Introduction

Film studies developed as an academic discipline in the late 1960s—roughly the same time that hard-core pornography emerged from under the counter and into the public sphere in bookstores and movie theaters. In its quest for legitimacy, film studies cast its gaze backward some thirty or forty years, largely focusing on classical Hollywood cinema. After their establishment in the late 1960s in small storefront theaters in the United States, pornographic movies also drew heavily on Hollywood’s past, concentrating on narrative features, building a system largely based on bankable stars, and even mimicking Tinseltown with glitzy premieres for major releases. But even though film studies and pornographic cinema came of age at about the same time, the emerging discipline paid scant attention to adult film. Most academic work on adult movies at that time took place in the social sciences or legal scholarship. Although a few articles appeared in other journals earlier, it was not until 1988 that the first essay to deal exclusively with pornography was published in Cinema Journal.¹

A year later, everything changed with the publication of Linda Williams’s groundbreaking book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” ² Hard Core looked at pornography as a genre with its own distinct conventions and audience expectations—and served as a key intellectual intervention in the “porn wars” that had grown through the mid-1970s and into the 1980s as fundamentalist Christians joined with some feminists to rally against pornography as, respectively, a threat to traditional values and a manifestation of patriarchal oppression. Notwithstanding the contributions of earlier work, Williams’s book invited scholars to look at movies made for sexual arousal in a serious way. Articles in publications such as Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Jump Cut, and Velvet Light Trap multiplied through the 1990s and 2000s, as did monographs and edited collections. Papers on adults-only material also increased at conferences, no longer consigned to one-off events.

In the inaugural issue of the journal Porn Studies in 2014, Williams notes how the study of adult cinema has accrued its own sense of history as a subfield of film and media studies and is no longer in the perpetual state of “emergence” correlative to pornography’s culturally suspect status.³ While the movement to reclaim adult cinema as a worthy object of study has been partially won (although scholars may still be pigeonholed as their university’s “porn person” for working in this area), a major reason for the subfield’s provisional coalescence has been the difficulty of historicizing such a poorly documented and preserved corpus. Most scholars would be rightly skeptical of peers or filmgoers who dismissed any popular genre with a grand “seen one, seen them all” gesture or reduced a whole genre’s appeal to one spectatorial purpose—yet this stigma against adult cinema has proved difficult to shake without a detailed accounting of historical diversity in production, representation, exhibition, distribution, and reception practices, not to mention sexual orientation and taste. As a corollary to pornography’s reputation as an open secret (existing in the cultural shadows, widely viewed but seldom discussed in serious and dispassionate ways), adult cinema has been too often regarded as monolithic and largely interchangeable, a mass with little historical variation—but this presumption is precisely what the new wave of adult film historiography actively challenges.

At the 2014 SCMS conference in Chicago, Eric Schaefer called for the formation of the Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group (SIG), citing the critical mass of scholarship that had developed. The mission of the SIG would be to “provide a forum for scholars working on adult film history to collaborate, share information and archival sources, debate issues within the field, and promote high caliber research”; to advocate for preservation of adult films; and to be “a liaison with scholars from other fields and other professional organizations.”⁴ The SIG is now thriving and continuing to grow.

The decision to eschew a name for the SIG like “Porn Studies” in favor of “Adult Film” was strategic, because as Walter Kendrick observed, “pornography names an argument, not a...