![Sample our Law journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5942/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Law.jpg"})
Abstract
This article provides an overview of the state of ‘pornography, porno, porn’ studies grounded on a critique of my own anthology and other significant texts. It notes the (over)abundance of work on gay pornography versus the surprising paucity on heterosexual pornographies; the under-representation of soft core; the near non-existence of an ‘archive’; and the need for more original single-authored books. Finally, the article makes a plea that criticizes the very title of this journal in the casual, too-comfortable use of the terms ‘porno’ and now ‘porn’ that risk aligning the academic field too closely with the industry, thus eliding critical distance and suggesting that the field is automatically ‘pro-porn,’ which it should not be.
Acknowledgements
This article is a revision of an essay originally to be published in Porn Archives (Dean, Ruszczycky and Squires, forthcoming). It has been revised for the occasion of this inaugural issue of Porn Studies. Thanks to Sanjay Hukku, Damon Young and Dolores McElroy for invaluable help.
Notes
1. Controversy erupted when, after the publication of this new journal Porn Studies was announced, a petition was circulated by the group Stop Porn Culture arguing that the claim the journal is operating ‘under the auspices of neutrality’ is false since it has a pro-porn bias; 880 signatures were gathered (Cadwalladr June 15, Citation2013).
2. I refer to two historically succeeding lesbian feminist journals: Off Our Backs, an anti-pornography journal that began in 1970 and ceased publication in 2008, which occupied the position of portraying lesbian sex as positive and natural; and the 1984 ‘dyke’ reply, On Our Backs, which not only challenged the anti-pornography stance of its predecessor and continues today, but in addition morphed into the production of lesbian pornography (through Fatale Video). These lesbian pornographies, in contrast to the more politically correct gentleness of Off Our Backs, celebrated butch/femme, dildo wielding, and sadomasochistic lesbian fantasies. See Butler (Citation2004).
3. Bernardi is also one of the few scholars to agree with the first version of Kobena Mercer's famous analysis of Mapplethorpe's nude photographs of black men. Mercer published an initial article attacking Mapplethorpe in 1986, and a second article revising the first in 1989. He then combined them in the 1992 article ‘Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary.’ See Mercer (Citation1994).
4. For example, Bernardi describes me as a ‘radical sex feminist’ scholar who writes about ‘the virtues of pornography’ (Citation2006, 220–243).
5. Elena Gorfinkel (Citation2011b) has published ‘Tales of Times Square: Sexploitation's Secret History of Place’ while her book-length study of sexploitation cinema is coming down the pike, as is Eric Schaefer's Massacre of Pleasure: A History of Sexploitation Films, 1960–1979.
6. ‘If hardcore really does it, softcore merely fakes it. If hardcore hangs on the authenticity of the real view (that adolescent shock of seeing people actually getting off), softcore holds back, cannot show, kisses but finally does not tell’ (L.R. Williams Citation2005, 269–270).
7. Portions of the above section on soft core are excerpted from my review for Film Quarterly, ‘Studying “Soft” Sex’ (Williams Citation2008b).
8. In an earlier version of this article appearing in Porn Archives (Dean, Ruszczycky, and Squires, forthcoming).
9. In my article for The Moving Image, ‘“White Slavery” Versus the Ethnography of “Sexworkers”: Women in Stag Film at the Kinsey Archive’ (Williams Citation2005), I note that we cannot assume that the archive of human sexuality is congruent with the archive of pornography, although I agree with Dean that the ‘porn archive’ gives us a glimpse into the ‘sex archive.’ For one thing, the female performers in the ‘porn archive’ of the stag period were very often prostitutes while the men were not.
10. Given its goal of collecting, preserving and facilitating access to films of historic significance that have not been collected elsewhere, and its dedication to ‘ephemera’ –usually the term for pornographic works – this practice does not bode well for the preservation of and access to the pornographic tradition on film, video and digital formats.
11. Other anthologies include porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography (Attwood Citation2010).
12. David Andrews (Citation2006) makes this astute observation in Soft in the Middle.
13. Perhaps I am here idealizing the gravitas of other more legitimate fields.
14. For example, I title one subsection of this epilogue ‘“The ‘Classical Era” of Theatrically Exhibited Porno.’
15. See, for example, Steven Maddison's claim that there is an ‘elision between advancing toward the new millennium and advancing toward a more open speaking of sex that strongly accords with Modernist notions of progress’ (Citation2010, 21).
16. It is also worth considering whether ‘blow job’ is an apt term. Blowing is rarely what one sees done in that particular sex act; in fact, quite the contrary. If you then choose the Latinate term, as I have mostly done, there is still the further problem of knowing how to pronounce it. During the first talk on pornography I ever gave, I consistently pronounced fellatio ‘fellahtio,’ until a kind colleague took me aside and corrected me.
17. I should explain here that my original paper for the volume Porn Archives (Dean, Ruszczycky and Squires, forthcoming), of which this is a much revised version, was prompted by a very different title than the one that emerged. It was a call for papers under the title ‘At the Limit: Pornography and the Humanities,’ and it rested partly on the inference that pornography might want to lodge itself as a field in the Humanities, as if to say to the Humanities: what do you think of that! It is this quality of provocation that I believe the academic field of pornography studies needs to temper if it is to successfully cultivate its fields. Although I take issue with many of Tim Dean's ideas about pornography and the archive, I thank him for organizing the conference and book that became Porn Archives and for his innovative work.
18. In an email message to me on 24 March 2010, Young continues: ‘This is a ploy to bolster the aura around its own product, to produce an authentically shocking and transgressive pornography amidst a sea of banality.’