Porn Studies Research Articles

When did ‘the true king of hardcore’ start to cry? Investigating Rocco Siffredi’s stardom

ABSTRACT With a career in the adult industry spanning 40 years, Rocco Siffredi is undoubtedly one of the most important male porn stars to date. Despite his undoubted importance, however, he has not been the subject of extensive research in the fields of porn studies and adult film history. This article is intended to be the first step in a long-term research project dedicated to the Italian porn star. Combining reflections on the cultural positioning of pornography with the theoretical framework and methodology of star and celebrity studies, we will first analyze the construction of Rocco Siffredi as a pornographic star; secondly, we will examine Siffredi’s image in the public sphere (specifically in the Italian context). In both cases, we will draw on a variety of sources – such as hardcore productions, trade journals, mainstream media, public appearances, general press, social media, and so on – selected for their theoretical and historical relevance.

Main/streaming porn discourse?: 10 years of Porn Studies and reminiscing on South Asian pornocultures

ABSTRACT In India, and in South Asia more broadly, the pornographic spectrum is inflected by a wide range of cultural and social imaginaries. Such imaginaries impact social norms, the constitution of what relations are permissible and which ones are tabooed, and more institutionalized aspects such as censorship regulations and laws about obscenity. Starting with an overview of the legal, censorial, and historical discourses about pornography and obscenity, this article sheds light on the complexities of knowing and regulating porn in India. Further, by examining two nostalgic productions about B and C grades, and pornographic films of the celluloid era, we show how there has been a mainstreaming of porn discourse through the filter of arthouse and/or serious cinema and television. In tracking these issues, we also show how porn studies in a South Asian context might not, at first look, resemble ‘porn’ studies at all. Making a case for expanding the ambit of the pornographic, we show how the work of porn studies must ‘accent’ itself as it weaves its way through cultural and geopolitical difference.

I Know It When I Hear It

In the following article I consider a catalog of audio description porn videos available on the online adult entertainment platform Pornhub. Attending to the visual and aural elements of the original source video and their simultaneous narration in the audio descriptive tracks, I argue that this transcription offers us, the viewer/auditor, an ekphrastic encounter with the pornographic moving image mediated by the acousmatic gendered voice of the audio describer. While academic scholarship on pornography informs my discussion of the source videos, theories of ekphrasis ranging from its usage in Ancient Greek rhetoric, to its formulation in twentieth-century anglophone literary theory, and finally to its application in digital visual culture, will underpin my analysis of the audio description. Through ekphrasis I ultimately distinguish the audio description of pornography as a creative genre in its own right, as well as offer an extensive and interdisciplinary approach that extends beyond the recursive or self-reflexive lens of porn studies scholarship, and newly positions hardcore film pornography within a larger body of academic inquiry in conversation with epic poetry and art history.

Teaching porn in a time of backlash: findings from a study on campus sexual speech

ABSTRACT Drawing on 24 in-depth interviews with professors at colleges and universities in the USA, this article examines how porn studies scholars navigate issues of campus free speech and academic freedom in an increasingly polarized time. What specific institutional challenges and forms of gatekeeping do porn studies scholars face? How do concerns on the part of university administrators, students, and media affairs professionals regarding sexual content have a chilling effect that imperils faculty speech? This article offers an instructive case study for understanding how professors who teach difficult or potentially controversial material, including but not limited to pornography, navigate increasingly fraught and risk-averse university contexts, and what kinds of lessons their experiences might offer to those seeking to shore up free speech and academic freedom in times of backlash.

What we must be: AI and the future of porn studies

ABSTRACT This article explores the potential impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of pornography and pornography studies. It links the content policies created by technology companies such as OpenAI, which prohibit sexually explicit material, to the social media, technology, and entertainment industries before them, and examines the cultural and regulatory impact on pornography, sexuality, and human relationships. Drawing on the work of Joseph Weizenbaum, the author argues that the increasing disconnection of humanity from creative expression, along with growing disinterest in the consequences of that disconnection, will have profound consequences for the future of pornography studies.

