Through our discussions, which were originally occasioned by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group where the three of us met, it became evident to us that adult media allows for a confluence of different ideas, sensibilities, and political perspectives even as it represents a point of departure from more traditional objects of study. The three co-editors of this issue all study porn from radically different perspectives: Darshana researches transnational porn cultures with a specific focus on South Asia, Nikola employs a queer historicist approach to adult media within a larger discourse on urban masculinities, and Rebecca studies the cultures and technologies of digital pornography. Porn scholars routinely attend conferences where fellow attendees are embarrassed by their topics, and stories abound of young scholars who are advised to repackage their work in order to be taken more seriously or seem more “hireable.” In other words, assumptions exist that pornography studies are either too limited in scope or too contentious for the academy. The growth and solidification of porn studies notwithstanding, the field maintains a marginal status in academia.
The growth of the discipline has been supported through debates and disagreements that allow for teasing out radical ethics and politics which, in turn, enable certain reading practices and representational schemas to persist. As a proliferating subfield of sexuality studies, porn studies has become a larger framework to understand sexually explicit media.
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