Porn Archives

by Tim Dean (Editor), Steven Ruszczycky (Editor), David Squires (Editor)

While sexually explicit writing and art have been around for millennia, pornography—as an aesthetic, moral, and juridical category—is a modern invention. The contributors to Porn Archives explore how the production and proliferation of pornography has been intertwined with the emergence of the archive as a conceptual and physical site for preserving, cataloguing, and transmitting documents and artifacts. By segregating and regulating access to sexually explicit material, archives have helped constitute pornography as a distinct genre. As a result, porn has become a site for the production of knowledge, as well as the production of pleasure.

The essays in this collection address the historically and culturally varied interactions between porn and the archive. Topics range from library policies governing access to sexually explicit material to the growing digital archive of "war porn," or eroticized combat imagery; and from same-sex amputee porn to gay black comic book superhero porn. Together the pieces trace pornography as it crosses borders, transforms technologies, consolidates sexual identities, and challenges notions of what counts as legitimate forms of knowledge. The collection concludes with a valuable resource for scholars: a list of pornography archives held by institutions around the world.

Contributors. Jennifer Burns Bright, Eugenie Brinkema, Joseph Bristow, Robert Caserio, Ronan Crowley, Tim Dean, Robert Dewhurst, Lisa Downing, Frances Ferguson, Loren Glass, Harri Kahla, Marcia Klotz, Prabha Manuratne, Mireille Miller-Young, Nguyen Tan Hoang, John Paul Ricco, Steven Ruszczycky, Melissa Schindler, Darieck Scott, Caitlin Shanley, Ramon Soto-Crespo, David Squires, Linda Williams

Genres: Sexuality, Nonfiction, Queer Studies, Queer, Philosophy, History, Film

514 pages, Paperback

First published November 26, 2014

About the author

Tim Dean joined the University Buffalo faculty in 2002, after several years teaching at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and University of Washington (Seattle). A former British civil servant, he was educated at University of East Anglia (BA in American Studies), Brandeis University (junior year abroad), and Johns Hopkins University (MA and PhD).
He wrote an undergraduate dissertation on Gary Snyder and a doctoral dissertation on Hart Crane. He also has been a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

His research and teaching interests include Anglophone modernism, poetry and poetics, queer theory, gender theory, aesthetic theory, and psychoanalytic theory.

Reviews

[H. Givens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any anthology is a mixed bag, collecting the boring and the fascinating, the relevant and the "maybe for future research." This one is super good and important though. An excellent introduction into the meaning and issues of archiving porn, and then a parade of essays on different sources, genres, problems, approaches, etc. Really a must-have for sex historians.

[6655321 · Rating 4 out of 5]

outside of two pieces on war porn (which tbh, somewhat stretch what you can reasonably talk about in a conference on pornography and feel incongruous and if i wanted to go all theory nerd i would talk about Wittgenstein on games and how this is mistaking category for similarity but i think they also could be useful for someone). Honestly, the fact that i read every article (and one on Zizek, Lacan, Bacon, and Satyrs really tested my patience with navel gazing pretentious wank) is i think a mark of quality especially because it opens up a lot of questions on other registers (which i think Dean does really well in the closing chapter on gay amputee porn).

[Nels Highberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I keep going back and forth on the rating, and I landed on two stars (2.5 if I could) because I found a lot of articles fascinating, but the more I read, the more the idea of the archive became secondary. In the title, Archives may be the now, and Porn may be the adjective, but this collection turns out to be mostly about porn and less about archives. At times, it seemed a bit obvious that a sizable number of articles were written by graduate students in the same course not because of quality but because of the citation of similar references and theoretical approaches. It's not bad. It's just more general than I expected.