Susanna Paasonen
Professor of Media Studies
suspaa@utu.fi +358 29 450 3429 +358 50 328 9613 Arcanuminkuja 1 Turku |
internet research, critical sexuality studies, affect inquiry, media theory, popular culture
I'm professor of Media Studies and head of department. After finishing my PhD in 2002 I worked at universities of Tampere, Helsinki and Jyväskylä before starting in my current post in 2011. I've been visiting scholar/profesor at MIT and Microsoft Research New England's Social Media Collective (2016), University of Florence (2020) and University of Sydney (2022).
I'm broadly interested in media culture and my recent book projects range from social media inquiry to cinema history in e.g., Who's Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (with Jenny Sundén, MIT Press 2020), Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism (with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer and Clarissa Smith, Routledge 2020), Distracted, Frustrated, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP 2021), Technopharmacology (with Joshua Neves, Aleena Chia and Ravi Sundaram, University of Minnesota Press 2022) and Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter, co-authored with Sundén and Katrin Tiidenberg, is forthcoming from MITP in 2026.
I serve on the editorial boards member of the journals New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Sexualities, Porn Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Dialogues on Digital Society, Postmodern Culture, Capacious, Postmodern Culture, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Kvinder, kön och forskning, MedieKultur and Monstrum.
I have taught courses on media studies, cultural studies, digital culture and gender studies since 1998. I'm in charge of Media Studies' postgraduate studies, participate in MA supervision, and teach also at BA level.
- Refusal, Jamming, and Absurdity: Feminist Tactics in Social Media (2025) Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten Paasonen, Susanna, Sundén, Jenny
- Shaping pleasure, shifting boundaries: a roundtable on the future of porn studies (2025)
- Porn Studies
- Bored Audiences: Zoned In and Out (2024) The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences Paasonen, Susanna
- Dick pics and the shifty meanings of porn (2024)
- Porn Studies
- Intimità (2024) Quasi viventi: Il mondo digitale dalla A alla Z Paasonen, Susanna
- Lambda nordica Vol. 29 No. 1 (2024): Sex at the Borders: Queering Transnational Histories (2024)
- Lambda Nordica
- Les « sorcières sans honte » et les « putains de la tolérance » : la résistance féministe et les circuits affectifs de la haine en ligne (2024)
- Revue française des sciences de l'information et de la communication
- Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump’s deselection (2024)
- International Journal of Cultural Studies
- Monsieur Mosse: A Bad Gay? Queer Celebrity in Finnish Print Media, from the 1960s to the 1980s (2024)
- Lambda Nordica
- Objectionable nipples: Puritan data politics and sexual agency in social media (2024) Queer Data Studies Paasonen Susanna, Sundén Jenny
- Platform economies, reputational stains, and the in/conveniences of porn (2024) In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround Paasonen, Susanna
- Sex at the Borders: A Special Issue Introduction (2024)
- Lambda Nordica
- About sex, open-mindedness and cinnamon buns: Exploring sexual social media (2023)
- Social Media + Society
- Ambiguous affect: excitements that make the self (2023) The Affect Theory Reader II: Worldings, Tensions, Futures Paasonen Susanna
- Can We Break the Horizontal Lines of Whorism? (2023)
- Interactions
- Conclusion: Shifting Horizons of Possibility (2023) Media Materialities: Form, Format, and Ephemeral Meaning Paasonen Susanna
- Golden era, revisited (2023)
- Porn Studies
- Iiu Susiraja: Self-shooting as playful practice (2023) Reconfiguring the Portrait Hynnä-Granberg Kaisu, Paasonen Susanna
- Intimate Infrastructures We Depend upon: Living with Data (2023)
- Media Theory
- Kinky, leaky, opaque: Sexual intimacies and data (2023)
- Interactions