Porn Studies Special Issue: “Canon Fodder: Reappraising Adult Cinema’s Neglected Texts”

In the inaugural issue of Porn Studies, Linda Williams (2014) notes that the films explored in her pioneering book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989/1999), the first major study of pornography as a distinct cinematic genre in its own right, “have been taken by others to be canonical, but in fact they are simply the examples I chose that were then available to me…through rentals in my local video stores. […] Not enough consensus was built up around these films through criticism and recorded reactions to call them canonical.” Moreover, she argues, many subsequent studies have gravitated toward queer and/or feminist pornographies, while largely neglecting the more dominant varieties of adult cinema that have proven either harder to politically reclaim (heterosexual hard-core forms) or generated little controversy among anti-porn feminists (soft-core forms). Yet, by influentially characterizing pornography (alongside horror and melodrama) as a “body genre,” Williams (1991) suggests that the ultimate success of any given film is dependent on its visceral impact, quite independent of qualitative aesthetic considerations—a critical move which allowed early studies of pornography to sidestep but not dismantle the genre’s prevalent associations with low-budget, poorly made schlock. Nevertheless, the posture of negative critique lurking behind so much ideological criticism has also allowed academics to readily disavow their own affective responses to pornography, thus downplaying this key criterion of generic success beneath the veil of critical distance.

Unlike the once-disreputable genres of horror and melodrama (both of which produced their fair share of low-budget and/or rough-hewn films that have since been academically reclaimed and even championed), the field of film studies has proven remarkably reticent to make qualitative claims for pornographic films as a filmic genre, inadvertently implying that even porn scholars find little aesthetic value in the films themselves. After all, for most academics, the very idea of actively constructing a generic canon of pornography might imply uncritically endorsing the more regressive ideological implications of such films—a concern which, to offer a contrasting example, did not stop the western (a genre premised on the actual historical genocide of indigenous peoples) from becoming the field’s first major object of generic criticism. In effectively leaping over the qualitative excavation of a popular-yet-denigrated genre, an important stage of academic/aesthetic reclamation was lost, which continues to have vital implications for porn studies’ claims to legitimacy as a cultural project. That is, studying the genre’s dominant forms remains too often justified as a response to pornography’s status as a supposed “social problem,” but less often justified as assessing the historical and aesthetic value of pornography as a cinematic art form—thus doing little to unravel lingering cultural skepticism about our own attempts to take pornography seriously.

On one hand, when pornography entered film studies in the wake of the 1980s “porn wars,” the heyday of 1960s-70s genre criticism had already passed, giving way to the various forms of ideological criticism that, to their credit, immediately rendered pornography’s generic status more of a political issue than an aesthetic one. On the other hand, pornography’s admission to the academy, as a genre as worthy of study as any other, has seldom been accompanied by an attendant revaluing of its individual texts. Influential films like Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) have generated plenty of scholarly ink for their industrial/cultural role in shaping the genre, while a few qualitatively superior works like The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger, 1976) have done likewise for seemingly proving the exception to the rule of porn’s implicitly understood aesthetic shortcomings. When, for example, a guidebook like Jim Holliday’s exemplary Only the Best (1986) offers a composite list of the best X-rated films, as assessed by critics specializing in adult cinema, it quickly becomes clear just how few of even the genre’s superior texts have received any scholarly attention. It would be inadequate to take the measure of any cinematic genre based on exploring a small handful of prominent films, while neglecting the many smaller, overlooked films that make up the genre’s bulk—but this is still the state facing the academic study of pornography.

This issue of Porn Studies will help redress this critical oversight by offering concise but detailed readings of individual pornographic films that extend well beyond the “usual suspects” hitherto explored in existing scholarship. In working to expand the historical canon by drawing wider attention to important, aesthetically fascinating, and/or overlooked films, this issue also belongs to an ongoing historiographic shift in reconsidering the genre’s history, including the DVD/Blu-ray re-release of adult films from labels like Vinegar Syndrome and Distribpix. Indeed, as scholars, students, and fans not only gain qualitatively greater access to pornography’s historical texts, but as the radioactive rhetoric of the porn wars recedes into the historical background, it has become easier for scholars to foreground their own bodily responses to these films, thus allowing us to reconcile these texts’ respective successes in making both aesthetic and affective appeals.

Authors will not be expected to contort their arguments into politically “progressive” or “against-the-grain” readings of ideologically suspect texts, nor to engage in uncritical celebration that avoids a film’s potentially problematic aspects, but rather to thoroughly engage a given film’s ideological implications alongside aesthetic considerations. Likewise, John Champagne’s (1997) caution that submitting pornography to ahistorical forms of textual analysis at the expense of considering its specific circulation and reception contexts is important to bear in mind. The ideal contribution to this issue will be a mini-essay (approx. 2500-3000 words) on a single text, uniting aesthetic appraisal, political considerations, and industrial/reception history into a tightly focused argument for the film’s canonical importance. This short essay format will also permit a more diverse range of contributions, since selected films may be from any historical period (from early twentieth century to today), and any orientation or designation (heterosexual, homosexual, soft-core, hard-core, narrative, non-narrative, short, feature-length, etc.). Authors are also encouraged to include a line describing where (if applicable) the film is currently commercially available on home video.

In addition to any questions or queries, interested authors should submit a 300-word abstract and short bio by April 1, 2015, to the guest editor:

David Church
contact email:
drchurch@indiana.edu

Timeline:
Deadline to Receive Abstracts: April 1, 2015
Deadline to Receive Full Submissions: December 2015
Expected Publication Date: September 2017

cfp categories:
african-american
american
cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches
film_and_television
gender_studies_and_sexuality
interdisciplinary
journals_and_collections_of_essays
popular_culture
twentieth_century_and_beyond