Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field

Linda Williams

The Field

Academic fields are gardens that need to be tended. Sometimes they grow and flourish; sometimes they dry up and die. For the last ten years many of us working in pornography studies have labored under the belief that we were building an important field that deserved academic legitimacy. There was often an evangelical fervor about our work. Against the odds, we tried to build a field that would be as much like any other as possible. I want to take a cool look at the extent to which this has actually happened. What would we need to really make such a field instead of, as I think has too often happened, to only gesture toward it?

In 1989 I published my first—and last—single-authored book about pornography: Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and "the Frenzy of the Visible." It was hardly the first book on the topic, but I believe that it was the first academic, feminist book to be interested in the form and history, the power and pleasure, of moving-image pornography. In writing this book I had absolutely no intention of spawning a field. I simply wanted to understand more about these troubling, fascinating, and provoking films, just then turning into the more ubiquitous videos that actually made my study of them possible. How could I understand these pornographies as part of our popular culture, as genres like other film genres? What was their address to us as spectators; what was their history?

I did not, at that time, seek a place for what would come to be called "porn studies" in the academy. In 1989 that seemed unthinkable. However, ten years later, after publishing an updated second edition, I began to think that it might be possible. For me it would be a subfield of film and video studies; for others it might be a subfield of history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies, or the then-developing queer studies. It would be an interdisciplinary field, and it would gain acceptance in the various welcoming places where it could grow and build knowledge.

By 2004, when I edited a volume, titled Porn Studies, by other scholars and some of my own students, I was convinced that such a field was not only possible but inevitable. Indeed, the very blunt and familiar title of that anthology would seem to have signaled that such a field had already arrived. Yes, it was possible to put aside the "tired debates" between procensorship, antipornography feminism and anticensorship, "sex-positive" feminism. The field that was mapped by my anthology was also mapped by the earlier wide-ranging 1999 anthology Porn 101: Eroticism, Pornography, and the First Amendment, and later by Peter Lehman's Pornography: Film and Culture (2006).

I look back at my own anthology, Porn Studies, because it is fairly typical of the field mapping carried out by these others. But with the vantage of hindsight I now introduce a more critical perspective than the enthusiasm with which I first introduced it. What has flourished and what hasn't? The anthology is purposely long (496 pages), as if to impress with the sheer volume of approaches to all kinds of pornography. The first part attempts to introduce the variety of the field. It seemed important at the time that the field not be limited to the narrow range of heterosexual hard-core films and videos that I had analyzed in Hard Core, but that the field could be located in a lot of unlikely places: for example, in the Starr Report on President Clinton's sexual relations with an intern (see the chapter by Maria St. John), or the home video of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee—a private video that had "gone viral" on the Internet long before such a term even existed (Minette Hillyer). There is also the example of hard-core Japanese pornographic comics marketed to women (Deborah Shamoon). Finally, this part offers a case study and analysis of amateur online porn sites (Zabet Patterson). If this part succeeds in introducing the variety of pornographies, it perhaps is guilty of ignoring what still remained the mainstream of hard-core heterosexual video pornography, whether obtained on DVD or delivered online, thus skewing the impression of what pornography was in its most dominant form. As we shall see, this is part of futurist rhetoric.

Part II, "Gay, Lesbian, and Homosocial Pornographies," is an attempt to map the boundaries of nonheterosexual pornographies, and it primarily focuses on moments in the history of gay and lesbian pornography. It included a chapter by Thomas Waugh on the homosocial reception conditions of the classical American stag film; a chapter on the culture and aesthetics of all-male moving-image pornography that focuses on a key film from 1977 (Rich Cante and Angelo Restivo); a pioneering chapter on the emergence of lesbian pornography from 1968 to 2000 (Heather Butler); plus a queer reading of a straight work of pornography by a gay director (Jake Gerli). The first and last chapters foreground the importance of the possible queer context for the reception of ostensibly...