chapter is a historical argument about how sex workers have been integral to the rise of live streaming, even though they have largely been written out of its history.

Congrats to all of the authors! Faculty or grad students interested in teaching the book, please feel free to get in touch if you’d like Johanna or I do Zoom in for a guest class visit.

One of our goals as JCMS editors (that’s me and Liz Ellcessor, co-editors, and our fabulous masthead team) is to increase transparency around the journal’s operations. We also want to make the journal a welcoming place for a wide variety of scholars to submit their work.

As part of that effort, we and the fabulous Assistant Editors (Mel Monier and Jennessa Hester) have put together this helpful flowchart, “The Life of a JCMS Article Submission.” We distributed it at an info session about publishing with JCMS at SCMS this spring – and now it’s available online.

The flowchart walks you through the steps of: preparing your article, submitting, undergoing desk review, undergoing peer review, doing revisions, working through developmental edits and production, and more. We hope it helps demystify what is admittedly a long and complicated academic publishing process!

I’m so honored that my book Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies has been selected for the 2023 Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award! The Anne Friedberg award “recognizes the best new scholarly work that exemplifies rigorous, interdisciplinary and theoretical inquiry into issues of vision and visuality.”

Sex Dolls at Sea is a project that is near and dear to my heart, so this really means a lot. Writing it required a ton of research but also a journey of learning new methods and really challenging myself as a scholar. I’m proud of the result–this strange book about sex dolls and sailors and the way we tell history–and so glad that other people are enjoying it too.

My book Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies comes out in 2 WEEKS from MIT Press! It officially releases on June 14 but you can pre-order copies from Amazon. You can also follow the Twitter account for the book (@SexDollsatSea) for more updates and fun archival images.

The book is all about the history of sex dolls, sex toys, and contemporary sex tech. It argues that, in order to imagine more socially just futures for sexual technologies, we need to challenge accepted narratives about the origins of those technologies. It’s a feminist, queer intervention into the sex tech landscape – and it even involves various sexual escapades on the high seas.

I’m excited to talk to folks about the book. If you are a professor looking for guest speakers, a journalist writing about sex and/or tech, or a podcast host interested in chatting, I’d love to hear from you!

I’m very excited to announce that the special issue of Television and New Media that Johanna Brewer and I co-edited is now published online!

The special issue is all about different ways that gender and sexuality manifest in various forms of live streaming – from queer streaming to the erotics of streaming to debates over streamers’ gendered legitimacy. It features 9 original research articles written by 10 amazing scholars pursuing work on live streaming and digital culture – plus an introduction by myself and Johanna that argues for the importance of addressing gender and sexuality when we study live streaming, both today and across its history.

The pieces are currently published “online first,” so you can find them on the TVNM website. Here is a list of the articles with direct links to each piece:

– Introduction: “Digital Intimacy in Real Time: Live Streaming Gender and Sexuality,” Bo Ruberg and Johanna Brewer

– “Beauty From the Waist Up: Twitch Drag, Digital Labor, and Queer Mediated Liveness,” Christopher Persaud and Matthew Perks

– “’Love You, Bro’: Performing Homosocial Intimacies on Twitch,” Tom Welch

– “‘Never Battle Alone’: Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as ‘Real’ Work,” Christine Tran

– “A Labor of (Queer) Love: Maintaining ‘Cozy Wholesomeness’ on Twitch During COVID-19 and Beyond,” Jordan Youngblood

– “How Not to Be Seen: Notes on the Gendered Intimacy of Livestreaming the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Daniel Lark

– “Just on the Right Side of Wrong: (De)Legitimizing Feminism in Video Game Live Streaming,” Amanda Cullen

– “Desiring Wanghuang: Live Streaming, Porn Consumption and Acts of Citizenship among Gay Men in Digital China,” Lin Song

– “‘Cute Goddess is Actually an Aunty’: The Evasive Middle-Aged Woman Streamer and Normative Performances of Femininity in Video Game Streaming,” Maria Ruotsalainen

– “Why Do We Only Get Anime Girl Avatars? Collective White Heteronormative Avatar Design in Live Streams,” Noel Brett

My new book, Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies, is coming out from MIT Press this June! It’s about the history of contemporary sex tech: interrogating that history, finding new histories, and imagining new futures for sexual technologies. It tells the history of sex tech through the history of the sex doll, debunking myths about its origins – like the tale that the first sex dolls were invented by sailors on long sea voyages – and uncovering the true stories of the earliest dolls. Before there were sex robots or internet-enabled vibrators, there were sex dolls at sea…

The good news is the book is available for pre-order through both Amazon and the MIT Press website. Here’s where to go to pre-order the book from Amazon. And here’s where to go to pre-order it from MIT Press. If you’re a journalist, podcaster, reviewer, etc., I’d love to talk to you about the project! You can reach me via email (bruberg @ uci . edu) or find me on Twitter. My personal account is @myownvelouria and the account for the book is @SexDollsatSea.

Woohoo, it’s official! The board of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies has selected Liz Ellcessor (University of Virgina) and myself as the new incoming co-editors-in-chief of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies – the premier peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of media studies. It’s an amazing honor to be selected and I’m so excited to embark on this new adventure with a great co-editor. Editors-in-chief are chosen for five-year terms (2021 – 2026), so I’ll be in the position long enough to hopefully help bring a lot of new, meaningful change to the journal, building off of what the fabulous last editorial team accomplished.

This will also the first time that the journal has a game studies and/or a disability studies (Liz’s specialty) scholar at the helm. Watch out, media studies, here we come!

Whit Pow and I are excited to announce that the Call for Paper is now out for an upcoming special issue of Communication, Culture & Critique on “Trans Game Studies.” The issue will explore various topics at the intersection of trans lives and games, with the goal of envisioning what research should look like at the vibrant, radical intersection of trans studies and game studies.

You can read more about the issue in the CFP. Abstracts of roughly 500 words are due December 15. Selected authors will be invited to submit articles for peer review, with an estimated due date of May 1, 2022. Please feel free to reach out to me (bruberg@uci.edu) and Whit (wpow@nyu.edu) with questions!