Home / Books / Porn Archives

Porn Archives

Porn Archives cover image

Book

Pages: 514

Illustrations: 31 illustrations

Published: December 2014

Editors: Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky, David Squires

Contributors: Jennifer Burns Bright, Brinkema, Eugenie, Bristow, Joseph, Robert L. Caserio, Ronan Crowley, Tim Dean, Robert Dewhurst, Lisa Downing, Ferguson, Frances, Loren Glass, Harri Kalha, Marcia Klotz, Mireille Miller-Young, Tân Hoàng Nguyen, Salwatura A. Prabha, John Paul Ricco, Steven Ruszczycky, Melissa Schindler, Scott, Darieck, Caitlin Shanley, Linda Williams, David Squires, Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

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

Praise

"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." - Robyn Wiegman, author of Object Lessons

"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." - Leo Bersani, Emeritus Professor of French, University of California, Berkeley

"The consensus in Porn Archives is that the conditions for the production and reception of pornography have changed so radically since the 1980s that the questions feminists were asking about censorship, agency, gender, violence, and power seem today, if not irrelevant, at least in need of a serious makeover. Given the diverse, transnational, cross-media archive that the volume brings together, the argument is persuasive—even to die-hards like me." - Heather Love, Public Books

"Given its grand scope and quality, Porn Archives is sure to quickly become a valuable resource for anyone doing research in pornography studies." - Laura L. S. Bauer, Women's Studies

Buy

Availability: In stock

Price: $39.95

Request a desk or exam copy

Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Back to Top
Tim Dean is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, where he is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He is the author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and Beyond Sexuality.

Steven Ruszczycky recently completed a PhD in English at the University at Buffalo, where David Squires is a PhD candidate in English.

Table Of Contents

Back to Top
Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. 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

Rights

Back to Top

Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing

Additional Information

Back to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8223-5680-6 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8223-5671-4 / eISBN: 978-0-8223-7662-0 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376620

Publicity material