Porn Archives

Porn Archives

  • Author: Dean, Tim; Ruszczycky, Steven; Squires, David
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822356714
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822376620
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2015
  • Month: February
  • Pages: 514
  • Language: English
While sexually explicit writing and art have been around for millennia, pornography—as an aesthetic, moral, and juridical category—is a modern invention. The contributors to Porn Archives explore how the production and proliferation of pornography has been intertwined with the emergence of the archive as a conceptual and physical site for preserving, cataloguing, and transmitting documents and artifacts. By segregating and regulating access to sexually explicit material, archives have helped constitute pornography as a distinct genre. As a result, porn has become a site for the production of knowledge, as well as the production of pleasure.

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
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Pornography, Technology, Archive - Tim Dean
  • Part I: Pedagogical Archives
    • 1. Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field - Linda Williams
    • 2. Pornography as a Utilitarian Social Structure: A Conversation with Frances Ferguson
    • 3. The Opening of Kibena, Cecilia, Robert, Linda, Juana, Hoang, and the Others - Nguyen Tan Hoang
    • 4. Pornography in the Library - David Squires
  • Part II: Historical Archives
    • 5. "A Quantity of Offensive Matter": Private Cases in Public Places - Jennifer Burns Bright and Ronan Crowley
    • 6. Up from Underground - Loren Glass
    • 7. "A Few Drops of Thick, White, Viscid Sperm": Teleny and the Defense of the Phallus - Joseph Bristow
  • Part III: Image Archives
    • 8. Art and Pornography: At the Limit of Action - Robert L. Caserio
    • 9. Big Black Beauty: Drawing and Naming the Black Male Figure in Superhero and Gay Porn Comics - Darieck Scott
    • 10. Gay Sunshine, Pornopoetic Collage, and Queer Archive - Robert Dewhurst
    • 11. This is What Porn Can Be Like! A Conversation with Shine Louise Houston - Mireille Miller-Young
  • Part IV: Rough Archives
    • 12. Snuff and Nonsense: The Discursive Life of a Phantasmatic Archive - Lisa Downing
    • 13. Rough Sex - Eugenie Brinkema
    • 14. "It's Not Really Porn": Insex and the Revolution in Technological Interactivity - Marcia Klotz
  • Part V: Transnational Archives
    • 15. Porno Ricans at the Borders of the Empire - Ramon E. Soto-Crespo
    • 16. Butts, Bundas, Bottoms, Ends: Tracing the Legacy of the Pornochanchada in A b…profunda - Melissa Schindler
    • 17. Pornographic Faith: Two Sources of Naked Sense at the Limits of Belief and Humiliation - John Paul Ricco
    • 18. Parody of War: Pleasure at the Limits of Pornography - Prabha Manuratne
  • Part VI: Archives of Excess
    • 19. Fantasy Uncut: Foreskin Fetishism and the Morphology of Desire - Harri Kalha
    • 20. Stadler's Boys; or, the Fictions of Child Pornography - Steven Ruszczycky
    • 21. Stumped - Tim Dean
  • Appendix: Clandestine Catalogs: A Bibliography of Porn Research Collections - Caitlin Shanley
  • Filmography
  • Bibliography
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index

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