Course description
Pornographic images have never been as produced, reproduced and consumed as they are today; they are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary visual culture. It is thus not surprising that public debates on the roles and/or dangers of porn have increased in recent years. However, those debates often depart from unexamined assumptions and moral positions, with little time and space given to critical and anytical engagements with actual pornography. In this interdisciplinary course, doctoral students in Gender Studies will gain a better understanding of the history of porn and of its conventions, as well as the modern and contemporary contexts—social, political, and juridical—that have shaped and continue to shape its production, distribution, and consumption.
Porn Studies will introduce PhD researchers to the main theories and debates that have surrounded and framed the production, dissemination and consumption of pornographic images. With a focus on modern and contemporary pornographic images, the course will approach pornography as a form of cultural production that can illuminate our understanding of the ways in which our societies have conceived and represented human bodies, their sexual desires and sexual pleasures. Tracing the “birth” of pornography back to the “birth” of modernity, we will follow the tense and complex relationships of visibility and invisibility that have given porn its currency, and we will map our changing understandings of obscenity vis-à-vis the histories of our cultural policing of both bodies and the visible. To do so, we will be critically engaging with materials ranging from literature to early visual erotica; from censored films to the so-called “Golden Age of Porn”; from gay porn to feminist and queer “post-porn;” from online amateur pornography to artists who blur the boundaries between art and pornography. Informed by scholarship drawn from feminist and queer studies, law, media and cultural studies, and the emerging interdisciplinary field of porn studies, the module will allow researchers to develop important critical and analytical skills that they will use to engage with a form of visual production that is second to none when it comes to the scale of its contemporary output.