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6 books match the query 'Pornographic films'

cover of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography

A Taste for Brown Sugar

Black Women in Pornography

Mireille Miller-Young

Duke University Press, 2014

A Taste for Brown Sugar boldly takes on representations of black women's sexuality in the porn industry. It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. The women share their thoughts about desire and eroticism, black women's sexuality and representation, and ambition and the need to make ends meet. Miller-Young documents their interventions into the complicated history of black women's sexuality, looking at individual choices, however small—a costume, a gesture, an improvised line—as small acts of resistance, of what she calls "illicit eroticism." Building on the work of other black feminist theorists, and contributing to the field of sex work studies, she seeks to expand discussion of black women's sexuality to include their eroticism and desires, as well as their participation and representation in the adult entertainment industry. Miller-Young wants the voices of black women sex workers heard, and the decisions they make, albeit often within material and industrial constraints, recognized as their own.
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cover of Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic

Alice in Pornoland

Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic

Laura Helen Marks

University of Illinois Press, 2018

The unquenchable thirst of Dracula. The animal lust of Mr. Hyde. The acquiescence of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Victorian literature--with its overtones of prudishness, respectability, and Old World hypocrisy--belies a subverted eroticism. The Victorian Gothic is monstrous but restrained, repressed but perverse, static but transformative, and preoccupied by gender and sexuality in both regressive and progressive ways.

Laura Helen Marks investigates the contradictions and seesawing gender dynamics in Victorian-inspired adult films and looks at why pornographers persist in drawing substance and meaning from the era's Gothic tales. She focuses on the particular Victorianness that pornography prefers, and the mythologies of the Victorian era that fuel today's pornographic fantasies. In turn, she exposes what porning the Victorians shows us about pornography as a genre.

A bold foray into theory and other forbidden places, Alice in Pornoland reveals how modern-day Victorian Gothic pornography constantly emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates issues of gender, sexuality, and race.

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cover of Porn Studies

Porn Studies

Linda Williams, ed.

Duke University Press, 2004

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

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cover of Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s

Porno Chic and the Sex Wars

American Sexual Representation in the 1970s

Carolyn Bronstein

University of Massachusetts Press, 2016

For many Americans, the emergence of a “porno chic” culture provided an opportunity to embrace the sexual revolution by attending a film like Deep Throat (1972) or leafing through an erotic magazine like Penthouse. By the 1980s, this pornographic moment was beaten back by the rise of Reagan-era political conservatism and feminist anti-pornography sentiment.

This volume places pornography at the heart of the 1970s American experience, exploring lesser-known forms of pornography from the decade, such as a new, vibrant gay porn genre; transsexual/female impersonator magazines; and pornography for new users, including women and conservative Christians. The collection also explores the rise of a culture of porn film auteurs and stars as well as the transition from film to video. As the corpus of adult ephemera of the 1970s disintegrates, much of it never to be professionally restored and archived, these essays seek to document what pornography meant to its producers and consumers at a pivotal moment.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Peter Alilunas, Gillian Frank, Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Lucas Hilderbrand, Nancy Semin Lingo, Laura Helen Marks, Nicholas Matte, Jennifer Christine Nash, Joe Rubin, Alex Warner, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Greg Youmans.

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cover of Smut and Sandwiches: A History of Stag Film

Smut and Sandwiches

A History of Stag Film

Russell Sheaffer

Duke University Press, 2027

In Smut and Sandwiches, Russell Sheaffer reconstructs the history of “stag films,” spanning from the term’s roots in the late nineteenth century to the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography’s 1970 Report, which used the term to refer to early hardcore film. While histories of pornography equate the phrase with sexually explicit films, Sheaffer draws from an archive of advertisements, newspaper reports, institutional records, and public spaces to show that the early stag films were comprised of a variety of genres deemed to be popular with men, including boxing pictures, slapstick comedies, films that displayed women’s bodies through dancing or modeling, and both softcore and hardcore representations of sex. Sheaffer highlights how the 1920s vice reform movements played a crucial role in shaping the codification of the term itself as well as the environments in which stag films would be viewed and remembered, ironically making screenings more noteworthy than they would have been otherwise. Smut and Sandwiches intervenes in the established history of transgressive film to understand the methods and consequences of mobilizing and modifying language in service of moral and political aims.
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cover of The Swedish Porn Scene: Exhibition Contexts, 8mm Pornography and the Sex Film

The Swedish Porn Scene

Exhibition Contexts, 8mm Pornography and the Sex Film

Mariah Larsson

Intellect Books, 2016

This book presents a close look at the golden age of Swedish pornography in the 1970s, with a specific focus on pornographic films screened in Malmö between 1971 and 1976. How, Mariah Larsson asks, was that one small city’s embrace of the era’s sexual liberation both representative and unique in relation to the rest of Sweden?
            Combining contemporary case studies with comprehensive analyses of advertisements, critical responses, and censorship records, Larsson deconstructs the complexities and paradoxes of the Swedish porn scene. Looking as closely at the exhibition spaces where porn was seen as at the productions themselves and their audiences, Larsson reveals the conditions and social changes that allowed pornography in Sweden to flourish in the period.
 
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