Pornographication: exploring the ‘porn’ in ‘inspiration porn’

ABSTRACT This article brings aspects of disability and pornography studies together by exploring the phenomenon of ‘inspiration porn’. Inspiration porn broadly refers to problematic and ableist representations of disabled people, and it has been suggested within disability studies that this term has resonance given its objectifying and dehumanizing qualities. Engaging more critically with porn studies, however, I interrogate the resonances between inspiration porn and pornography, and question what is at stake in the construction of non-pornographic material with the descriptive suffix ‘porn’. Building and extending Hester’s work in Beyond Explicit, I find that inspiration porn likewise contains attributes associated with pornography, namely prurience, the real, authenticity, intensity, and transgression. The findings suggest that there are significant overlaps between inspiration porn and pornography, and ones that go beyond reductive notions of objectification and dehumanization. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings, particularly in relation to the displacement of sex within conventional understandings of pornography and broader pornographication trends.

No respect: sex research as sex work

ABSTRACT In this scholarly conversation, Dr Rebecca Sullivan and Dr Valerie Webber share their experiences in sex work and how it has informed their research in their different areas of sexuality studies. Dr Webber, who has worked as both a porn and cam performer, is a postdoctoral scholar at Dalhousie University’s Sexual Health and Gender (SHaG) Research Lab. Dr Sullivan, a professor in the Department of English at University of Calgary, had a brief stint as a phone sex operator during her undergraduate studies. Together, they reflect on the similarities between sex labour and academic labour, from precarity to gig economies. Their research has deepened their understanding of stigma and emphasized the importance of allied scholarship in order to imagine new research frameworks for porn studies that foreground sexual health and rights for vulnerable communities.

How (and How Not) to Study Porn

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.

CARNAL PRACTICES: PORN CONSUMPTION AMONG QUEER EAST ASIAN MEN

Despite its ability to arouse and titillate or disgust and anger (and sometimes both simultaneously), porn has only recently been examined through an affective lens. Writing in the inaugural issue of Porn Studies, Susanna Paasonen (2014) advocates for porn studies scholars to consider how the application of affect theory can help us better understand the appeal of pornography. Drawing on Paasonen’s concept carnal resonance and Margaret Wetherell’s (2012) affective practice, I propose the concept _carnal practice_ as a way to examine how one engages and makes sense of online pornography through the affectively felt practice of searching for, finding, and getting off to online pornography. This is done through an analysis of 48 semi-structured interviews, conducted between February 2019 and September 2020 and in 5 countries—Taiwan, South Korea, China, Japan and Canada—in which I discuss how queer East Asian men navigate their respective internet space, are drawn to particular content and platforms that satisfy their desires and curiosities, and make sense of the porn they view. In some instances, participants discussed notions of being drawn to authenticity in porn as well as porn that seems real (that is, most similar to their lived experience), attraction to particular sex acts, scenarios and races, and, in other cases, allowing a platform’s algorithm to help facilitate and fine-tune their desires, to name a few. Although this study focuses specifically on the practices of queer East Asian men, the concept of carnal practice is not limited to this group and has wider application.

Notes from a (retiring) porn scholar – teaching porn studies in Canada: a (very brief) reflection

ABSTRACT What does it mean to teach Porn Studies? How has the inclusion of Porn Studies inside the undergraduate university curriculum changed the university – or has it? What have we learned after some 30 years of teaching inside the academy? I explore these and other questions, arguing that very little of the structure of university teaching has changed with the inclusion of Porn Studies.

Sex Acts (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Sex Acts (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Performer Demographics (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Performer Demographics (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Conceptual Overview (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Conceptual Overview (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

‘The words which sailor John put to them when unrestrained were the veriest filth’: situating chanteys in the field of porn studies

ABSTRACT This article grapples with situating erotic chanteys within specific labels that attend to texts that contain sexual material. Erotic songs, like chanteys, are often categorized as erotica, bawdry, or pornography without much investigation into what these labels mean and do to the texts to which they are assigned. Close examination demonstrates that the labels applied to content come to bear on the analyses of those texts and I venture that applying the term bawdry to collected erotic chanteys is the more advantageous label. Succinctly, this term is historically and culturally accurate as a designation, especially when it is applied to songs that were sung during the Great Age of Sail, as it is a term that attaches to other content and contexts that are relatively similar to the content located in some sailing work songs. Throughout, I lean on examples from archival sources to demonstrate the types of content encountered in erotic chanteys and argue that despite examples sometimes meeting with definitions of erotica and pornography, those labels do not fully capture the depth and breadth of chantey narrative.

