Sex Tape Research Articles

The Kardashians, Live! Fabricating Liveness in the Sex-Tape-Derived Reality Series

This article explores the fabrication of liveness, understood as a category of affective urgency and narrative motivation, in two reality series derived from a sex tape scandal: Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians. The reality programs narratively incorporate Kim’s live TV appearances to compensate for the sex tape intertext’s incomplete liveness. Consequently, the Kardashian series suggest that live TV might imbue other media genres, like reality TV and sex tapes, with the liveness those genres only partially replicate. At the same time, the Kardashian series indicate a deficiency in live TV’s intertextual influence. The two series necessitate artificial liveness, produced through esthetic techniques, and simulated liveness, manufactured from imitations of live TV, to bolster the liveness of Kim’s live TV appearances. The Kardashians’s intertext, Saturday Night Live, clarifies this complication in live TV’s intertextual impact by parodying live TV’s decline as the dominant medium for liveness.

Celebrity myth-making: from Marilyn M. to Kim K

ABSTRACT In May 2022, at the annual Met Gala, Kim Kardashian made an appearance in the iconic dress worn by Marilyn Monroe at President John F. Kennedy’s birthday celebration in 1962. Controversy ensued, relating both to the actual wearing of the dress and to the celebrity status of Kim vs. Marilyn and whether Kardashian had the moral and cultural right to wear the dress. In the aftermath of the Met Gala, debates about the ways in which the two stars are perceived emerged, particularly in media. The Kardashians have been a topic for the tabloids for around 15 years, with the initial rise to fame on Kim’s part taking place through a leaked sex tape. The popular image of Marilyn Monroe combined innocence and unattainability while being the ultimate sex symbol of the 1950s and early 1960s. This paper examines the construction of the celebrity myth in relation to Kim Kardashian and Marilyn Monroe as presented in media and research, with focus on the notion of the sex symbol. Kardashian’s recent Met Gala appearance along with subsequent media attention and controversy indicates that further analysis is warranted of the intricate connections between the two celebrities.

A new day for Hulk Hogan: Celebrity selves and racial diversity in contemporary professional wrestling

This paper considers contemporary World Wrestling Entertainment’s new racial politics in the light of Hulk Hogan’s 2015 erasure from the Federation after a leaked racist sex tape rant, and the African-American wrestlers The New Day’s rise to fame during the same period. This paper locates WWE’s actions as responses in line with a domestic media marketplace where the rhetoric of racial diversity is fetishised. In doing so, this paper combines literature on corporate social responsibility, race, and the performativity of the self in contemporary celebrity culture. This paper reads World Wrestling Entertainment’s actions as strategies through which the Federation’s corporate social responsibility is spectacularly performed, allowing it to grow and survive in the streaming video era.

Predatory porn, sex work and solidarity at borders

ABSTRACT This piece examines the exploitation of migrant sex workers in Greece through the marketization of nonconsensual video recording of sexual encounters where profit and pleasure are extracted from emerging predatory economies at border crossings. In the context of this special issue on Sexuality and Borders, the piece suggests that extraction of value from sexuality and sex work at borders relies on racial profiling of refugees, reinforcing, sorting and situating them in the colonial cartographies of space where the construction of desirability furnishes the consumer and producer with enduring orientalist fetishes of migrant male masculinity as untainted by the supposed metrosexualization of the European man. Blending history and fieldwork to uncover the production and proliferation of these sex tapes, the article also looks at the ways in which sexual play and pleasure seeking engender new social and spatial relations through solidarity that emerges in response to predatory porn industries.

