Over the course of the Fall semester, a diverse group of researchers from the departments of Humanities, Film Studies and Communications will meet in order to exchange their passion, research and knowledge on the field of porn studies. Inspired by the genre's visual histories, its perennial marginal status within academia, as well as its evident centrality in current political, technological and material discourses, the group aims to build upon the porn studies curriculum already in place in the departments of Film Studies and Communications. So far, the questions that the group has examined through biweekly discussions were directed at recent theoretical interest on pornographic affect, labor, spectatorship and representation, as well as the genre's relationship to the rhetoric of pathology and panic.
The porn studies group aims to solidify this interest and open up the conversation on pornography for the greater Concordia community, with the Global Emergent Media Lab hosting the project. As a nurturing environment for the investigation of different media practices, both mainstream and alternative, the Lab serves an opportune hub for a reading group centering on porn through the general frameworks of media and cultural studies. Bearing in mind Montreal's centrality in the contemporary production and distribution of pornography through companies such as MindGeek, and Concordia's Strategic Directions which emphasize global thinking through endeavors based in local trends (particularly the mandate "Embrace the city, embrace the world"), the coordinators and members of the reading group recognize the GEM Lab as a strategic location from which these institutions can be examined.
The reading group will meet each time at 6:00pm until 8:00pm
If interested in participating in the porn studies group, please contact Nikola Stepić or Rebecca Holt at nikola.stepic@concordia.ca or reba.s.holt@gmail.com
Winter 2019 Calendar:
Week 1 (January 31): Archives Cait McKinney, “Body, Sex, Interface: Reckoning with Images at the Lesbian Herstory Archives” (Ylenia) Keilty, Patrick Keilty, “Carnal Indexing.” Knowledge Organization 44(4): 265-272. (Maggie)
Week 2: (February 21): Sex work/Reception Hosted by: Matthieu, Grace, and Aurelie
Week 3: (March 14) Queer Studies Hosted by: Nikola, Edo, and Brian
Week 4: (April 4) Critical Data/Platform Studies Hosted by: Antonia, Maggie, Becky
Week 5: (Wednesday, April 24) Transnational Porn Studies Hosted by: Edo and Brian
Fall 2018 calendar:
September 27: Porn and Pedagogy (Jump Cut Special Issue, 1996)
Curry, Ramona, ‘Media Scholars Teaching Pornography: Stepping Across Broadway’, Jump Cut, 1996, 114–18
Kane, Kate, ‘Teaching the Body Course’, Jump Cut, 1996, 132–126
Kleinhans, Chuck, ‘Teaching Sexual Images: Some Pragmatics’, Jump Cut, 1996, 119–22
October 18: The Aesthetics of Porn
Koch, Gertrude, ‘On Pornographic Cinema: The Body’s Shadow Realm’, trans. by Jan-Christopher Horak, Jump Cut, 1990, 17–29
Williams, Linda, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44 (1991), 2–13
November 8: Porn and Power
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, ‘Screening Pornography’, in Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, Massachusetts London: The MIT Press, 2006), pp. 77–128
Hansen, Christian, Catherine Needham, and Bill Nichols, ‘Skin Flicks: Pornography, Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power’, Discourse, 11 (1989), 64–79
November 29: Reading Porn
Beauvoir, Simone de, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, in Political Writings, ed. by Margaret A Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, 2017, pp. 37–102
Sontag, Susan, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador USA, 2002), pp. 35–73
Ullén, Magnus, ‘Pornography and Its Critical Reception: Toward a Theory of Masturbation’, Jump Cut, 2009
December 13: TBD
- Rebecca Holt & Nikola Stepić