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This paper examines how the Japanese self-regulatory systems that evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War to regulate the sexual content within Japanese films metamorphosed into a powerful state apparatus to create fear and uncertainty for those involved in making adult videos. We depict the history of Japan's obscenity laws, from their origin as a response to Western imperialism to the self-regulatory bodies created in the post-war period of the American Occupation to maintain the obscenity laws while conceding to American demands for freedom of creative expression. Thus, these self-regulatory bodies originated to mediate between two antithetical Western imperial requirements in a state initially wanting to modernize and then democratize. We then examine how the notorious prosecution of the Nihon Ethics of Video Association (Bideo Rinri Kyōkai aka Biderin), the self-regulatory of the adult video industry, brought to a head the contradictions inherent in the state's deployment of these bodies while revealing a more sinister dynamic of state control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relates the Foucauldian theorisation of self-surveillance to the contradictory (non)presence of racialized labouring bodies of South Asian men in rural Greece. The disciplinary mechanism of temporary labour and migration regimes, exercised through migrant illegality and threat of deportations, works efficiently to make the men conform to a certain set of societal behaviours, erase their presence from Greek public spaces, and extract productive labour efficiently from them. By drawing on interviews of undocumented Indian and Pakistani male migrants in Greece, the article shows how 'illegality' and potential deportability shapes their strategies of staying in the country. The men self-surveil and regulate their movements by 'containing' themselves in their dormitories after work. This self-imposed isolation, through spatial segregation, deflects attention away from Greece's restrictive immigration and labour regimes, based on differential exclusion based on class, skills, and professional education. It prevents local Greeks from building solidarity with them and, in doing so, avoid dismantling deep-rooted and widely prevalent discourses of Islamophobia and xenophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the rise of fertility apps and what data-sharing in this arena can mean for app users. The paper offers a brief background of some available fertility apps, how they work and where they are situated in the sphere of health-tracking apps. Exploring how exactly these apps market themselves in terms of feminist-empowerment discourses, the author examines how these claims fit within broader critical discussions around fertility data, data sharing and the ways that applications and algorithms are designed to configure particular versions of reproductive femininity. The author shows the way that intimate data takes on a new life as it is sold on in order to identify women as potential targets for purposes of commercial marketing, as well as the more subtle ways this works to remind female users of reproductive expectations within societies. The paper illustrates the way that fertility apps can play a role in the further medicalization and regulation of the female body as a newly-digitalized reproductive machine, as these apps become a new mode of inducing conception under a veiled guise of appearing to be a harmless and empowering way for women to re-learn and re-claim their bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Sharing’ as it relates to the online environment is underconceptualized, and yet has been proposed as a means for understanding how individuals negotiate everyday privacy. To explore this possibility, we gather reader comments to online news accounts, as these offer an opportunity for observing everyday discourse. Using semantic network analysis, we map related concepts, and use these as a basis for revisiting the concept of ‘sharing' as it pertains to the digital sphere. We argue that while ‘sharing' continues to encompass traditional notions of communality and distribution, as practiced in digital spaces, it also takes on an added dimension of subjectivity. Consonant with Foucault's (1988) ‘technologies of the self’, sharing online becomes a reflexive mechanism to know and care for oneself. By considering ‘sharing' in this light, we aim to further the conversation of counter-posing sharing to privacy, especially when envisioned as a boundary management process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Digital health technologies are playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, health education and voluntary self-surveillance, self-quantification and self-care practices. This paper presents a critical analysis of one digital health device: computer apps used to self-track features of users' sexual and reproductive activities and functions. After a review of the content of such apps available in the Apple App Store and Google play™ store, some of their sociocultural, ethical and political implications are discussed. These include the role played by these apps in participatory surveillance, their configuration of sexuality and reproduction, the valorising of the quantification of the body in the context of neoliberalism and self-responsibility, and issues concerning privacy, data security and the use of the data collected by these apps. It is suggested that such apps represent sexuality and reproduction in certain defined and limited ways that work to perpetuate normative stereotypes and assumptions about women and men as sexual and reproductive subjects. Furthermore there are significant ethical and privacy implications emerging from the use of these apps and the data they produce. The paper ends with suggestions concerning the ‘queering’ of such technologies in response to these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In early 2009 the British tabloid and broadsheet media were consumed with the impending death of reality TV star Jade Goody. Goody, an under-educated working-class girl transformed into a media personality by UK's Big Brother, had already been at the centre of two major media controversies: one in 2002 for her tabloid vilification and recuperation during Big Brother 3 and again in 2007 for using racist language against a housemate on Celebrity Big Brother. Her medical diagnosis of advanced cervical cancer, however, shifted the controversy in terms of magnitude: filming a reality TV show for Living TV during her treatment and rapid decline, Goody was accused of 'selling her illness' to the media and even of intending to die on television, the ultimate taboo. These programmes were widely reviled by commentators as the nadir in Goody's mutually exploitative relationship with celebrity media, but we argue that the Jade series is a structurally groundbreaking programme in which real time and television time begin to coalesce in a way that disrupts categories of celebrity, privacy and mortality. Our analysis focuses upon the ways in which Goody's impending death impacts on her self-image and on the series' production, highlighting both her celebrity and the show as emergent texts. Through a close analysis of the series, we interrogate Goody's complex relationship with her celebrity persona in the shadow of terminal illness, and the British public's even more complex relationship with the mediatisation of celebrity death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]