Introduction: Prior Constraints

Most of the publicity around sexual image matters in recent years has focused on professors teaching pornography. This seems to be a perennial topic for slow news days (especially late August) as uninformed reporters troll for sensational quotes, while pundits and Fox talk show hosts fulminate about matters they do not bother to investigate. Yet beyond sensational journalism, everyone who seriously studies the area of sexual representation knows that publishing one s research often involves problems. The object of study can fall within advertising or art history, gender studies or medical imaging, production codes or government censorship, ratings systems or FCC rulings, Internet pornography or performance art. But expanded control under intellectual property law, attempts to restrict fair use, new legislation, and politically charged enforcement by administrators courting favor with ultraconservative and fundamentalist constituents produce a sometimes treacherous field. The cumulative effect of restrictions on publishing images is to constrain scholarship, to limit the circulation of ideas and information, and to inhibit the development of a comprehensive understanding of past history, current practices, and future policy. The purpose of this In Focus section is to examine the current state of sexual representation scholarship and the problems raised in terms of publishing visual material as part of the research.

Given the Internet s global reach, new technologies of image creation, and the ease with which contemporary image search engines find all sorts of things, it is clear that we are in a strange new digital world. Anyone with Internet access and a search engine can easily find a vast range of sexual representations, licit and illicit, indecent and obscene, soft core and hard core, legal and probably illegal. And that is just the free stuff.

The range of images covered under sexual representation has effectively expanded in recent years with a broadening of the field of media studies and technological changes in media. The avant garde has always been involved with taboo breaking sexuality as seen in canonical short films such as Paul Sharits T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969) and Carolee Schneeman s Fuses (1967) as well as art cinema dramatic features such as Oshima s The Realm of the Senses (1976) and Pasolini s Salo (1975). Subscription cable TV has long featured soft-core erotic thrillers as well as full frontal documentaries such as HBO s successful Real Sex series. Basic cable includes the History Channel series on the history of sex, while E! s Dr. 90210 shows plastic surgery on private parts (with teasing digital blurs). Pushed to compete, broadcast TV has moved into stronger topics and more explicit display (not very subtly authenticated with digital blurs over breasts and genitals). In new media commercialism, flashing body parts such as in the Girls Gone Wild series is matched by amateur contributions on social networking sites such as YouTube and LiveVideo. Celebrity culture increasingly revolves around explicit images with a Google image search instantly producing multiple results displaying Janet Jackson s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, Britney Spears s repeated forays to nightclubs without underwear, and Paris Hilton s lovemaking sessions. Clever computer game customizers create flesh leotards for their Sims who then engage in sexual activities. Digital 3-D modeling programs have advanced to produce relatively plausible photorealistic characters who can then be cast into still and moving images activities (cross-generational incest seems to be a favorite), joining hentai and anime depictions of taboo sex.

As a broad cultural phenomenon, pornography can be discussed without visual examples, but close textual analysis is one of the central procedures of contemporary media analysis, as evidenced by such successful introductory textbooks as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson s Film Art: An Introduction and Jeremy Butler s Television: Critical Methods and Applications. Recently I published an article on the change from theatrical film to home video pornography in an anthology that would have no images.¹ Without visual support, I had to forego a discussion of changes in visual style, which I judge to be a significant aspect of the transition. The basis of modern scholarly analysis (as opposed to belles-lettres subjectivity) is, of course, the...