Of "Sound" and "Unsound" Body and Mind: Reconfiguring the Heroic Portrait of Harriet Tubman

Of "Sound" and "Unsound" Body and MindReconfiguring the Heroic Portrait of Harriet Tubman Janell Hobson (bio) Harriet Tubman (ca. 1822–1913) is central to narratives of US progressive history and specifically black women's history. For this reason, she can easily be invoked in a historic acceptance speech by Viola Davis, who became the first black woman to win a Leading Actress Emmy in 2015 at a time when she had planned to produce and star in a Tubman biopic. Tubman has also inspired the establishment of a national park, as with the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, and won the popular vote in a 2015 campaign to place a historic woman on the US currency. She is even contemporized for modern audiences, whether that involves denigrating her in a vulgar spoof called the Harriet Tubman Sex Tape, which briefly appeared on and then was subsequently removed from Russell Simmons's All-Def Digital YouTube channel due to its controversy, or celebrating her in a satirized Drunk History episode on Comedy Central, as portrayed by Octavia Spencer. She also appeared in the popular television series Underground, portrayed by Aisha Hinds, who delivered an unforgettable monologue in her iconic role. Functioning as perhaps the most iconic black woman in American culture, Tubman's image, words, and story continue to inspire and provoke. Despite her hypervisibility as a historic icon, Tubman, who is renowned for her status as an Underground Railroad conductor, Civil War hero, and woman's suffragist, remains invisible as a person with a disability. That is, her disability as an identity marker is downplayed. I raise this issue for a few reasons. First, Harriet Tubman has been heralded as an extraordinary individual with incredible strength resulting in self-liberation and the liberation of approximately seventy slaves from the antebellum South on the Underground Railroad, and yet her "superwoman" abilities remain a mystery for many—mostly because these abilities remove her from the realm of the ordinary and the everyday. Second, this image of strong black womanhood clings to a woman who historically suffered from a disability [End Page 193] throughout her life, thus complicating the "strength" she embodied. Finally, Tubman was perceived as "illiterate," a woman who could not read nor write and therefore lacked the literary agency to make her own story legible in the annals of history. This last point shifts the critique of Tubman's disability from the physical to the cognitive, in which her ingenuity, navigational skills, and survival techniques are rendered mystically, even magically, as if they could not be based in intellectual genius. Steeped in romanticism and mysticism—guided as she was by her "supernatural" visions in her journey along the Underground Railroad—Tubman also functions as more mythical than historical in the popular imaginary. She becomes what Vivian May describes as an "icon of strength," someone who "seems ahistorical, selfless, and without equal, not someone who worked within long-established networks of communication and resistance."1 Such a mythic lens further restricts and confines notions of heroism. Tubman's history is much like that of other legendary historical figures, who represent what Nell Painter calls "invented greats."2 Utilizing the example of Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), another black woman icon, Painter argues that such "invented greats" are "consumed as a signifier and beloved for what we need [them to be]."3 If greatness is based on what we need our icons to be, then perhaps it is time to redefine what it means to be "great." In other words, a non-ableist rendering of the "great woman" must reconstitute Tubman in a way that foregrounds what we might consider to be her "vulnerable strength" in the historical narrative. By complicating her strength through the lens of vulnerability, I in no way wish to diminish her abilities or to engender an ableist critique of the strength she embodied. Instead, I wish to call attention to the ways that we have discursively distinguished between weakness and strength, in which the superwoman is always capable, while her opposite—the disabled woman—is often assumed to be incapable. This is a supposition that writer Carolyn Tyjewski challenges when reminding us that "if one looks...

Seks, taśmy i statusy Facebooka. O poezji Katarzyny Fetlińskiej

The article attempts to analyze the poetry of Katarzyna Fetlińska with the main stress laid upon her volume Sekstaśmy (Sex Tapes). The author tries to verify critical tracks and generalizations, introduced mostly by editorial and publishing descriptions which promote the collection. He exposes the importance of dramatic and surprisingly non-ironic themes chosen by the poet, who confronts herself with the most tragic aspects of human existence: loneliness and death. The main theme of the sketch is eroticism, sexuality and even pornographic character of her poetry, directed against metaphysically scandalous friability of interpersonal relations, human objectification and nothingness of being.

Sam Lebovic. Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America.

