How (and How Not) to Study Porn

Abstract

Abstract Over the past several decades, porn studies has cohered as an interdisciplinary field built by scholars of feminism, race, media studies, history, literature, sociology, gender studies, and queer theory. The most compelling recent work in the field, like Heather Berg’s Porn Work (2021) and Steven Ruszczycky’s Vulgar Genres (2021), approaches pornography as a broad textual and cultural field rich with information about how we imagine, consume, and construct sex. They show that the category of pornography expands and deepens as texts are written, excerpted, and republished; as sex workers invent new outlets and conditions for their labor; and as new technologies increase access for user interaction. Such work shows us not simply how pornography indexes pleasure, but how it creates politics, community, and labor theory. Some scholarship, meanwhile, remains wearily sedimented in polarizing arguments for or against pornography’s value, like Bernadette Barton’s The Pornification of America (2021). Locked into an assumption that pornography is harmful and irredeemable, such work avoids engaging with pornographic texts themselves and ignores recent work in the very field to which it claims to make urgent contributions.[T]he best work [in porn studies] defines pornography not as identifiable texts, videos, or films, but as a field that connects sex to the myriad social relations that shape it: gender, labor, pop culture, and consumption.