Porn Archives
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Porn Archives
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Overview
The essays in this collection address the historically and culturally varied interactions between porn and the archive. Topics range from library policies governing access to sexually explicit material to the growing digital archive of "war porn," or eroticized combat imagery; and from same-sex amputee porn to gay black comic book superhero porn. Together the pieces trace pornography as it crosses borders, transforms technologies, consolidates sexual identities, and challenges notions of what counts as legitimate forms of knowledge. The collection concludes with a valuable resource for scholars: a list of pornography archives held by institutions around the world.
Contributors. Jennifer Burns Bright, Eugenie Brinkema, Joseph Bristow, Robert Caserio, Ronan Crowley, Tim Dean, Robert Dewhurst, Lisa Downing, Frances Ferguson, Loren Glass, Harri Kahla, Marcia Klotz, Prabha Manuratne, Mireille Miller-Young, Nguyen Tan Hoang, John Paul Ricco, Steven Ruszczycky, Melissa Schindler, Darieck Scott, Caitlin Shanley, Ramon Soto-Crespo, David Squires, Linda Williams
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822376620 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/26/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 514 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Steven Ruszczycky recently completed a PhD in English at the University at Buffalo, where David Squires is a PhD candidate in English.
Read an Excerpt
Porn Archives
By Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky, David Squires
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7662-0
CHAPTER 1
Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field
Linda Williams
The Field
Academic fields are gardens that need to be tended. Sometimes they grow and flourish; sometimes they dry up and die. For the last ten years many of us working in pornography studies have labored under the belief that we were building an important field that deserved academic legitimacy. There was often an evangelical fervor about our work. Against the odds, we tried to build a field that would be as much like any other as possible. I want to take a cool look at the extent to which this has actually happened. What would we need to really make such a field instead of, as I think has too often happened, to only gesture toward it?
In 1989 I published my first—and last—single-authored book about pornography: Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and "the Frenzy of the Visible." It was hardly the first book on the topic, but I believe that it was the first academic, feminist book to be interested in the form and history, the power and pleasure, of moving-image pornography. In writing this book I had absolutely no intention of spawning a field. I simply wanted to understand more about these troubling, fascinating, and provoking films, just then turning into the more ubiquitous videos that actually made my study of them possible. How could I understand these pornographies as part of our popular culture, as genres like other film genres? What was their address to us as spectators; what was their history?
I did not, at that time, seek a place for what would come to be called "porn studies" in the academy. In 1989 that seemed unthinkable. However, ten years later, after publishing an updated second edition, I began to think that it might be possible. For me it would be a subfield of film and video studies; for others it might be a subfield of history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies, or the then-developing queer studies. It would be an interdisciplinary field, and it would gain acceptance in the various welcoming places where it could grow and build knowledge.
By 2004, when I edited a volume, titled Porn Studies, by other scholars and some of my own students, I was convinced that such a field was not only possible but inevitable. Indeed, the very blunt and familiar title of that anthology would seem to have signaled that such a field had already arrived. Yes, it was possible to put aside the "tired debates" between procensorship, antipornography feminism and anticensorship, "sex-positive" feminism. The field that was mapped by my anthology was also mapped by the earlier wide-ranging 1999 anthology Porn 101: Eroticism, Pornography, and the First Amendment, and later by Peter Lehman's Pornography: Film and Culture (2006).
I look back at my own anthology, Porn Studies, because it is fairly typical of the field mapping carried out by these others. But with the vantage of hindsight I now introduce a more critical perspective than the enthusiasm with which I first introduced it. What has flourished and what hasn't? The anthology is purposely long (496 pages), as if to impress with the sheer volume of approaches to all kinds of pornography. The first part attempts to introduce the variety of the field. It seemed important at the time that the field not be limited to the narrow range of heterosexual hard-core films and videos that I had analyzed in Hard Core, but that the field could be located in a lot of unlikely places: for example, in the Starr Report on President Clinton's sexual relations with an intern (see the chapter by Maria St. John), or the home video of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee—a private video that had "gone viral" on the Internet long before such a term even existed (Minette Hillyer). There is also the example of hard-core Japanese pornographic comics marketed to women (Deborah Shamoon). Finally, this part offers a case study and analysis of amateur online porn sites (Zabet Patterson). If this part succeeds in introducing the variety of pornographies, it perhaps is guilty of ignoring what still remained the mainstream of hard-core heterosexual video pornography, whether obtained on DVD or delivered online, thus skewing the impression of what pornography was in its most dominant form. As we shall see, this is part of futurist rhetoric.
