Porn Studies

Front Cover
Linda Williams
Duke University Press, 2004 - Business & Economics - 516 pages
In her pioneering book Hard Core, Linda Williams put moving-image pornography on the map of contemporary scholarship with her analysis of the most popular and enduring of all film and video genres. Now, fifteen years later, she showcases the next generation of critical thinking about pornography and signals new directions for study and teaching. Porn Studies resists the tendency to situate pornography as the outer limit of what can be studied and discussed. With revenues totaling between ten and fourteen billion dollars annually--more than the combined revenues of professional football, basketball, and baseball--visual, hard-core pornography is a central feature of American popular culture. It is time, Williams contends, for scholars to recognize this and give pornography a serious and extended analysis.

The essays in this volume move beyond feminist debates and distinctions between a "good" erotica and a "bad" hard core. Contributors examine varieties of pornography from the tradition of the soft-core pin-up through the contemporary hard-core tradition of straight, gay, and lesbian videos and dvds to the burgeoning phenomenon of pornography on the Internet. They explore, as examples of the genre, individual works as divergent as The Starr Report, the pirated Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson honeymoon video, and explicit Japanese "ladies' comics" consumed by women. They also probe difficult issues such as the sexualization of race and class and the relationship of pornography to the avant-garde. To take pornography seriously as an object of analysis also means teaching it. Porn Studies thus includes a useful annotated bibliography of readings and archival sources important to the study of pornography as a cultural form.

Contributors. Heather Butler, Rich Cante, Jake Gerli, Minette Hillyer, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Despina Kakoudaki, Franklin Melendez, Ara Osterweil, Zabet Patterson, Constance Penley, Angelo Restivo, Eric Schaefer, Michael Sicinski, Deborah Shamoon, Maria St. John, Tom Waugh, Linda Williams

 

Contents

Proliferating Pornographies OnScene An Introduction
1
Contemporary Pornographies
25
Pornography Performance and the Presidents Penis
27
Porn Home Movies and the Live Action Performance of Love in Pam and Tommy Lee Hardcore and Uncensored
50
The Pleasures of Japanese Pornographic Comics for Women
77
Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era
104
Gay Lesbian and Homosocial Pornographies
125
OffScreen OnScreen
127
The White Trashing of Porn
309
Soft Core Hard Core and the Pornographic Sublime
333
The American Secret Weapon in World War II
335
16 mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature
370
Video Pornography Visual Pleasure and the Return of the Sublime
401
Pornography andas AvantGarde
429
Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avantgarde
431
Scott Starks NOEMA
461

The CulturalAesthetic Specificities of Allmale MovingImage Pornography
142
What Do You Call a Lesbian with Long Fingers? The Development of Lesbian and Dyke Pornography
167
Chuck Vincents Straight Pornography
198
Pornography Race and Class
221
The Making of a Gay Asian American Porn Star
223
Pornography Exploitation and Interracial Lust
271
An Annotated Bibliography
479
A Select List of Archives and Commercial Sites
491
List of Contributors
495
Index
497
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric and Director of the Program in Film Studies and of the Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson; Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"; and Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film.