By late 2016, the term “fake news” had entered the nation’s lexicon, a candidate who refused to release his tax returns had won the presidency of the United States, and a professional wrestler turned reality star had won millions from a jury after a website published what it argued was his newsworthy sex tape. How we got to this point is in large part what Sam Lebovic explores in Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America. We seem to be in a time when we do not know what information is accurate and what may be planted nefariously, when governmental actors seem to worry little about public access, and when truth is no longer necessarily an absolving defense for publishers who push the envelope of propriety. But to some extent, as Lebovic explains through an intriguing lens of history and law, it has all happened before.

Selfie, sex tape, ‘snuff’ film: Andris Grinbergs's Pašportrets

ABSTRACTPašportrets/Self-Portrait, a 1972 short film by Latvian body and performance artist Andris Grinbergs, is both a singular artifact of Cold War-era Soviet dissident culture and an addition to first-person quasi-documentary cinema's experimental vein. Hailed by filmmaker-critic Jonas Mekas as ‘one of the five most sexually transgressive films ever made,’ Pašportrets is a selfie avant la lettre and a prototypical sex tape – important medium-specificity considerations aside – though its greater historical significance may reside in the fact that it was essentially social media deprived of social circulation. It shares similarities, both in editing style and visual content, with certain films of the so-called American underground, Western European auteurs and various East European New Waves, although Pašportrets lacked their access to audiences. This predicament beset a cycle of contemporaneous, self-portrait works by members of Birojs (Office), a small collective of Latvian artists that included Grinbergs. Narrowly escaping confiscation by the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB) shortly after its completion, Pašportrets remained hidden until 1994–1995, when it was restored and premiered at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

Kasur Child Sexual Abuse Case

The Kasur child sexual abuse scandal is horrific. 280 children from 2010 to 2014 were forced to have sex while being filmed and 400 movies were leaked out. In a village of Kasur Hussain Khanwala a gang of 25 men who used the hundreds of videos they produced to blackmail the youngsters' parents, according to Latif Ahmed Sara, a lawyer and activist representing the victims. This also indicates the irresponsibility and carelessness of local police and politicians. According to Human Rights Commission these sex tapes were made for commercial purposes. The tapes that were made then used to blackmail the parents of the victims into keeping quiet and into giving money to the paedophilia ring. These tapes were also being sold to locals in the town for Rs 50 and even, according to one report, were being sold to paedophile websites overseas.

The last days of gay porn

‘The Last Days of Gay Porn’ examines the evolution and dissolution of the gay male pornography industry from the perspective of an insider who is both a filmmaker and an analyst, and asks whether adult films have a place in the current Internet era. The author briefly explores the cultural influence of gay pornography over four decades, from its origins in the late 1960s, through the hedonism of the 1970s, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when the author argues that the gay adult industry performed a tangible public service by incorporating condoms into its films, and into the 1990s and a new century as the rise of the Internet, social networking and ‘celebrity sex tape culture’ render moot the point and purpose of pornography.

