The Porn Studies Journal has released its second volume. Included is the special issue section, Porn Goes to College.

While pornography is often criticized in academia, it is rare that artists from within the industry are invited to speak about their work and its intersections.

The issue is introduced by editor and porn scholar Lynn Comella:

“In January 2014 I moderated a seminar at the annual Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas entitled ‘Porn Goes to College’. The panel, which included industry veterans jessica drake and Tasha Reign, and porn scholar Constance Penley, among others, was an occasion to talk about the various ways in which pornography intersects with college life, as an object of study, a way to pay tuition, and, all too often, a topic of controversy.” [article]

Zeb Tortorici (‘Auto/Ethno/Pornography’):
“The personal, the political, the theoretical, and the pornographic can and should be in dialogue with one another. Considering pornography as a form of history, and perhaps framing history itself as a mode of pornography, might allow us to begin to do this.” [article]

Robert Reece (‘The plight of the black Belle Knox: race and webcam modelling‘):
“When a Duke University freshman revealed in early 2014 that she worked as an adult film actress to help pay her tuition, a media firestorm ensued as people were forced to deal with the collision of white, upwardly mobile feminine respectability and stereotypes about porn actresses. But the Duke freshman porn star, Miriam Weeks aka Belle Knox,1 leveraged her story to secure a part in an online reality show and a sex toy line, while major news outlets framed her as an advocate for both sex worker rights and the almost inevitable result of rising college tuition on students (Shire 2014). However, the unspoken racial undercurrents of her story have yet to be examined and beg a number of questions: how would a black Belle Knox experience the adult film industry? How would the media frame the experience of a black woman who has sex for money to pay for an elite college education?” [article]

Jiz Lee (‘They Came to See the [Queer] Porn Star Talk‘):
“…our culture’s lack of age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education has positioned pornography as an awkward substitute teacher. When people do not have other sources of explicit sexual information, they often turn to porn for examples; and if the only kind of porn available presents a limited view of what sex looks like, it can define and limit our notions of who has sex, what kind of sex they have, and, ultimately, what ‘normal’ sexuality looks like. As writer Lux Alptraum (2013) notes, just as sex is not a monolith, neither is porn. But without porn in education, such as porn studies courses or lectures such as the ones I present on campuses, how can we expect people to know otherwise?” [article]

Jennifer Lyon Bell (‘Strengthening porn practice through film theory‘):
“I toyed with the idea that studying porn in an academic setting would be perfect for someone geeky like me. I knew it was possible to study porn in a women’s studies or cultural studies framework, but I wanted to stick closely to the film discipline so that I could eventually transition into actual film-making. What I needed was to find a film studies department that would be receptive to my growing interest in pornography.” [article]

Danielle Hidalgo and Cinnamon Maxxine (‘A performer and a professor: two friends and colleagues talk porn … in college‘):

Danielle: “This makes me think about some of the comments my students had. One student said, ‘Thank you so much for offering up your time. I know so much more now. I just had all kinds of stereotypes about sex workers’. And another said, ‘I only had this [one] particular perspective on the sex industry and now I’ve got a deeper understanding of it’. The way you talked about your relationship and said, ‘This is the person I’m with’, humanized you.”
Cinnamon: “I feel like the more I can humanize myself, and sex workers in general, the better. I felt like your students got a real sense of who I am as a person and it really challenged the stereotypes that they hear so often.” [article]

An interview between Comella and Conner Habib (‘Navigating Campus Controversy’)

LC: “I read somewhere that the school’s president didn’t think GLBT rights should be linked to pornography. How do you respond to that?”
CH: “That someone who claims to be an ally can make such a statement shows just how far we’ve strayed from our understanding of sexuality and sexual identity. Our desires are what help orient our sexuality. What kind of orientation are we talking about if we don’t understand that desire is part of GLBT identity, as well as heterosexual identity? The idea that we can somehow segregate desire, and the desire to represent desire, from our lives so neatly is just preposterous.” [article]

Diana Pozo (‘Trigger Warnings and the Porn Studies Classroom’):
“Anti-porn feminists, however, trade on porn’s association with discourses of triggering and trauma by designing presentations to ‘have “impact”, especially for women who “haven’t seen much if any pornography”’, using decontextualized images to provoke trigger-like emotional responses that Clarissa Smith and Feona Attwood call a ‘sex panic style’ (2013, 48). When used in an anti-porn context, trigger warnings may actually prime viewers to be traumatized, as they remind viewers that pornography is societally sanctioned as damaging, and ask them to look out for trauma in themselves as they view decontextualized porn images.” [article]

“As these essays attest, college classrooms and lecture halls are, increasingly, important platforms for porn literacy,” writes Comella. “They present occasions for students to engage with an industry that has a great deal to say about the politics of race and labour, queer bodies and desires, subjugated knowledges and censorship, and the ever more complex world in which we live.”

The section is currently available for FREE to access and download on tandfonline.com. (Note: the free articles are listed with a green tab.)