"Soft -Core City" Lecture: UTS Sydney

Description

Reflecting on ‘soft-core cities’ seems particularly important right now as we traverse urban life continually fingering our smartphones – each of us with endless access to images of sex and sexuality.

In a culture obsessed with hardcore, much of the soft-core urbanism that was once viewed as scandalous is barely perceived as transgressive in today’s sex-scapes. The presence of hardcore representations of sex has normalised the many soft-core qualities that now occupy many parts of urban life. This lecture will outline three typologies in Dr Nicole Kalms’ new book, Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft Core Urbanism – Hypersexual Mediascapes, Hypersexual Urbanscapes and Hypersexual Archiscapes – to propose that the material city is not immune to the proliferation of pornography.