Introduction

Introduction L. H. Stallings (bio) As a follow-up to Black Camera’s Special Issue on Sexuality and Eroticism in volume two, number two, this Close-Up continues to examine how black cultural imagination has learned to revel in the fluidity of sexuality and the nourishing impact of eroticism in as many ways as possible, despite Western patriarchy’s deployment of sexuality as power and violence. This alternative utility of sexuality and eroticism occurs in films thematically concerned with black sexual subjectivity. Black people have moved beyond simply wanting to see themselves and their sexual desire represented on screen in Hollywood: they have moved on to creating what they would like to see. Characters such as Mandingo, Sweet Sweetback, Foxy Brown, Nola Darling, and Mr. Marcus, and films such as Looking for Langston (dir. Isaac Julien, 1989), Tongues Untied (dir. Marlon Riggs, 1989), and Young Soul Rebels (dir. Isaac Julien, 1991) are from a bygone era of independent black filmmaking, though their cinematic tropes often land in other films and their political platforms and artistic ideals arise in classrooms. If the proliferation of hundreds of black sex tape scandals, the massive production of black-themed porn, the Afrocentric sexual instruction videos from the Adam and Eve production company, the R. Kelly child pornography trial, or the big-screen adaptation of erotic writer Zane’s Addicted (dir. Bille Woodruff, 2014) doesn’t convince us that black sexuality in film, video, and new media matters to black communities and art, then perhaps Silence: In Search of Black Female Sexuality in America (dir. Mya B., 2004), Afrodite Superstar (dir. Venus Hottentot and Candida Royalle, 2006), A Good Day to Be Black and Sexy (dir. Dennis Dortch, 2008), Karmen Geï (dir. Joseph Gaï Ramaka, 2001), The Aggressives (dir. Daniel Peddle, 2005), Mississippi Damned (dir. Tina Mabry, 2009), Children of God (dir. Kareem Mortimer, 2009), Pariah (dir. Dee Rees, 2011), and Gun Hill Road (dir. Rashaad Ernesto Green, 2011), can better substantiate the growing importance of black sexuality and eroticism in black film. These films serve as evidence that filmmakers’ concerns [End Page 163] and approaches to sexuality and eroticism have moved beyond representation politics and onto consider questions of agency, subjectivity, and the interiority of black life. Analysis of these complex elements has led to more radical conversations about sexuality in black film scholarship over the last two decades. Academic research and knowledge, in addition to mass popular conversations on black sexuality, have shifted the terrain from the approaches of arguing for proper and normative representations in Hollywood films or independent cinema. The new crop of film scholars learned a lot from Jacqueline Jones and bell hooks, but they also began incorporating other fields’ examination of sexuality and eroticism into their analysis of black film. Mia Mask’s Contemporary Black American Cinema insists, Since the early 1990s the field of Cinema Studies has grown considerably to encompass a wider array of scholars researching and studying black American cinema and cinemas of the black diaspora. The field now encompasses scholars situated squarely within the discipline of Film Studies and those who are located in other fields (i.e., Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Education, Art History, Queer Studies) but who publish interdisciplinarily. Across the United States, and internationally, there are growing numbers of scholars invested in Cinema Studies as a discipline.1 Mask’s statement about interdisciplinarity in Black Film Studies cannot be overstated, since the growth and evolution of Black Film Studies hinged on its founding critics’ ingenuity in rejecting “white” Film Studies early complicity with disciplinarity and elitism. Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor, Ed Guerrero, Mark Reid, Valerie Smith, Tommy Lott, Jacqueline Bobo, Phyllis Klotman, Michael Martin, bell hooks, Jacqueline Stewart, Haile Gerima, and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster are now joined by the likes of Mia Mask, Kara Keeling, Keith Harris, Norma Manatu, Terri Francis, Angelique Harris, Christine Achman, Akin Adesokan, N. Frank Ukadike, Yvonne Welbon, and Regine M. Jean Charles, who also emphasize interdisciplinarity. The list grows when you include recent porn scholars such as Mireille Miller-Young, Jennifer Nash, and Ariane Cruz. Thus to avoid further reinscriptions of white supremacy and patriarchal gazes embedded within the analytics of traditional film scholarship and...

Hottentot in the age of reality TV: sexuality, race, and Kim Kardashian’s visible body

Kim Kardashian is an omnipresent figure in today’s entertainment media. The daughter of O.J. Simpson’s defence attorney Robert Kardashian, she first entered the public eye in 2007, gaining notoriety with a home-made sex tape. Soon after came a reality-television partnership with the E! network that spawned five distinct programmes, and from there Kardashian took on an ever-expanding range of promotional and licensing opportunities, building a successful brand. Throughout, media coverage has placed constant attention on her curvaceous body, locating it as a site where both her ‘realness’ and artificiality lie. This attention to her body, much of it promulgated by Kardashian herself, works to consistently flatten the many interplays between race, class and sexuality in her image in order to best position her as both an accessible and unique commodity in the marketplace of personality. This paper addresses how the portrayal of Kardashian’s body is at once complex and contradictory, concurrently reinforcing heteronormative structures of reproductive, privatised sexuality and historic racial dichotomies positioning white bodies as restrained and non-white bodies as overtly sexual, while exploiting the interstices of these taxonomies for profit.

