Porn Studies: an introduction

Abstract

Academic journals don't usually grab popular media attention. However, the press release announcing the launch of Porn Studies attracted a great deal of interest across the media in summer 2013. On balance, the announcement of the journal's launch was largely positive. There were, of course, attempts to poke fun at the silliness of academic investigations of pornography in keeping with the perennial accusations of the superficiality of media studies, as well as more negative coverage questioning the need for a publication of this kind. How, then, to introduce this first issue of a journal that has already garnered more news interest prior to its launch than most academic publications receive over decades? We want to start out with a statement of why we think a journal in porn studies is needed and what we hope Porn Studies will become. Recent years have seen a resurgence of public discussions (and scares) about a series of pornography-related topics, perhaps most notably the expansions of pornography across the internet, its putative links to rape and sexual violence, and erotic life-styling or the oft-cited ‘sexualization’ of culture. These have become over time topics of intense public scrutiny and debate – sometimes spilling into moral, legal or administrative action. At the same time, the same issues have become the focus of increasing scholarly concern. Pornography is now of interest for academics working across a range of disciplines. Historians and art and literary scholars turned their attention to sexually explicit works during the 1960s. The late 1970s and 1980s saw the publication of groundbreaking work such as film scholar Linda Williams’ (Citation1989) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. By the time the second edition of her book was published in 1999, she could point to pornography studies as an emergent field; the beginning of critical academic discussion about pornography, moving away from a ‘porn debate’ centred on disagreements about pornography's harmfulness. From this point on we can trace the gradual development of research focused on the history of pornography, the analysis of its production and consumption, its aesthetics, its significance for particular audiences, and its place in contemporary culture.