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Porn Archives
Edited by Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky and David Squires
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Book Presentation:
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
About the authors:
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.
Press Reviews:
"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
See the publisher website: Duke University Press
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