The Feminist Porn Book : The Politics of Producing Pleasure

Description

The Feminist Porn Book brings together producers, actors, consumers, and scholars of feminist pornography. Addressing the fraught history of pornography, the rise of the anti-porn movement, and the ubiquity of porn in society, this comprehensive collection identifies the importance of porn made for and by feminists.

Contributors include Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, and Buck Angel.

“In terms both jarring and harrowing, women’s bodies became the terrain on which the 2012 election was fought. That the choices, experiences, and consequences of women’s sexual lives became fodder for such poorly informed national ‘conversations’ is evidence of the pressing need for thoughtful, sex-positive scholarship which centers on women’s sexual agency. The Feminist Porn Book is just such a contribution, and I predict this volume is going to find its way onto the bedside tables of several generations of American women. This volume brings together academics, activists, and porn entrepreneurs who have a startling array of interactions with pornography as an experience, a business, and a field of inquiry. This text is straightforward and informative in ways that are unfortunately rare in the multi-decade feminist struggle over porn. It’s also fun and sometimes a bit naughty to read. The authors do not assume that the porn industry as it exists is the one essential and only possible incarnation of porn. Instead, they assume that when feminists engage, intervene in, produce, and study pornography, they can radically alter its formations and meanings. At the core of the book is the question: Can porn coexist with the principles of feminism? No matter how one ultimately adjudicates this question, The Feminist Porn Book leaves no doubt about the inherent value in the inquiry itself.”— Melissa Harris-Perry, author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

“Finally the time is right for feminist porn! This stunning collection by academics and artists in dialogue accounts for the massive changes in technology, erotics, modes of spectatorship, and embodied identities which impact the world of pornography. As this volume demonstrates, we are now far from the sex wars of the 1980s, the sex panics of the 1990s, and well into a new era of erotic representation. In order to make sense of new and emergent worlds of desiring bodies, trans-femininities and trans-masculinities, transgressive racial performance, and the erotics of disabled bodies, read The Feminist Porn Book, and when you are finished, go out and make some porn!” —Jack Halberstam, author of Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal

“The Feminist Porn Book is a knockout! If this doesn’t sway antiporn feminists to the pro-porn feminist side, I’ll eat my bra. Let’s come together right now!” —Annie Sprinkle, feminist pornographer and eco-sex activist