Porn Studies

Linda Williams (Editor)

Description

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

Sujets

• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 21 juillet 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385844
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

porn studies

* Edited by Linda Williams

Duke University Press

Durham and London 

porn studies

© © 20  0  4 D D u u k k e e U U n n i i v v e e r r s s i i t t y y P P r r e e s s s s

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contents

Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction Linda Williams *

Contemporary Pornographies

How to Do Things with theStarr Report: Pornography, Performance, and the President’s Penis Maria St. John * Sex in the Suburban: Porn, Home Movies, and the Live Action Performance of Love inPam and Tommy Lee: Hardcore and Uncensored Minette Hillyer *

Office Sluts and Rebel Flowers: The Pleasures of Japanese Pornographic Comics for Women Deborah Shamoon * Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era Zabet Patterson

Gay, Lesbian, and Homosocial Pornographies

Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-Screen Thomas Waugh * The Cultural-Aesthetic Specificities of All-male Moving- Image Pornography Rich Cante and Angelo Restivo *

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What Do You Call a Lesbian with Long Fingers? The Development of Lesbian and Dyke Pornography * Heather Butler

The Gay Sex Clerk: Chuck Vincent’s Straight Pornography Jake Gerli

Pornography, Race, and Class

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The Resurrection of Brandon Lee: The Making of a Gay Asian American Porn Star Nguyen Tan Hoang * Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation, and Interracial Lust Linda Williams * Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn * Constance Penley

Soft Core, Hard Core, and the Pornographic Sublime

Pinup: The American Secret Weapon in World War II Despina Kakoudaki

Gauging a Revolution:  mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature Eric Schaefer * Video Pornography, Visual Pleasure, and the Return of the Sublime Franklin Melendez *

Pornography and/as Avant-Garde

Andy Warhol’sBlow Job: Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avant-garde Ara Osterweil * Unbracketing Motion Study: Scott Stark’s * Michael Sicinski

Suggested Reading: An Annotated Bibliography Pornographic Film and Video: A Select List of Archives and Commercial Sites List of Contributors Index

vi C O N T E N T S

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acknowledgments

Thanks to Eric Smoodin for encouraging this book in the first place and to Ken Wissoker and Duke University Press for making it happen. Many stu- dents in many classes atIrvine andBerkeley—and not only those who have contributed to this volume—have helped me to better understand the cultural and historical importance of moving-image pornographies. Special thanks to Heather Butler, whose research and enthusiasm have contributed enormously to all aspects of this volume, including the annotated bibliogra- phy. Final thanks to many colleagues in ‘‘porn studies’’: Peter Lehman, who was an insightful reader of the manuscript, and Rich Cante, Angelo Restivo, Constance Penley, Tom Waugh, and Eric Schaefer, all of whom I am honored to include in this volume.

Porn Studies:

Proliferating Pornographies

On/Scene: An Introduction

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Porn Studiesgrew out of a graduate seminar on pornography in the Film * Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of its chap- ters were originally seminar papers, now much revised, for courses offered in  and again in . The volume augments the essays by these younger scholars, many of them still completing their doctorates, with sev- eral more established contributors to the field: Rich Cante, Constance Pen- ley, Angelo Restivo, Eric Schaefer, Tom Waugh, and I. The porn studies of this volume diverge markedly from the kind of agonizing over sexual politics that characterized an earlier era of the study of pornography. Where once it seemed necessary to argue vehemently against pro-censorship, antipornog- raphy feminism for the value and importance of studying pornography (see, for example, the s anthologiesSex ExposedandDirty Looks), today porn studies addresses a veritable explosion of sexually explicit materials that cry out for better understanding. Feminist debates about whether pornography should exist at all have paled before the simple fact that still and moving- image pornographies have become fully recognizable fixtures of popular cul- ture. To me, the most eye-opening statistic is the following: Hollywood makes approximately  films a year, while the porn industry now makes from , to ,. Seven hundred million porn videos ors are rented each year. Even allowing for the fact that fewer viewers see any single work