Susanna Paasonen
Explicit content warning
12/10/18 • 67 min
In this episode, we’re joined one of the most prolific and accomplished scholars in the field of pornography studies, Susanna Paasonen. She is a professor of media studies at the University of Turku in Finland and has written and edited over eight books covering pornography, sex, internet studies, feminism, and affect. Her newest book is Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (MIT Press, 2018), where she explores sex, bodily capacities, appetites, orientations, and connections in terms of play and playfulness. Like many people in the U.S., I discovered her work in 2011 with the publication of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press). It has since become a landmark book within pornography studies due to the way it reorients the conversation around pornography from one centered on censorship, feminism, and the quality of sexual representation, to one trying to account for the various—and hard to quantify ways in which—pornography moves us, not only physically (with feelings of both revulsion and extasy), but affectively (where we find ourselves relating to our own bodies, and other’s bodies in new and different ways). While traditional academic methods of reading moving image texts revolve around notions of sexual, gender, or racial identity, affect theory helps to account for the ways in which social identity isn’t just centered within our race or sexuality, but is, in fact, a part of a wider social assemblage, where our various affective interactions with actors within our social networks dramatically influence the ways we relate to, and understand, ourselves. Affect theory accounts for the ways in which our subjectivity is formed not from our inner-selves, but is a relational force interacting with the body from the outside. Of course, the reason why approaching pornography studies from this perspective is so different from traditional methods is because this perspective frees the genre from needing to affirm or legitimate racial or gender uplift. An affective reading of pornography accounts for the politically incorrect ways in which we interact with the genre. Pleasure, disgust, joy, humiliation, and shame are all affective registers that we tap into when engaging with pornography. The accumulation of these feelings are part of the overall resonance that Susanna is trying to account for in her work. In this interview we talk about her first experience finding porn magazines in a damp Finland forest; the difference between the pornography in Finland and the surrounding Nordic countries; why she thinks Silvan Tomkins and Gilles Deleuze actually work well together, and she explains how she became an expert on bareback gay sex!
More about the phenomenon of “woods porn.”
Susanna’s interview with pornographer Paul Morris.
More about the films of Jan Soldat.
More info about Brandon Arroyo
In this episode, we’re joined one of the most prolific and accomplished scholars in the field of pornography studies, Susanna Paasonen. She is a professor of media studies at the University of Turku in Finland and has written and edited over eight books covering pornography, sex, internet studies, feminism, and affect. Her newest book is Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (MIT Press, 2018), where she explores sex, bodily capacities, appetites, orientations, and connections in terms of play and playfulness. Like many people in the U.S., I discovered her work in 2011 with the publication of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press). It has since become a landmark book within pornography studies due to the way it reorients the conversation around pornography from one centered on censorship, feminism, and the quality of sexual representation, to one trying to account for the various—and hard to quantify ways in which—pornography moves us, not only physically (with feelings of both revulsion and extasy), but affectively (where we find ourselves relating to our own bodies, and other’s bodies in new and different ways). While traditional academic methods of reading moving image texts revolve around notions of sexual, gender, or racial identity, affect theory helps to account for the ways in which social identity isn’t just centered within our race or sexuality, but is, in fact, a part of a wider social assemblage, where our various affective interactions with actors within our social networks dramatically influence the ways we relate to, and understand, ourselves. Affect theory accounts for the ways in which our subjectivity is formed not from our inner-selves, but is a relational force interacting with the body from the outside. Of course, the reason why approaching pornography studies from this perspective is so different from traditional methods is because this perspective frees the genre from needing to affirm or legitimate racial or gender uplift. An affective reading of pornography accounts for the politically incorrect ways in which we interact with the genre. Pleasure, disgust, joy, humiliation, and shame are all affective registers that we tap into when engaging with pornography. The accumulation of these feelings are part of the overall resonance that Susanna is trying to account for in her work. In this interview we talk about her first experience finding porn magazines in a damp Finland forest; the difference between the pornography in Finland and the surrounding Nordic countries; why she thinks Silvan Tomkins and Gilles Deleuze actually work well together, and she explains how she became an expert on bareback gay sex!
More about the phenomenon of “woods porn.”
Susanna’s interview with pornographer Paul Morris.
More about the films of Jan Soldat.
More info about Brandon Arroyo
Previous 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
Next Episode
Who is Pat Rocco?
Pat Rocco is a figure that doesn’t fit easily into pornography’s history. Pat started making films featuring nude male characters in soft core situations just before 1971’s Boys in the Sand, and he continued to purposefully occupy a unique middle ground where his work showcasing tame, but explicit, gay nudity coexisted alongside other films documenting the emerging gay rights movement, wholesome gay romance, and queer sexual politics. Pat used his camera as a form of activism highlighting gay men's varied sexual interests as well as their passions surrounding society’s changing attitudes about homosexuality. In this episode, we explore the legacy of Pat Rocco and try to figure out where he belongs within pornography’s history. This show features Matthew Hipps, who’s a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Iowa, and Bryan Wuest, who is a graduate of UCLA’s PhD program in Cinema and Media Studies. Each of them presented papers about Rocco's films at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in 2018, so I thought it would be great to have them on to talk about the different ways in which they approach his work. This episode has special resonance considering that Rocco would die just seven months after this recording. Matt considers Rocco's travelogue films where he travels to Brazil and Western Europe with a group of gay men to find out what gay life is like outside of the U.S. And Bryan considers how Rocco’s work should be thought of within the history of gay film production. This episode is intended to both spark interest in a figure that isn’t too well known because of the limited exposure his work as received, and to help us expand our ideas about what pornographic culture can be, and how it can help us delve into modes of political activism that we didn’t know were possible.
More info about Bryan.
Bryan’s article: “Defining Homosexual Love Stories: Pat Rocco, Categorization, and the Legitimation of Gay Narrative Film.”
UCLA’s articles about:
“Processing the Pat Rocco Collection”
“Hey Look Me Over: The Films of Pat Rocco” by Whitney Strub
Pat Rocco’s films:
Pat Rocco Dared trailer
Sign of Protest (1970) (a short documentary about the protests surrounding Barney’s Beanery and their “FAGOTS—STAY OUT” sign hanging in their bar.)
Changes (1970)
We Were There (1976)
Harvey Milk’s “Hope” Speech (1978)
Obituary from ONE Archives
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More info about Brandon Arroyo
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