Part II, "Gay, Lesbian, and Homosocial Pornographies," is an attempt to map the boundaries of nonheterosexual pornographies, and it primarily focuses on moments in the history of gay and lesbian pornography. It included a chapter by Thomas Waugh on the homosocial reception conditions of the classical American stag film; a chapter on the culture and aesthetics of all-male moving-image pornography that focuses on a key film from 1977 (Rich Cante and Angelo Restivo); a pioneering chapter on the emergence of lesbian pornography from 1968 to 2000 (Heather Butler); plus a queer reading of a straight work of pornography by a gay director (Jake Gerli). The first and last chapters foreground the importance of the possible queer context for the reception of ostensibly straight pornographies.
Of all the possible subfields of pornography studies, this queer and queering tendency has perhaps flourished the most, although it is telling that the male side of the queer continuum has especially flourished while the female side has not. Although there are lively pockets of lesbian porn making in Denmark and the San Francisco Bay Area, there is not an equally thriving academic field of lesbian pornography studies—at least there has been no equivalent to the earlier groundbreaking studies of gay male porn by the likes of Richard Dyer; or Tom Waugh's history of gay male eroticism in photography and film before Stonewall, Hard to Imagine; or the affecting memoir of Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue; or the chapter on graphic specularity in Earl Jackson Jr.'s Strategies of Deviance; or John Champagne's study in The Ethics of Marginality of the social-cultural context of the reception of gay and straight pornography. Pornography studies is a thriving subfield of history, ethnography, queer studies, and film and media studies, uninhibited by seemingly irrelevant feminist debates. If lesbian pornographies and lesbian pornography studies have been slower to develop, it may well be because they are still suffering from the legacy of those "off our backs," "on our backs" debates.
Two recently published books show the range of diverse and passionate investment in this field. Jeffrey Escoffier's popular account of the rise of gay pornography, Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (2009), is an authoritative account of the rise of gay pornography since the seventies—the studios, the stars, the auteurs. Written by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable fan, this book is a model of the genre of popular writing about pornography. Also published in 2009, and proof that this subfield can accommodate a wide range of approaches, is Tim Dean's Unlimited Intimacy, which is about the subculture of barebacking. Here is a scholarly, theoretical contrast to Escoffier's fan history, though in its own way it also is the work of a fan of the community it studies. While Dean's book sometimes tends to read pornography as if it could be the authentic ethnography of a subculture, it is nevertheless a stunningly original contribution. One of the most striking findings of this book is that the most long-standing trope of visible male pleasure—the ubiquitous convention of the money shot—is no longer necessary in a subgenre whose fantasy is the invisible "breeding" of a virus. Dean's central idea that bareback pornography "constitutes a mode of thinking about bodily limits, about intimacy, about power," and that it is also a "valid way of thinking about a virus," is the most provocative contribution to pornography studies that I have seen in recent years (even though it is also the most troubling). There seems to me no doubt that this particular subfield of pornography studies will continue to flourish, for the people who write about it have found these pornographic texts crucial to who they are.
Another, much less popular subfield is mapped in the third part of my anthology: "Pornography, Race, and Class." The class aspect of this part, represented by a previously published piece by Constance Penley ("The White Trashing of Porn"), is complemented in the racial section of this part by two attempts to move beyond the usual complaints about racial stereotypes, to understand their popularity in the pornographic context. The undersexed stereotype of the Asian American male (as discussed by Nguyen Tan Hoang in "The Resurrection of Brandon Lee: The Making of a Gay Asian American Porn Star") and the oversexed stereotype of the black man and woman (as discussed by me in "Skin Flicks on the Racial Border") are the two obvious examples. If pornography is a genre that seeks to confess the discursive truths of "sex," then what happens when racialized bodies are asked to reveal their racialized versions of these truths? What happens, we find, is often a particularly blunt eroticization of the very taboos that remain unspoken in more polite forms of culture.
