Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction / Linda Williams 1
Part I. Contemporary Pornographies
How to Do Things with the Starr Report: Pornography, Performance, and the President’s Penis / Maria St. John 27
Sex in the Suburban: Porn, Home Movies, and the Live Action Performance of Love in Pam and Tommy Lee: Hardcore and Uncensored / Minette Hillyer 50
Office Sluts and Rebel Flowers: The Pleasures of Japanese Pornographic Comics for Women / Deborah Shamoon 77
Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era / Zabet Patterson 104
Part 2. Gay, Lesbian, and Homosocial Pornographies
Homosociality i the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-Screen / Thomas Waugh 127
The Cultural-Aesthetic Specificities of All-male Moving-Image Poronography / Rich Cante and Angelo Restivo 142
What Do You Call a Lesbian with Long Fingers? The Development of Lesbian and Dyke Pornography / Heather Butler 167
The Gay Sex Clerk: Chuck Vincent’s Straight Pornography / Jake Gerli 198
Part 3. Pornography, Race, and Class
The Resurrection of Brandon Lee: The Making of a Gay Asian American Porn Star / Nguyen Tan Hoang 223
Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation, and Interracial Lust / Linda Williams 271
Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn / Constance Penley 309
Part 4. Soft Core, Hard Core, and the Pornographic Sublime
Pinup: The American Secret Weapon in World War II / Despina Kakoudaki 335
Gauging a Revolution: 16 mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature / Eric Shaefer 370
Video Pornography, Visual Pleasure, and the Return of the Sublime / Franklin Melendez 401
Part 5. Pornography and/as Avant-Garde
Andy Warhol’s Blow Job: Toward a Recognition of a Pornographic Avant-garde / Ara Osterweil, 431
Unbracketing Motion Study: Scott Stark’s NOEMA / Michael Sicinski 461
Suggested Reading: An Annotated Bibliography 479
Pornographic Film and Video: A Select List of Archives and Commercial Sites 491
List of Contributors 495
Index 497

Promotional Information

A collection of contemporary work on pornographic film and video, edited by one of the founders of the field

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"Thank God for Linda Williams! She is absolutely brilliant. I have learned an enormous amount from her over the years. She boldly goes where few academic dare. Porn Studies is a much needed, fascinating book, which paves the way and sets the tone for future porn studies." Annie Sprinkle, postmodern pornographer and sexologist "For more than a decade, Linda Williams has been taking porn seriously. Her latest book, Porn Studies does not disappoint. She succeeds, once again, in legitimizing porn as an essential topic of academic study and provides a guide for teaching about it. For all those who want to know more about the place of porn in culture, this is refreshingly unabashed scholarship." Susie Bright, author of Mommy's Little Girl: On Sex, Pornography, Motherhood and Cherry Pie "Porn Studies does something remarkably simple ... It treats pornography as a genre like any other, discussing hard and soft core simply in terms of their complex cultural representations. Gender politics is integral, but not as moralism... Editor Linda Williams, one of academic porn studies' most influential voices, describes the book as transforming the obscene into the on-scene, bringing onto the stage of scrutiny that which lurked in the wings. The book will certainly help "the teacher and student of pornography roll up their sleeves to begin work in this field", mitigating porn's image as mainstream culture's guilty secret."--Sight and Sound, December 2005