Pornification as Westernization on the semi-periphery: The history of the Hungarian ‘porn boom’ in the 1990s

The aim of this article is to reconsider ‘pornification’ as a universal concept to describe the mediatized process of proliferation of pornographic images in cultural spaces. Based on a textual and discursive analysis of newspaper clippings from the 1990s, autobiographical books and semi-structured interviews with Hungarian porn industry participants, this article explores the local factors that made Hungary an ideal place for the international porn industry to expand production after 1989. This article contributes to the growing body of literature in Porn Studies, which emphasizes the importance of the industrial nature and global inequalities in porn production. We examine the local discourses that justified the ‘porn boom’ as a sign of westernization and the country’s catching-up to the West and present the key factors in the capitalist reintegration process that led to the expansion of the Hungarian porn industry.

“Black Pole” and “Asian Hole”: Language Ideologies in Interracial Gay Porn

ABSTRACT This article examines the ideological interconnection encapsulated in the “language-race-masculinity” bundle in Asian-themed interracial gay porn produced in the United States. Reflecting on the conceptualization of “accented pornography,” I propose to incorporate the theoretical constructs of interactional sociolinguistics and language ideology to expand the analytical scope and enrich the theoretical lens adopted in gay porn studies. Through analyzing the linguistic feature of English accents and language-centered practices of styling, labeling, and erasing in four selected gay porn scenes, I demonstrate how racial and masculine identities intersect and mutually constitute each other in dynamic ways. In addition, I highlight the iconic linkage between language and race that has been long neglected in gay porn studies and argue that the discursive and institutional practices of gay porn-making are dictated by the dominant ideology of White supremacy that relegates both Asian and African American communities to hierarchically lower positions in the U.S. society.

Sexing the Archive

Abstract Despite being a widely consumed genre of visual culture, pornography remains a touchy subject in contemporary queer historiography. Queer archives overflow with it, but queer histories don’t. Historically associated with low culture and distrusted by value systems that have tended to privilege the “high” faculties of reason to the detriment of the “base” materiality of the body, its affects and appetites, porn is too rarely approached as a legitimate source with which to think cultural, affective, intellectual, and sexual histories. This article draws from porn studies and queer historiographies to draw some methodological considerations about the value, benefits, and challenges posed by porn archives to the writing of queer subcultural histories. Rather than trying to solve porn’s double ontological status as both documentary and fantasy, the authors locate in that defining feature of the genre porn’s value as a historical source. Simultaneously a document of sex cultures and of the edges of morality, and a historically and culturally situated speculation on what bodies and sex may become, porn offers both cultural critics and historians a rich archive for deepening their knowledge of the intersections of culture, morality, pleasure, community, embodiment, and the politics of belonging.

Times Square Strip: queer memories of New York and Jack Deveau’s Hand In Hand Films

ABSTRACT This review essay considers how the edited volume Good Hot Stuff: The Life and Times of Gay Film Pioneer Jack Deveau (2018) engages with critical discourses on queer history, the politics of preservation, and debates on public and private spheres through ethnohistorical modes of analysis linked to memory studies. By forwarding an argument in favour of new archival uses of pornography to explore subjects and disciplines beyond the history of sexuality, the methodological strengths of Good Hot Stuff lie in embracing the unreliable qualities of memory in order to demystify the Golden Age of Porn, offering porn studies scholars new ways to think about the past.

