Critical Climaxes

Porn Studies. Edited by Linda Williams. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. vii + 516 pp.

In the introduction to Porn Studies Linda Williams laments the excision of the "exuberant visuals" from the proceedings of the World Conference on Pornography in 1998 (4), claiming for the current collection the distinction of including illustrations (along with a serious annotated bibliography on porn, as well as information on how to obtain hard core materials). Given the "on/scenity" of those images (3), one question the prurient observer might pose of this book is, can I get off on it? The answer is, I think, almost, though I am not sure that the visuals will do it. They are sometimes crucially necessary (as in Despina Kakoudaki's essay "Pinup: The American Secret Weapon in World War II," which carefully reads the World War II pinups by Alberto Vargas and George Petty in Esquire and elsewhere), but sometimes they seem gratuitous and are curiously unsatisfying. The descriptions, however, along with the tease of visuals, nearly do the trick. This means that even for those whose interest in the topic consists of finding out more about what to watch and where to get it but whose habits preclude less respectable methods of research, Porn Studies performs its pedagogical mission.

The anthology intersperses articles by graduate students with those of young scholars and established people in the field of film and visual culture; by itself, this fact brings both originality and freshness to the anthology, which highlights a whole new Berkeley generation's way of approaching sexuality, feminism, racialization, and the study of media. Though some may be leery of the unevenness that such a gathering might produce, the essays are in fact learned, thorough, and well written. The reader is introduced to what sounds like—but is not yet, according to Williams—a serious, well-developed field of study combining the methods of popular cultural analysis, film history, queer theory, critical race studies, genre theory, close literary reading, and cultural studies. Both the breadth of coverage and the analytic detail are impressive, in articles ranging from popular and popularized nonfiction genres of porn exemplified by the Starr Report and the film Pam and Tommy Lee: Hardcore and Uncensored; to porn's subgeneric spin-offs, such as dyke and gay porn and Japanese pornographic comics for women; to race and class relations (one section of the book includes three particularly strong essays on Brandon Lee, by Nguyen Tan Hoang; interracial porn, by Williams; and white trash aesthetics, by Constance Penley); to film history; and to porn's connection to avant-gardist art movements (one essay examines Andy Warhol's Blow Job). Most of the pieces are sustained critical readings rather than theoretical explorations (though most, when they are not straightforwardly historical, are theoretically informed), and this fact considerably strengthens the volume's case for taking porn seriously as a phenomenon worthy of critical investigation.

Porn Studies will inspire academics to tackle the topic of pornography in courses on popular culture, cultural studies, and the history of U.S. film and visual culture (most, though not all, of the essays concern U.S.-based porn). The only drawback of the collection, which is designed as a teaching aid, among other things, is that while there may be compelling reasons to examine porn's visual elaborations, it seems in line with visual culture's predominance to offer a study of nearly exclusively visual porn media under the general rubric of "porn studies." I would have liked more text—and perhaps even music—submitted as primary material, especially given our inability (whether in the form of real censorship or internalized academic etiquette) to exhibit the range of visuals that some of these analytic studies would require. In addition to the accident of disciplinary provenance, it may be that because there is a rich and critically dense tradition of textual porn studies already in place, a collection that includes texts is less urgent—though...