[5] On Monday, 4 April 2016, Paasonen gave a lecture at Brown University in the USA on the politics and culture of online porn.
[6] In the essay, "Glimmers of the forbidden fruit: Reminiscing pornography, conceptualizing the archive,"[7] written along with Katariina Kyrölä, Paasonen traces the evolution of the "porn stash" from a physical collection to a digital one, and in doing so, examines cyberporn as a site of identity formation.
She and Kyrölä suggest that pornography occasions the accumulation of a somatic archive, which are "not merely reservoirs of extra-cognitive sensation but also knowingly curated, reflected upon and reworked: they are simultaneously material and semiotic, intimate and culturally specific, affective and open to representation."
In her lecture at Brown, Paasonen suggested that digital pornography must not be understood as something that creeps into society from the outside, but rather as something that already exists in contemporary culture.
[9] In October 2020, Paasonen, Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light won the Association of Internet Researchers' Nancy Baym Book Award for NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media, published with MITP in 2019.