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Porn Studies

Front Cover
Linda Williams
6 Reviews
Duke University Press, 2004 - Social Science - 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

  

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Review: Porn Studies

User Review  - Bryan - Goodreads

Couldn't finish this. Very disappointing. I had high hopes. A lot of the authors are Williams' students, which wouldn't be a problem, but many of essays read like students groping for a topic because ... Read full review

Review: Porn Studies

User Review  - Junebug - Goodreads

This is a very detailed analysis of porn as it stands today, including some porn from other countries like Japan. While the content of the subject matter is very good, it doesn't make up for the ... Read full review

All 6 reviews »

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Porn 101: eroticism, pornography, and the First Amendment
Porn 101: eroticism, pornography, and the First Amendment
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Selected pages

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

Common terms and phrases

16 mm films actors aesthetic all-male amateur Andy Andy Warhol argues Asian American audience avant-garde become Blow Job body Brandon Lee Bruce Lee butch camera cinema close-up comics contemporary cultural depicted desire dildo discussion dyke erotic Eroticism essay example explicit fact fantasy feature female feminist footage fucking gay male gay porn gay pornography gender genre Gerard Damiano Girl Hard Core hard-core heterosexual Hollywood home movie Internet interracial ladies Lee's lesbian Lewinsky Linda Williams look magazine mainstream Mandingo masculinity motion study narrative NOEMA nography object on/scenity orgasm penis performance pinup pleasure political popular porn star porno pornographic film pornography production queer racial representation screen sex acts sex scene sexploitation sexual shojo manga shot social space spectator stag films stereotypes story taboo tape theater tion University Press Varga Girl Vargas viewer Vincent's films visible visual Warhol watching white trash white woman women York

References to this book

From other books

Pornography: Film And Culture
Pornography: Film And Culture
Peter Lehman
Limited preview - 2006

From Google Scholar

The Boundaries Of Porn Studies
Karen Boyle - 2006 - New Review of Film and Television Studies
" White Slavery" Versus the Ethnography of" Sexworkers
Linda Williams - 2005 - The Moving Image
Big Bad Chinese Mama
CHRIS HUDSON
Karen Boyle
On Linda Williams’ Porn Studies - 2006 - New Review of Film and Television Studies
All Scholar search results »

References from web pages

Porn studies books reviewed by Susan Ericsson
Linda Williams in the introduction to Porn Studies provides statistics that poignantly substantiate the need for more academic research on the abundantly ...
www.ejumpcut.org/ currentissue/ Ericsson/ index.html

PORN STUDIES, Linda Williams, ed. | freakytrigger
PORN STUDIES Linda Williams, ed. I never took any courses from Linda Williams while she ... So therefore, why not a collection called simply Porn Studies? ...
freakytrigger.co.uk/ ft/ wedge/ 2004/ 10/ porn-studieslinda-williams-ed/

Books in Brief
In the introduction to Porn Studies Linda Williams laments the excision of the ... methods of research, Porn Studies performs its pedagogical mission. ...
muse.jhu.edu/ journals/ journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/ v011/ 11.3freccero.pdf

critical theories of pornography
Porn Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. [PS] ... Linda Williams, “Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction” [PS] (21) ...
j-l-r.org/ docs/ pornsyllabus.pdf

Porn Studies | Pornsaints
If you are searching for interesting Porn Studies, you must read books like "Porn Studies" by Linda Williams, "Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism ...
church.pornsaints.org/ porn-studies

BOOK REVIEWS
Nor are the various contributors to Porn Studies interested in pur- ... Most assuredly, Porn Studies is serious (with the exception of ...
www.haworthpress.com/ store/ E-Text/ View_EText.asp?a=3& fn=J082v50n04_09& i=4& s=J082& v=50

ingentaconnect THE BOUNDARIES OF PORN STUDIES
This paper centres around Porn Studies (ed. Linda Williams, 2004: Duke University Press). It examines the disciplinary terrain set out in this volume and ...
www.ingentaconnect.com/ content/ routledg/ rfts/ 2006/ 00000004/ 00000001/ art00001;jsessionid=3pnq9u9sqf763.alexandra?form...

ebscohost Connection: Porn Studies.
Sight & Sound: The article reviews the book "Porn Studies," edited by Linda Williams.
connection.ebscohost.com/ content/ article/ 1041397152.html;jsessionid=1F39AA1F855AF0B2D861A541B0F0BC9A.ehctc1

F.LM » Porn Studies
Wie schön, dass die amerikanische Filmwissenschaftlerin Linda Williams mit „Porn Studies“ ein Buch herausbringt, dass die Pornografie-Forschung abermals ...
www.f-lm.de/ ?p=117

09.30.2004 - On/scenity: She knows it when she sees it
In the introduction to Porn Studies, her recent anthology of scholarship in this developing area, Williams writes that the class covered a range of examples ...
berkeley.edu/ news/ berkeleyan/ 2004/ 09/ 30_williams.shtml

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.

Bibliographic information

QR code for Porn Studies
TitlePorn Studies
EditorLinda Williams
ContributorLinda Williams
Editionillustrated, annotated
PublisherDuke University Press, 2004
ISBN0822333120, 9780822333128
Length516 pages
Subjects › 

Social Science / Gender Studies
Social Science / Pornography
  
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