This book is great!
"I have a few academic books on the adult film culture and the porn industry, but this one is one of the best that I've found. Well worth picking up if you are interested in pornography as a field of study."
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By Linda Williams
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
516 pages
6" x 9"
Overall rating: 5.0 / 5 from 3 reviews.
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Duke University Press is killing it
"Porn Studies by Linda Williams is a fascinating and deeply insightful read that takes a serious, academic look at pornography—something rarely given this level of intellectual rigor. Williams and the contributing scholars break down its cultural, political, and artistic significance, challenging the way we think about adult media. It’s a bold and necessary book that encourages open, nuanced discussions about a subject often dismissed or sensationalized."
Great resource!
"Great intro to the field! Content is engaging and the perspectives from the contributors ate relatively diverse."