15 Minutes of Shame? Copyright Issues in Celebrity Sex Videos

Author(s): Rosenfeld, Shelly | Abstract: It's the tape that launched a thousand clips Paris Hilton's Celebrity Sex Video became a form of Must See TV. Celebrities are used to performing for the camera. But when Hilton was caught on video, she reacted as many participants do when their celebrity sex tapes are revealed they file a lawsuit. This article explores the various legal tools that one can consider in response to their involvement in a dispute over a celebrity sex tape. Copyright law presents an important framework to consider. The torts of public disclosure of private facts, intrusion upon seclusion, and the right of publicity may also help protect one who wishes to nail his or her opponent.

Notes toward an “Open” Conversation on New Media Art and Ending the Politics of Exile

As a curator who works at the intersection of film and or New Media, and like anyone who works in a specific area for a period of time, I regularly come to question what lured me to the field. Medium has always been of interest to me, but I also believe that I came to this generic turf (oft considered a subfield of the visual arts) because of a certain sense of exile I felt when operating within the broader schema. By exile I refer to the sense of being an outsider. Coming from a film and visual arts background, I was not schooled within the conventional mold of an historical discourse (although this has changed through self-education). Indeed, influential media curators from Steve Dietz to Sarah Cook, a colleague who co-runs the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss (CRUMB) email list-have observed that new media is like visual art, but with noted differences. The emphasis on processes and networks has been considered divergent or separate from the museological objecthood often theorized in historical discourse. As culture continues to subsume dividends, there evolves a narrative that equally encompasses the travails of a Paris Hilton sex tape and the work of famous YouTube artists such as Marisa Olson and Ryan Trecartin (who directly critique that narrative). Bearing this in mind, I find myself scratching my head at the continued historical subdivisions of so-called Art. My experience at international symposia suggests that the construct of media history in academic discourse has been arced around an obsession with reconciling the relationship between and technology for an audience with so-called high art concerns. To the younger generation of curators: media seems to speak from a position of lack. I refer to lack in the postcolonial sense of the word-a discourse I believe I am well versed in. It is a lack that is built on an Orientalist politics of outright exclusion, based on a very didactic and diametric fear of the Other. For so-called contemporary new media artists and curators, this apparent lack seems all but imagined. We are in control of our fate. Our destiny. What was once our exile is now our source of empowerment. Not tied to binding contracts with private gallery owners, the world as manifest through virtual and cross-embedded screens is our platform, our all-embracing oyster. Why do we need an inherent predisposition that continues to define a narrative of struggle for artists with media-led practices? A narrative that continues to propagate the notion that medium-led practices are held in a separate light from the broader canon of the visual arts and culture? Isn't it anachronistic? The past three decades have materialized in significant ways. We have witnessed the birth of electronic and media departments within universities, as well as international conference series on the subject. They have proliferated in tandem with global capital. But, when culture becomes remixed and hyperlinked, labels become contestable. The capitalization of the words Arts and Electronic Art, for instance, are by their very nature framing devices initiated and applied by an outdated historical movement, whose vernacular has since become especially directed toward a select group of self-subscribing individuals. I would like to take this opportunity to be as polemical as possible. I would like to provoke the thought that these terms and constructs (for example, Art Histories, Electronic Art, New Media) are self-constricting and exiled formations or spaces. These strictures must be shifted to encompass and enable a more fluid formation for the creation of a broader schema. This may be a written or unwritten history, but whatever the case, it must enable a more malleable and open frame for the appropriation of media-based technology and its relationship to visual culture. I know that I, and the many artists I work with, would like to stop living in self-fulfilling exile and self-marginalization. …

Want to Go Private (review)

