Dear Family First: Academics Study Porn
15 10 2004…the Porn issue of M/C: Journal of Media and Culture is now available online. It was co-edited by Andrew King and me.
EditorialThe history of public discourse (and in many cases, academic publishing) on pornography is, notoriously, largely polemical and polarised. There is perhaps no other media form that has been so relentlessly the centre of what boils down to little more than arguments ?for? or ?against?; most famously, on the basis of the oppression, dominance or liberation of sexual subjectivities. These polarised debates leave much conceptual space for researchers to explore: discussions of pornography often lack specificity (when speaking of porn, what exactly do we mean? Which genre? Which markets?); assumptions (eg. about exactly how the sexualised ?white male body? functions culturally, or what the ?uses? of porn actually might be) can be buried; and empirical opportunities (how porn as media industry connects to innovation and the rest of the mediasphere) are missed. In this issue, we have tried to create and populate such a space, not only for the rethinking of some of our core assumptions about pornography, but also for the treatment of pornography as a bona fide, even while contested and problematic, segment of the media and cultural industries, linked economically and symbolically to other media forms. [continued]
Well done Jean! I immediately zoomed in on the suicidegirls article because I have been waiting for someone to give that phenomenon a good go. Although collaborative eroticism as business model is interesting enough, I can’t help but think there is still so much more that can be said in terms of media and culture…
Couldn’t agree more - I loved the phrase “collaborative eroticism” - hopefully we will see more detailed writing on the suicidegirls now that the first pass has been done? and of course I am interested in the activation of self by the suicide girls, not to mention the marketing “niche”, especially when read in relation to shifts in the music industry recently…the “indie porn” genre is fascinating.