Lara Karaian

Areas of Interest

My research examines the intersections between sexuality, technology, representation, bodily experience, and legal regulation. I have published journal articles and legal reports on topics such as: teenage sexting and child pornography; ‘revenge porn’ and Intimate Image distribution; accidental incest and ‘technology facilitated’ incest; ‘self-exploitation’; queer pornography; risk management and (self)surveillance; pregnant men and anti-discrimination law; transgender human rights; and, third wave feminisms. I approach these topics empirically and theoretically and employ a post/intersectional lens.

I am cross-appointed to the Department of Law and Legal Studies, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and to Women’s and Gender Studies. I am also a member of the Sexuality Studies Committee at Carleton and an adjunct faculty member in the department of Socio-Legal Studies at York University.

Follow Lara on Twitter @LaraKaraian

Read Lara’s blog posts here: https://cfe.torontomu.ca/search?keys=karaian

Current Research

My current SSHRC funded research—“Sex/Crime in the Era of Immersive, Interactive, and Intelligent Technologies: A Study of Sextech, Affect and Law” (Insight Grant, 2020-2025)— examines how sextech—new technologies developed or applied to enhance, innovate, or disrupt human sexual experience—affects us, and how these affects sustain or destabilize legal constructions of ‘sex crime’. I asks: How does sextech implicate and alter our body’s physical borders and its affective ways of knowing and being?; How has sextech and its affects been described, conceptualized, and responded to by sextech consumers, digisexuals, mainstream culture, and courts? How do our affective experiences of and with sextech support, subvert, and create new sexual norms, legal knowledge, and modes of regulation? I ground my analyses in an examination of legal and cultural narratives of, and experiences with, sex robots, deepfake pornography, sex in virtual reality, and digisexuality. This qualitative study is informed by cultural and critical criminology theory, legal theory, sexuality studies, science and technology studies, affect theory, posthumanism, and new/feminist materialist theories.

This research builds on my previous SSHRC funded study: “Selfies, Sexuality, and Teens: A Canadian Study” (Insight Development Grant, 2012-2015). In it, I examined how courts, child protection agencies, and crime prevention efforts construct and regulate consensual teenage digital sexual expression. In addition to conducting focus groups with teenagers in Ottawa and Toronto this project analyzed the representational and regulatory responses of extra-legal and legal institutions and organizations responding to youths’ digital sexual practices.

Recently, I completed a smaller project examining judicial interpretations of the ‘private use exemption’ to Canada’s child pornography laws (funded by the Canadian Bar Association’s Foundation for Legal Research). The resulting co-authored article titled “Revisiting the ‘Private Use Exception’ to Canada’s Child Pornography Laws: Teenage Sexting, Sex Positivity, Pleasure, and Control in the Digital Age,” can be downloaded from Osgoode Hall Law Journal’s website: https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol56/iss2/3/

Consultation

As a result of my research I have been invited to serve as an expert consultant by the Law Reform Committee of the Parliament of Victoria, Australia for their ‘International Consultation on Sexting Inquiry’ (Parliamentary Paper No. 230, Session 2010–2013). I have also served as an expert witness for the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on the Status of Women as well as for two constitutional questions and one sentencing decision regarding the application of child pornography laws to teenage sexting scenarios. In an effort to ensure that my research findings are read and understood by front-line state and social service actors, I have also served as an expert consultant for Kids Help Phone (during the development of their sexting content) and have presented my research at the Ottawa Police LGBT Liaison Committee’s Annual Information Exchange on ‘Cyber Sex and the Law’.

Supervision

I am currently supervising and serving on the committees of numerous graduate and undergraduate students from various departments. I am not taking on new MA or PhD supervisions until Fall 2025. Completed supervisions (past 5 years only) include:

Selected Publications (Refereed)

(To read early versions of these publications visit my Academia.edu cite: https://carleton-ca.academia.edu/LaraKaraian Final published versions are accessible through Carleton’s MacOdrum Library)