The Qualitative Report Volume 21 Number 8 Article 11 8-16-2016 Good Vibrations: Charting the Dominant and Emergent Discursive Regimes of Sex Toys George Rossolatos University of Kassel,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr Part of the Business and Corporate Communications Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Public Relations and Advertising Commons, and the Social Media Commons Recommended APA Citation Rossolatos, G. (2016). Good Vibrations: Charting the Dominant and Emergent Discursive Regimes of Sex Toys. The Qualitative Report, 21(8), 1475-1494. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2016.2566 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The Qualitative Report at NSUWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Qualitative Report by an authorized administrator of NSUWorks. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Good Vibrations: Charting the Dominant and Emergent Discursive Regimes of Sex Toys Abstract Sex toys promote a new consumptive ethos whose significance may be adequately outlined by attending to the institutional implications of this product category’s consumption. By drawing on Foucault’s theory of sexuality and the technologies of the self that materialize with the aid of discursive formations about sexuality, as well as on relevant sociological and ethnographic insights, I undertake a qualitative content analysis on a corpus of 100 sex toys’ product reviews from popular magazines and web sites in order to identify how the discourse about sex toys is articulated in terms of three dominant categories of sexual scripts (Simon & Gagnon, 2007), viz. cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts and intrapsychic scripts.