A finding aid to the pornographic imaginary: implications of amateur classifications on/by reddit’s NSFW411

ABSTRACT The goal of this article is to ‘bring’ reddit and its user communities into porn and information studies and to argue that its unique features offer insights and have implications for both fields. After an explanation of reddit, this article extends the work of Keilty and Leazer into a different erotic community: reddit’s /r/NSFW411. I argue that the categories used on ‘traditional’ pornographic ‘tube’ sites are potentially oppressive and limiting, and examine various aspects of an individually created naïve pornographic taxonomy with folksonomic elements. Finally, I demonstrate how the interplay between reddit, NSFW411, and this system identifies ‘gaps’ between erotic representation and users’ desires, thereby encouraging the creation of a new erotic communities. While unending proliferation and chaotic tagging is often identified as a weakness of folksonomies, I conclude that, in this case, it is a strength, as reddit’s ease of community-creation allows self-definition and community to marginalized sexual identities.

Spotlight: Teddy Pozo

Spotlight:Teddy Pozo Interview by TreaAndrea M. Russworm TreaAndrea M. Russworm: What would you like our readers to know about the history of video games and where you enter the conversation? Teddy Pozo: My book talks about two specific moments in video game history related to sexual and gender representation. The first is the early twentieth century, when moving pictures ceased to be arcade machines, and the arcade and the movie theater split apart. Film started to define itself as a disembodied visual medium, on the mind side of mind/body dualism, in a constructed zone of non-pornography. The second is the "queer games scene" of the early 2010s when trans artists started to become highly visible in video game design. The conversation around queerness and games did not initially separate "pornographic" and "non-pornographic" works, as it was part of a larger scene of sex and technology makers and queer pornography. In connecting these moments, my work goes much further back than games history sometimes does in order to understand more recent events in a historical frame. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Teddy Pozo (Jett Allen, 2021). Russworm: Since we may not often think about the erotic, haptic, and visceral dimensions of playing games, can you give us an example of how the haptic and the erotic converge in this regard? [End Page 4] Pozo: Think about the physical and emotional process of playing a Twine game: a sparsely designed one-on-one interaction between player and game, or player and game maker, where the white text on a black background of Twine's Sugarcane story format is much different than the social media feed or blog you may have clicked to arrive there. Clicking a hyperlink leads to a miniature world of hyperlinks simulating one other person's mind or chain of associations that may be very different from your own. There's no specific haptic technology in this moment, no vibration, electrotactility, or force feedback. However, the interaction between player and game or game maker in personal games is often "haptic" in a surface, caressing, intersubjective way of interacting with a piece of media that oscillates between understanding and being overwhelmed, taking and giving up control. This is consistent with Laura U. Marks's theory of haptic visuality.1 So many of the early Twine games that were part of the queerness and games scene were erotic or pornographic, depending on your definition.2 Marks argues that haptic texts are always erotic, regardless of subject matter, so experiencing a haptic pornographic text can be very powerful. Russworm: Perhaps we can play a game. Please offer a rapid-fire association to each of the following terms: touch, control, tingle, vibrate, consent. Pozo: Touch—An essential part of all the human senses, because every sense organ can both be physically touched and can call up haptic sense memories. Tingle—Tingle is a very old term that means to pass with a thrill or to vibrate as a bell, so it marks the intersection of electricity and vibration, from penny arcade vibration machines to The Tingler (1959), a William Castle film with a vibrating gimmick by Dona Holloway, that also influenced John Waters's Multiple Maniacs (1970), in its Tingler-esque Lobstora sequence, and Polyester (1981), with its card-based Odorama gimmick.3 Vibrate—Vibration has the potential to be appropriated for pleasure at all times. Consent—Digital environments can produce coercive consent structures, automatically collecting data and requiring us to opt out, for example, but games by queer and trans artists often try to transform digital consent to true interpersonal consent, allowing for touch to be experienced as care rather than coercion.4 Russworm: What do you think porn studies can contribute to game studies? [End Page 5] Pozo: What inspires me in porn studies is its labor consciousness—its understanding that while creative workers claim and demonstrate passion as part of the work, passion is not an excuse for not getting paid. Academics can relate to this! We in video game studies need to take a cue from porn studies and not exceptionalize our passionate relationship to an industry. Rather, we need to...