Full Description
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 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
