Home | Best Seller | FAQ | Contact Us
Browse
Art & Photography
Biographies & Autobiography
Body,Mind & Health
Business & Economics
Children's Book
Computers & Internet
Cooking
Crafts,Hobbies & Gardening
Entertainment
Family & Parenting
History
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Detective
Nonfiction
Professional & Technology
Reference
Religion
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports & Outdoors
Travel & Geography
   Book Info

enlarge picture

Porn Studies  
Author: Linda Williams (Editor)
ISBN: 0822333120
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review

Book Description
In her pioneering book Hard Core, Linda Williams put moving-image pornography on the map of contemporary scholarship with her pathbreaking analysis of the most popular and enduring of all film and video genres. Now, fifteen years later, she showcases the next generation of critical thinking about pornography and signals new directions for study and teaching. Porn Studies resists the tendency to situate pornography as the outer limit of what can be studied and discussed. With revenues totaling between ten and fourteen billion dollars annually—more than the combined revenues of professional football, basketball, and baseball—visual, hard-core pornography is a central feature of American popular culture. It is time, Williams contends, for scholars to recognize this and give pornography a serious and extended analysis. The essays in this volume move beyond feminist debates and distinctions between a "good" erotica and a "bad" hard core. Contributors examine varieties of pornography from the tradition of the soft-core pin-up through the contemporary hard-core tradition of straight, gay, and lesbian videos and dvds to the burgeoning phenomenon of pornography on the Internet. They explore, as examples of the genre, individual works as divergent as The Starr Report, the pirated Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson honeymoon video, and explicit Japanese "ladies’ comics" consumed by women. They also probe difficult issues such as the sexualization of race and class and the relationship of pornography to the avant-garde. To take pornography seriously as an object of analysis also means teaching it. Porn Studies thus includes a useful annotated bibliography of readings and archival sources important to the study of pornography as a cultural form. Contributors. Heather Butler, Rich Cante, Jake Gerli, Minette Hillyer, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Despina Kakoudaki, Franklin Melendez, Ara Osterweil, Zabet Patterson, Constance Penley, Angelo Restivo, Eric Schaefer, Michael Sicinski, Deborah Shamoon, Maria St. John, Tom Waugh, Linda Williams

About the Author
Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric and Director of the Program in Film Studies and of the Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson; Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"; and Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film.




Porn Studies

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her pioneering book Hard Core, Linda Williams put moving-image pornography on the map of contemporary scholarship with her pathbreaking analysis of the most popular and enduring of all film and video genres. Now, fifteen years later, she showcases the next generation of critical thinking about pornography and signals new directions for study and teaching. Porn Studies resists the tendency to situate pornography as the outer limit of what can be studied and discussed. With revenues totaling between ten and fourteen billion dollars annually -- more than the combined revenues of professional football, basketball, and baseball -- visual, hard-core pornography is a central feature of American popular culture. It is time, Williams contends, for scholars to recognize this and give pornography a serious and extended analysis. Contributors examine varieties of pornography from the tradition of the soft-core pin-up through the contemporary hard-core tradition of straight, gay, and lesbian videos and dvds to the burgeoning phenomenon of pornography on the Internet. They explore, as examples of the genre, individual works as divergent as The Starr Report, the pirated Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson honeymoon video, and explicit Japanese "ladies' comics" consumed by women. They also probe difficult issues such as the sexualization of race and class and the relationship of pornography to the avant-garde. To take pornography seriously as an object of analysis also means teaching it. Porn Studies thus includes a useful annotated bibliography of readings and archival sources important to the study of pornography as a cultural form.

     



Home | Private Policy | Contact Us
@copyright 2001-2005 ReadingBee.com