Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction

* Porn Studies grew out of a graduate seminar on pornography in the Film Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of its chapters were originally seminar papers, now much revised, for courses offered in 1998 and again in 2001. The volume augments the essays by these younger scholars, many of them still completing their doctorates, with several more established contributors to the field: Rich Cante, Constance Penley, Angelo Restivo, Eric Schaefer, Tom Waugh, and I. The porn studies of this volume diverge markedly from the kind of agonizing over sexual politics that characterized an earlier era of the study of pornography. Where once it seemed necessary to argue vehemently against pro-censorship, antipornography feminism for the value and importance of studying pornography (see, for example, the 1990s anthologies Sex Exposed and Dirty Looks), today porn studies addresses a veritable explosion of sexually explicit materials that cry out for better understanding. Feminist debates about whether pornography should exist at all have paled before the simple fact that still and movingimage pornographies have become fully recognizable fixtures of popular culture. To me, the most eye-opening statistic is the following: Hollywood makes approximately 400 films a year, while the porn industry now makes from 10,000 to 11,000. Seven hundred million porn videos or dvds are rented each year. Even allowing for the fact that fewer viewers see any single work