In these chapters we encounter what many pornography critics consider to be the limit of the serious study of this subject. Daniel Bernardi, for example, writes that "watching pornography is not likely to lead to physical acts of violence such as rape, but it might lead to the perpetuation—or ignorance—of violent ideologies such as racism." Bernardi puts his finger on the reason for the relatively stunted development of this aspect of the field. To even broach the subject is to appear to revel in forms of racism and stereotyping that only degrade the others depicted. Bernardi critiques the field of pornography studies for not doing more with race, while simultaneously scolding those scholars who do discuss race if they do not simply say, as he does repeatedly, that such pornography is beyond the pale, only racist, and without any cultural interest. He thus cites approvingly Richard Fung's criticism of the conflation of Asian with anus as if that were a fate worse than death—a position that Nguyen's chapter specifically challenges. Bernardi is also one of the few scholars I know of who agrees with the first version of Kobena Mercer's famous analysis of Robert Mapplethorpe's nude photos of black men. While Bernardi is careful not to call racist those few who have managed to write about race and pornography in the U.S. context, he does charge that those scholars—for example, me and Mercer in his second version of the Mapplethorpe chapter—are insufficiently antiracist. This brings us back, somewhat uncomfortably, to the same kind of false dichotomy of anti-pro pornography with which feminist debates of the eighties and nineties were so entangled. Indeed, Bernardi describes me as a "radical sex feminist" scholar who writes about "the virtues of pornography." Here we encounter a perennial problem of the field: to write about pornography with any detail or interest is not to automatically advocate its virtues. It would seem that to be interested in pornography or race—or the intersection of race, class, and gender with their performative identities—is to be cast onto one or the other side of an antiporn-proporn divide that scholarship on pornography, I argue, must get beyond.
A much less contentious aspect of the pornographic field is contained in the fourth part of my anthology: the intersection, as well as the sometimes-rigorous separation, of soft- and hard-core forms of sexual representation. Somewhat unfairly, hard-core pornography has received the lion's share of attention in a field that has a strong relation to soft-core and less graphic erotic depictions. In this part of the anthology, Despina Kakoudaki demonstrates how pinups were deployed for patriotic purposes during World War II, while Eric Schaefer explains the crucial influence of 16 mm film technology in the transition from sexploitation erotica to hard-core, aboveground, narrative features. Schaefer identifies the importance of exploitation and, particularly, sexploitation cinema in the move to hard core. Here again we encounter the opening of an extremely rich subfield developed more recently in books by Linda Ruth Williams (no relation), David Andrews, and Nina Martin, all pointing us toward non-hard-core genres that have been immensely popular, especially with heterosexual couples and straight women.
What I find most intriguing in this work is that, unlike my own hard-core pornography studies of the late eighties and nineties, it has not been seemingly influenced, or its claims predetermined, by the antiporn feminism of the late seventies and early eighties. Scholars of hard core in that era had to situate the "legitimacy" of the pornographic field in relation to a vehement antipornography feminist stance that viewed the genre's explicit sexual representations as the quintessential example of the male objectification of the female. In contrast, the work of Linda Ruth Williams—pioneering a revolution in the academic and feminist study of soft core with The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (2005)—needs no such apologia. Nor does David Andrews, who followed with Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts (2006). Subsequently, Nina Martin issued her study Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller (2007).
All of this work asserts the importance of the genre of soft-core erotica, which has a complicated history and legacy adjacent to pornography: the genre has been disparaged both as sex-film manqué (not explicit enough) and as a kind of pornography for women. Linda Ruth Williams calls soft core the cinematic equivalent of "coitus interruptus." While this leaves open the question of whether all sex in movies that is not explicit should be called soft core—since not all of this sex is so prominent or so overtly aimed at arousal—what may be most significant about the study of the soft-core genre is itsapparent appeal to both male and female viewers. The soft core examined by all of these writers can exist in its own right (as Andrews suggests), but it often simulates sex scenes laced with narrative thrills and danger. Williams, Andrews, and Martin illuminate a genre that frequently borrows from the traditions of the romance and the soap and that is primarily disseminated in the home, but that also links up with the traditions of noir and thriller to create a potent hybrid. The historical category of sexploitation cinema is also flourishing, with new work by Schaefer and Elena Gorfinkel soon to be published.
