Grad Student Roundtable
Explicit content warning
08/09/18 • 89 min
In this episode we’re trying something different! This is our first “roundtable” episode featuring four guests. And instead of talking with established scholars in the field, we’re actually talking with four up-and-coming graduate students who will soon be making their mark within pornography studies. As pornography studies grows within academe, it is becoming increasingly possible to build a support network of fellow students that share your interests. And considering how much resistance there still is toward studying pornography, these networks can be a crucial part of one’s survival throughout graduate school. This episode is our small attempt at fostering more supportive networks. In this episode you’ll hear stories about professors urging students not to pursue the study of pornography, and even hear about professors that are openly hostile to students working on this topic. Also, studying pornography within different cultural contexts means that students often have to utilize alternative methodologies, which typical film departments are sometimes ill-equipped to accommodate. Like when your research leads you to branch off into urban history and city-planning, or when you have to use anthropology methods to find out how pornography is thought about within different transnational contexts. These are the type of issues we’ll be talking about with our guests in this episode: John Paul Stadler of Duke University, Darshana Sreedhar Mini of the University of Southern California, Ben Strassfeld from the University of Michigan, and Madita Oeming of Paderborn University in Germany. Each of them has their own compelling story about how they found themselves studying this topic, and harrowing tales about how they’ve endured through the suspicion and anger that is aimed at pornography scholars both within America and outside it. Be sure to keep listening after the interview is over because there’s a little bonus where Madita gives all of us a lesson in German dirty talk. Believe me, you’re not going to want to miss that!
More info about John’s book PREHISTORIC
John’s Twitter
Madita’s Twitter
Ben’s Twitter
Darshana’s Twitter
Darshana talking about her SCMS Student Writing Award for the essay “The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the Precarious Stardom of Shakeela.”
In this episode we’re trying something different! This is our first “roundtable” episode featuring four guests. And instead of talking with established scholars in the field, we’re actually talking with four up-and-coming graduate students who will soon be making their mark within pornography studies. As pornography studies grows within academe, it is becoming increasingly possible to build a support network of fellow students that share your interests. And considering how much resistance there still is toward studying pornography, these networks can be a crucial part of one’s survival throughout graduate school. This episode is our small attempt at fostering more supportive networks. In this episode you’ll hear stories about professors urging students not to pursue the study of pornography, and even hear about professors that are openly hostile to students working on this topic. Also, studying pornography within different cultural contexts means that students often have to utilize alternative methodologies, which typical film departments are sometimes ill-equipped to accommodate. Like when your research leads you to branch off into urban history and city-planning, or when you have to use anthropology methods to find out how pornography is thought about within different transnational contexts. These are the type of issues we’ll be talking about with our guests in this episode: John Paul Stadler of Duke University, Darshana Sreedhar Mini of the University of Southern California, Ben Strassfeld from the University of Michigan, and Madita Oeming of Paderborn University in Germany. Each of them has their own compelling story about how they found themselves studying this topic, and harrowing tales about how they’ve endured through the suspicion and anger that is aimed at pornography scholars both within America and outside it. Be sure to keep listening after the interview is over because there’s a little bonus where Madita gives all of us a lesson in German dirty talk. Believe me, you’re not going to want to miss that!
More info about John’s book PREHISTORIC
John’s Twitter
Madita’s Twitter
Ben’s Twitter
Darshana’s Twitter
Darshana talking about her SCMS Student Writing Award for the essay “The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the Precarious Stardom of Shakeela.”
Previous Episode
Lynn Comella
Professor Lynn Comella joins us to talk about her books New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law (co-edited with Shira Tarrant, 2015) and Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure (2017). The reach of Vibrator Nation’s readership has extended beyond the typical academic circles and has resonated with a mainstream audience due to its easy reading style, and because it details a history of feminist sex shops that the public was obviously eager to read about. The history of these shops is a fascinating one and one that has literally changed the ways in which we think about the female orgasm within our post-sexual revolution era. The story of these stores isn’t one of capitalist opportunism, it’s actually a story about revolutionary feminist sexual educators who wanted to spread their sexual knowledge to a starving female public looking for ways to expand their sexual pleasure. In short, our understanding of sexual history would be incomplete without the information contained in this book. Pornography also has a role to play in this history. We talk about how pornography worked its way into these sex shops after owners long resisted their inclusion. And we also talk about the movies produced by the legendary San Francisco sex shop Good Vibrations. This is a history that you’re not going to want to miss!
Learn more about Lynn on her website.
Vibrator Nation book review in the New York Times.
Lynn’s interview with The Atlantic.
Sex Out Loud episode where Tristan Taormino interviews Joani Blank.
Vibrator Nation Instagram.
Lynn’s Twitter.
“Ten Feminist Sex Shops You’re Going to Want to Add to Your Wishlist”
Next Episode
Canadian Content: The Adult Film Industry & its Canadian Contexts
Believe it or not, Canada might be the most important country determining what porn you’re watching today! I say that because the most popular porn sites in the world were created, and continue to operate, in Canada. PornHub, YouPorn, RedTube, and Brazzers just to name a few. While Canada has an extensive porn history and shapes the ways in which we consume and distribute porn today, oftentimes it’s overlooked in favor of its flashier cousin in the south known as the San Fernando Valley. This episode looks to change all of that with a panel that was recorded at the 2018 Society for Cinema & Media Studies in Toronto. This panel features a friend of the show, Professor Peter Alilunas talking about the pornographic history of Toronto’s most famous street, Yonge st. He specifically details the history of a theater on that street known as Cinema 2000. It was a screening room showing pornography on VHS starting in 1969! The second presenter is Cait McKinney. She’s a professor in the department of communication studies at California State University at Northridge. And in her talk, she details the history of a long-lost 1984 film titled Slumber Party. The film was made by a group of radical feminist lesbians. Cait also considers the role that lesbian porn played in the feminist porn wars in the 1980s. A topic that is rarely considered. The third paper is presented by Nikola Stepić. He’s a PhD student in Concordia University’s Humanities Department. And his paper covers how gay pornography shot in Montreal’s Gay Village acted as a type of visual tourism for the neighborhood, attracting people from all over the world, helping make Montreal the gay destination is it today. The final paper is by Patrick Keilty. He’s a Professor at the University of Toronto and his presentation covers the short history of Montreal’s emergence as a global porn capital, followed by a theoretical consideration of the digital interface we as viewers are presented with as we’re surfing these various sites emanating from this city. Here is a link for the pictures from each PowerPoint. Be sure to follow along!
Peter Alilunas: “‘Closed Due to Pressure from the Morality Squad’: The Cinema 2000 and Pornography Regulation in Toronto”
Cait McKinny: “Digitizing Controversies in Toronto’s Lesbian Porn Archives”
Nikola Stepic: “Quebec Exposed: Gay Male Pornography as Virtual Tourism”
Patrick Keilty: “Silicon(e) Valley: Montreal’s Porn Industry”
New York magazine article about the rapid rise of the porn industry in Montreal: “The Geek-Kings of Smut.”
More info about Jon Ronson’s podcast series titled The Butterfly Effect, which details Fabian Thylmann’s role in creating a porn empire in Montreal and more!
More info about Peter’s book Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video.
Cait’s work with the LGBTQ History Digital Collaboratory
Cait’s No More Pot Lucks article: “Out of the Basement and on to the Internet: Digitizing Oral History Tapes at the Lesbian Herstory Archives.”
Cait’s Drain Mag article: “Can a Computer Remember AIDS?”
Nikola’s HuffPost article on the porntastic movie The Canyons: “Stuck in the Canyons.”
Article about the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection run by Patrick Keilty
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