Reviewed by: Want to Go Private Karen Coats Littman, Sarah Darer. Want to Go Private? Scholastic, 2011. 330p. ISBN 978-0-545-15146-7 $17.99 M Gr. 9–12. Despite having a supportive best friend, Faith, Abby is really insecure about entering high school. She prefers her virtual life at ChezTeen.com, where her avatar doesn’t have to worry about what she’s wearing or whether her hair and makeup are just right. As Faith embraces high school activities and makes new friends, Abby makes a friend online who calls himself Luke and claims to be twenty-seven. Luke supports her when she’s feeling insecure or misunderstood, but he also asks her to undress for him on the webcam while he masturbates. When her parents ground her for a bad grade, Luke suggests they go away together for a few days, a plan to which she readily agrees. She’s convinced that he loves her, but it turns out he’s a thirty-two-year-old sexual predator who has been posting pictures of her, including sex tapes of her losing her virginity to him, on child pornography sites. As agenda-based fiction, the story clearly aims to show how even smart kids who’ve heard all the warnings can still be successfully groomed by sexual predators. However, [End Page 91] Abby isn’t as sympathetic as she needs to be for readers to really identify with her to the point where they understand their own vulnerability, and her motives are never effectively conveyed. She’s got a real boy who likes her, a helpful best friend that she lies to, and a sister who presents an alternate site of identification and says the things that readers will likely be thinking about how stupid Abby’s being; her folly seems calculated to get her into trouble as fast as possible without regards to credibility, and the book’s extreme version of the consequences only undercuts its believability. While the subject matter is undeniably important, this treatment is more likely to convince readers of their imperviousness to such harm rather than caution them to take internet predation seriously. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Black Visual Experience: Hendrix, Porn, and Authenticity

Reading Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape and the dialogue surrounding it as a most fecund site for the collaborative laboring of black male sexuality, authenticity, and spectatorship, this article reveals the constitutive relationship between authenticity and spectatorship in the production of black manhood. That is, the tape facilitates our understanding of how performances of race, gender, sex, and sexuality are equally induced by subject as by spectator. The tape not only speaks to the constitutive links between authenticity and spectatorship that pornography reveals but also to the intersections of racial and sexual authenticity for the black male body. Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape offers a posthumous performance of Hendrix's already contentious racial, sexual authenticity. This essay interrogates the collaboration of multiple motifs of authenticity working within Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape and the discourse that frames it: the authenticity of the celebrity body, the authenticity of sex (real sex resulting in tangible, visible pleasure) and most of all, racial, sexual authenticity. The polyvalence of authenticity operating in Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape is matched only by the plurality of spectatorship and the multiplicity of gazes at play in the making of this authenticity. Specifically, the tape illuminates the reflexive constitution of an authentic black masculinity via the white female gaze while further revealing pornography's investment in the imaging and imagining of a genuine black masculinity as being still underscored by a racial, sexual authenticity coded somatically in the “body” of the black male genitals. Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape shows us that to really understand how pornography functions as a critical medium in the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects, we need to recognize pornography as both performance and spectatorship.

From Saints to Sinners: Identity and celebrity in a contemporary Iranian television serial

Strolling through the evening streets of Tehran between August and October 2006, the flicker of television screens in homes, shops and cafes would have caught your eye, all showing Narges, the summer serial. Eavesdropping on conversations in restaurants and coffee shops, you would have heard people discussing the ill-fated love affair of the young protagonists, Nasrin and Behrooz. Browsing any one of the many newsstands on the streets of Tehran over the summer, the plethora of magazines and newspapers that featured Narges, supplying a veritable smorgasbord of tabloid tittle-tattle, further attested to its popularity and impact. These publications offered interviews with the stars, the stars’ own analyses of and reactions to the characters in Narges, speculation about plot developments and responses to the death of Poupak Goldareh, the star of the show. The fascination with its stars continued after the serial finished as it emerged that a sex tape featuring one of the stars of Narges, Zahra Amira Ebrahimi, had found its way into the public sphere. The story received considerable coverage online and a certain amount in the international press. The Iranian media also reported the story, although they did so somewhat obliquely.