The final brief part of my overstuffed anthology is "Pornography and/as Avant-Garde." This part posits that the study of pornography and of the avant-garde can benefit from being considered in light of one another. Ara Osterweil examines Andy Warhol's Blow Job, while Michael Sicinsky considers the connection between motion study and Scott Stark's highly edited interruptions of the familiar gestures of pornography in his film Noema. The avant-garde is not always pornography and pornography is only rarely—as, say, in the work of Warhol, Curt McDowell, Wakefield Poole, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Rubin, Peggy Ahwesh, and Bruce LaBruce—the avant-garde. Nevertheless, as I have recently argued in Screening Sex with respect to narrative art films, there is such a thing as the hard-core art film, and there is also such a thing as hard-core art, and they sometimes interestingly converge. Indeed, Kelly Dennis maintains that something called "Art/Porn" has flourished since the fondling of statues in antiquity through to today's point-and-click interactivities on the Internet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Porn Archives by Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky, David Squires. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Pornography, Technology, Archive / Tim Dean 1
Part I. Pedagogical Archives
1. Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field / Linda Williams 29
2. Pornography as a Utilitarian Social Structure: A Conversation with Frances Ferguson 44
3. The Opening of Kobena, Cecilia, Robert, Linda, Juana, Hoang, and the Others / Nguyen Tan Hoang 61
4. Pornography in the Library / David Squires 78
Part II. Historical Archives
5. "A Quantity of Offensive Matter": Private Cases in Public Places / Jennifer Burns Bright and Ronan Crowley 103
6. Up from Underground / Loren Glass 127
7. "A Few Drops of Thick, White, Viscid Sperm": Teleny and the Defense of the Phallus / Joseph Bristow 144
Part III. Image Archives
8. Art and Pornography: At the Limit of Action / Robert L. Caserio 163
9. Big Black Beauty: Drawing and Naming the Black Male Figure in Superhero and Gay Porn Comics / Darieck Scott 183
10. Gay Sunshine, Pornopoetic Collage, and Queer Archive / Robert Dewhurst 213
11. This Is What Porn Can Be Like! A Conversation with Shine Louise Houston / Mireille Miller-Young 234
Part IV. Rough Archives
12. Snuff and Nonsense: The Discursive Life of a Phantasmatic Archive / Lisa Downing 249
13. Rough Sex / Eugenie Brinkema 262
14. "It's Not Really Porn": Insex and the Revolution in Technological Interactivity / Marcia Klotz 284
Part V. Transnational Archives
15. Porno Rícans at the Borders of Empire / Ramón E. Soto-Crespo 303
16. Butts, Bundas, Bottoms, Ends: Tracing the Legacy of the Pornochanchada in A B . . . Profunda / Melissa Schindler 317
17. Pornographic Faith: Two Sources of Naked Sense at the Limits of Belief and Humiliation / John Paul Ricco 338
18. Parody of War: Pleasure at the Limits of Pornography / Prabha Manuratne 356
Part VI. Archives of Excess
19. Fantasy Uncut: Foreskin Fetishism and the Morphology of Desire / Harri Kalha 375
20. Stadler's Boys; or, The Fictions of Child Pornography / Steven Ruszczycky 399
21. Stumped / Tim Dean 420
Appendix. Clandestine Catalogs: A Bibliography of Porn Research Collections / Caitlin Shanley 441
Filmography 457
Bibliography 459
Notes on Contributors 481
Index 485
What People are Saying About This
"Pornography and the archive? Each word in the title of this fascinating collection of essays seems—historically and logically—to contradict the other. Porn is private, ephemeral, and stigmatized, while the archive makes permanent and publicly accessible officially approved records. But, as the contributors to this volume persuasively demonstrate, pornography, since the discovery of Pompeii, is archival. Sequestered and preserved, pornography becomes 'archival dirt.' The many brilliant essays collected here, written by distinguished scholars from many disciplines (film, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, law) will quickly be recognized as constituting an indispensable text in cultural history and theory."
"Once Porn Archives is published, everyone working on porn will have to refer to this field-defining collection. It is an important book, notable for its compelling argument, stellar roster of contributors, intellectual heft, and broad theoretical scope. It is the most exacting and exciting statement about porn studies to date."