1 Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field

Linda Williams

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1 Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field

Linda Williams
Linda Williams

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1Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy FieldLinda WilliamsThe FieldAcademic 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 por-nography: 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, femi-nist 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 in-tention 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

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1Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy FieldLinda WilliamsThe FieldAcademic 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 por-nography: 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, femi-nist 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 in-tention 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

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