Taormino - The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure

PRAISE FOR THE FEMINIST PORN BOOK

In terms both jarring and harrowing, womens bodies became the terrain on which the 2012 election was fought. That the choices, experiences, and consequences of womens sexual lives became fodder for such poorly informed national conversations is evidence of the pressing need for thoughtful, sex-positive scholarship which centers on womens 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. It 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. These essays are straightforward and informative in ways that are unfortunately rare in the multidecade feminist struggle over porn. Its 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, host of MSNBCs Melissa Harris-Perry

This thrilling anthology brings together scholars, producers, and fans of feminist pornography to define an emerging movement of gender and sexual visionaries, working at the radically inclusive and egalitarian edges of sexual representation. The authors explore an ever-widening range of body types, and a proliferating variety of images, sensations, and feelings. They examine the conditions of production as well as the politics of representation. They show us the new feminist porn as deep playchallenging, exciting, and important.

Lisa Duggan, professor of American studies and gender
and sexuality studies, Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis, New York University

The Feminist Porn Book is a readable and smart must-have for any classroom dealing with sexual representations.

Chuck Kleinhans, co-editor of JUMP CUT:
a review of contemporary media

The Feminist Porn Book finally brings the voices of porn stars and directors into the room so they can speak for themselves. Part academic inquiry, part porn star tell-all, part comprehensive history of the growing influence of women in explicit cinema, The Feminist Porn Book is a brainy and fierce antidote to simplistic antiporn arguments, a love letter to feminists who seize the means of pornographic production and the academics who study them.

Carol Queen, founding director of the Center for Sex and Culture,
and author of Real LiveNude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture

To have writings from so many of the most important creators in feminist porn in one anthology is wonderful. It captures the past, present, and future pioneering of this important film genre.

Shine Louise Houston, director and CEO
of Pink and White Productions

This impressive volume of essays shows that thirty years after the feminist sex wars first erupted, porn is still a hot topic for the womens movement, and for the scholarly study of gender and sexuality. The Feminist Porn Book brings together a potent mix of perspectives from academics, activists, and sex industry workers, while addressing dis/ability, transness, and race/ethnicity.

Susan Stryker, director of the Institute for
LGBT Studies, University of Arizona

Eloquent, smart, passionate, and engagingeach page of The Feminist Porn Book offers a timely reminder of the continued importance of feminist interventions into the politics and production of pornography.

Carol Stabile, director of the Center for the
Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon

In this breakthrough collection, scholars, artists, and producers from across a spectrum of identities serve up profound new insights on making, consuming, and studying porn. This book advances my understanding of how porn works, when it doesnt, and why it matters. The short essay format makes this book ideal for teaching, but its essential reading for anyone insterested in sexual politics or contemporary culture.

Richard Fung, video artist and professor,
Ontario College of Art and Design

The

FEMINIST

PORN

THE POLITICS OF PRODUCING PLEASURE

Edited by

TRISTAN TAORMINO, CELINE PARREAS SHIMIZU,
CONSTANCE PENLEY, AND MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG

Published in 2013 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Introduction copyright 2012 by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young

Selection and compilation copyright 2012 by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young

Individual copyrights retained by contributors.

All rights reserved.

A version of Out of Line: The Sexy Femmegimp Politics of Flaunting It! copyright 2010 by Loree Erickson first appeared in Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader, 3rd Ed., eds. Mindy Stombler et al. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010) 13540.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing February 2013

Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com

Text design by Drew Stevens

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The feminist porn book : the politics of producing pleasure / edited by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young.

1. PornographyPolitical aspects. 2. Feminism. 3. WomenSexual behavior. 4. Sexual freedom. I. Taormino, Tristan, 1971

2012043903

Contents

CONSTANCE PENLEY, CELINE PARREAS SHIMIZU, MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG, and TRISTAN TAORMINO

T he Feminist Porn Book is the first collection to bring together writings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As collaborating editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one porn director who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics and pornography for years. In their criticism, feminist opponents of porn cast pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make sweeping generalizations about its production, its workers, its consumers, and its effects on society. These antiporn feminists respond to feminist pornographers and feminist porn professors in several ways. They accuse us of deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of pornography; they claim we fail to look critically at any porn and hold up all porn as empowering. More typically, they simply dismiss out of hand our ability or authority to make it or study it. But The Feminist Porn Book offers arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be summarily rejected, by providing on-the-ground and well-researched accounts of the politics of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to explore the emergence and significance of a thriving feminist porn movement, and to gather some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography. By putting our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking about the richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a way that helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn industry are doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges.