Hard Core: Power, Pleasure
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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===Prehistory: The "Frenzy of the Visible"=== | ===Prehistory: The "Frenzy of the Visible"=== | ||
- | [[Eadweard Muybridge]] prurient interests - [[Albert Goldbarth]]'s poem "The Origin of Porno" - | + | [[Eadweard Muybridge]]'s prurient interests - [[Albert Goldbarth]]'s poem "The Origin of Porno" - |
===The Stag Film: Genital Show and Genital Event=== | ===The Stag Film: Genital Show and Genital Event=== |
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Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989) is an academic study of pornography by American scholar Linda Williams that details and analyzes the history and forms of pornographic films.
Amongst other things Linda Williams concludes that facials are a fetish or a perversion. She states "The money shot is thus an obvious perversion -in the literal sense of the term, as a swerving away from more "direct" forms of genital engagement- of the tactile sexual connection."
From the publisher
- "In academic prose, film professor Williams of the University of California offers a graphic analysis of hard-core porno movies such as Deep Throat, as well as early, anonymous stag flicks. She finds that the newer, "softer" X-rated rental videos "show a more genuinely adult quality" than earlier videos. She ponders the "utopian problem-solving intent" of the hard-core genre and makes specious comparisons between blue movies, Hollywood musicals and films like Dirty Dancing. Sadomasochistic porn films, she claims, let viewers experience "a clearer confrontation with the oscillating poles of our gendered identities and the role of power in them." A critic whose professed goal is to understand film pornography, and who opposes those who would censor it, Williams begins this obfuscating study by analyzing the portrayal of women in the 19th-century kinetoscope, prototype of the motion-picture projector.
TOC of the 1999 edition
For the 1999 edition, Williams has written a new preface and a new epilogue, "On/scenities," illustrated with 26 photographs, and has added a supplementary bibliography.
Speaking Sex: "The Indiscreet Jewels"
The Indiscreet Jewels refer to the vagina in the famous novel by Denis Diderot. Le Sexe qui parle is mentioned and Michel Foucault's 'scientia sexualis' enters the stage. The sub-chapter
The Elusive Genre of Pornography
This section provides an overview of the historiography of pornography and the problem of its definition. This overview starts with H. Montgomery Hyde's A History of Pornography (1964), moves on to Susan Sontag's '"The Pornographic Imagination" (1969), Peter Michelson' The Aesthetics of Pornography (1971) and George Steiner's "Night Words". It ends with Walter Kendrick's The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (1987).
The Meese Commission and Women Against Pornography
Meese Commission: "Pornography is degrading to women ... Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice." - Antipornography viewpoints.
The Anti-Censorship Feminists
Gayle Rubin - Sex-positive feminism
Prehistory: The "Frenzy of the Visible"
Eadweard Muybridge's prurient interests - Albert Goldbarth's poem "The Origin of Porno" -
The Stag Film: Genital Show and Genital Event
Fetishism and Hard Core: Marx, Freud, and the "Money Shot"
Generic Pleasures: Number and Narrative
Hard-Core Utopias: Problems and Solutions
Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography
Sequels and Re-Visions: "A Desire of One's Own"
See also