Sex Acts: Reading the History of Female Sexuality through Art and Drama

Sex Acts:Reading the History of Female Sexuality through Art and Drama Marlis Schweitzer (bio) Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture. By Maria Elena Buszek. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. 444 pages, 94 illustrations. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paperback). Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America, 1900-1920. By Katie N. Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 265 pages, 11 illustrations. $85.00 (cloth). In 1913, the literary journal Current Opinion announced that "sex o'clock" had struck in America.1 Ninety-four years later, the clock keeps striking. Sex is all around us, and watching sex acts, both simulated and real, has become a staple of mainstream American culture. So-called news shows such as Dateline entice audiences with their lurid "caught in the act" exposés of sexual predators. Celebrity sex tapes have become a standard device for attracting publicity and launching careers. And a recent review of Madonna's "Confessions" world tour implied that the postfeminist icon's attempts to provoke audiences by representing herself as a hypersexualized Christ figure seemed almost quaint in comparison to the endless stream of sexually graphic images that greet Western audiences daily.2 While it's possible to argue that the proliferation of these "sex acts" has presented new opportunities for self-expression, the long-term political implications remain to be seen. Some might hail Paris Hilton, whose vapid sex doll poses and unapologetic displays of wealth, privilege, and consumption have secured her almost ubiquitous presence on entertainment television, as a new postfeminist role model. Others might cite her popularity as conclusive proof of yet another feminist backlash. Understanding the multiple meanings that spectators derive from sexual spectacles today is a difficult, complicated task. Understanding the multiple meanings that spectators may have derived from sexual spectacles in decades and centuries past is an even more complicated challenge, one that historians [End Page 443] continue to grapple with. Not only must those interested in probing historical manifestations of sexuality proceed with caution when using words such as "heterosexual," "homosexual," "gay," "lesbian," and "straight"—each of which has its own, quite specific, history—they must also avoid using binary models to acknowledge the range of historical subjects' sexual desires and experiences. Most recently, Afsaneh Najmabadi has questioned whether the typical clustering of "gender and sexuality" as categories of historical analysis has led scholars to make presentist, Eurocentric assumptions about the experiences of historical subjects. She urges historians to see sexuality as a historically and culturally contingent category on its own terms, often but not necessarily aligned with gender.3 Art historian Maria Elena Buszek and theater historian Katie N. Johnson contribute to these discussions by demonstrating the advantages (as well as the disadvantages) of using a single aesthetic medium to understand shifting expressions of female sexuality in the United States. Reading sexuality through the respective lenses of the pin-up and the brothel drama, these authors offer detailed, contextually specific analyses of the production, distribution, and consumption of sexual representation. Although their projects vary considerably with respect to scope and subject—Buszek's study of the pin-up moves from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century, while Johnson's analysis of "brothel drama" focuses specifically on the Progressive Era (1900–1920)—both highlight the social and cultural processes that regulate and contest definitions of female sexuality. These authors also share an interest in moving beyond stale oppression versus liberation debates to develop a more nuanced appreciation of art's ability to simultaneously support and undermine dominant discourses. Their work should therefore appeal to a broad audience interested in exploring the relationships among art, sex, and ideology. In Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, Buszek challenges stereotypical readings of the pin-up as simply another example of women's sexual exploitation by identifying the many ways that women have appropriated the pin-up for counterhegemonic purposes. As Buszek explains, while the pin-up genre is typically associated with heterosexual male desire and therefore tends to be read as "a kind of visual shorthand for the desirable female," it also has the capacity for "representing and accepting seemingly contradictory elements—traditional as well as transgressive female sexualities—by...

Eroticizing Safe Sex

SUMMARY This paper considers several lesbian-produced safe sex tapes which engage pornographic vernacular with a dual purpose, offering both a very pointed counter to the dearth of erotic imagery depicting lesbian sex/sexuality specifically by and for women, but also functioning as pedagogical (self-help) tools for rethinking safe sex.