| SEX WORKER VISIONS II - CLOSING RECEPTION | Jul. 25th, 2007 @ 11:03 pm |
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SEX WORKER VISIONS II - CLOSING RECEPTION
On ebay: http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZjellym0nkey
Or at our closing cocktail reception this Thursday, July 26th
Join curator Audacia Ray and the rest of the $pread team at Arena Studios for a closing cocktail reception for our annual art show, Sex Worker Visions II. It's your last chance to see the art before the show comes down on July 28th. If you missed your chance to bid on a decorated dildo at the art show opening, more will be available on the night, along with the new issue of $pread!
All art is for sale and the ebay auction will close during the reception, so come prepared to bid!
Thursday July 26th, 7-9pm. Arena Studios, 407 Broome St., Suite 7A, NYC. This event is FREE.
If you can't make this event but would like to see the show before it closes, contact Arena Studios at 212.889.1591 or email Audacia Ray at audacia@spreadmagazine.org. |
| netporn studies reader | Jul. 19th, 2007 @ 01:32 pm |
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C'LICK ME: A NETPORN STUDIES READER
Edited by Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Matteo Pasquinelli
Editorial Assistance: Geert Lovink, Sabine Niederer
Copy Editing: Wietske Maas - Design: Kernow Craig
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures
Supported by: Paradiso, Amsterdam
ISBN: 978-90-78146-03-2
Order a copy of this book by sending an email to:
info@networkcultures.org
A PDF of this publication can be downloaded for free at [NOT SAFE FOR
WORK!]
low-res, 2MB: http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/24.pdf
hi-res, 9MB: http://www.networkcultures.org/clickme/pdf/
clickmeReader_9MB.pdf
C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader is an anthology that collects the
best materials of two years debate: from The Art and Politics of
Netporn conference held in 2005 in Amsterdam to the 2007 C'Lick Me
festival in Paradiso, Amsterdam. C'Lick Me opens the field of
'Internet pornology'. Based on non-conventional approaches, mixing
academics, artists and activists, the C'Lick Me Reader reclaims a
critical post-enthusiastic, post-censorship perspective on netporn, a
dark field that has been dominated thus far by dodgy commerce and
filtering. The C'Lick Me reader covers the rise of the netporn
society from Usenet underground to the blogosphere, analyses economic
data and search engines traffic, compares sex work with the work of
fantasy, disability and accessibility. The C'Lick Me reader also
expands the no tion of digital desire, and smashes the predicatable
boundaries of porn debates, depicting a broader libidinal spectrum
from fetish subcultures to digital alienation, from code pornography
to war pornography. The reader concludes by re-contextualising the
queer discourse into a post-porn scenario.
Contributions by: Adam Arvidsson, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Manuel
Bonik, Mikita Brottman, Florian Cramer, Samantha Culp, Barbara
DeGenevieve, Mark Dery, Michael Goddard, Stewart Home, Katrien
Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Julie Levin Russo, Regina Lynn, Sergio
Messina, Mireille Miller-Young, Tim Noonan, Francesco Macarone
Palmieri aka Warbear, Matteo Pasquinelli, Audacia Ray, Andreas
Schaale, Nishant Shah, Tim Stuettgen, Matthew Zook.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
SECTION 1: THE RISE OF THE NETPORN SOCIETy
Regina Lynn
Sex Drive: Where Sex and Tech Come Together
Mark Dery
Naked Lunch: Talking Realcore with Sergio Messina
Nishant Shah
PlayBlog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace
Audacia Ray
Sex on the Open Market: Sex Workers Harness the Power of the Internet
Adam Arvidsson
Netporn: the Work of Fantasy in the Information Society
Manuel Bonik and Andreas Schaale
The Naked Truth: Internet Eroticism and the Search
Tim Noonan
Netporn, Sexuality and the Politics of Disability:
A Catalyst for Access, Inclusion and Acceptance?
Matthew Zook
Report on the Location of the Internet Adult Industry
SECTION 2: DIGITAL DESIRE BEYOND PORNOGRAPHY
Mark Dery
Paradise Lust: Pornotopia Meets the Culture Wars
Matteo Pasquinelli
Warporn! Warpunk: Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime
Florian Cramer and Stewart Home
Pornographic Coding
Florian Cramer
Sodom Blogging: Alternative Porn and Aesthetic Sensibility
Mikita Brottman
Nightmares in Cyberspace: Urban Legends, Moral Panics and the Dark
Side of the Net
Michael Goddard
BBW: Techno-archaism, Excessive Corporeality and Network Sexuality
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
The Obsession of the (Vanishing) Body
SECTION 3: NETPORN AFTER THE QUEER BOOM
Mireille Miller-young
Sexy and Smart: Black Women and the Politics of Self-Authorship in
Netporn
Katrien Jacobs
Porn Arousal and Gender Morphing in the Twilight Zone
Barbara DeGenevieve
Ssspread.com: The Hot Bods of Queer Porn
Julie Levin Russo
'The Real Thing': Reframing Queer Pornography for Virtual Spaces
Samantha Culp
First Porn Son: Asian-man.com and the Golden Porn Revolution
Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka Warbear
21st Century Schizoid Bear: Masculine transitions Through Net
Pornography
Tim Stuttgen
Ten Fragments on a Cartography of Post-Pornographic Politics
BIOGRAPHIES
WEBOGRAPHY
This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution
Non Commercial Non Derivative Works 2.5 Netherlands License. No
article in this reader may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the
author.
We would like to thank all the participants of the conferences 'Art
and Politics of Netporn' (2005) and ‘C’Lick Me’ (2007). A special
thanks to our director, Emilie Randoe, School of Interactive Media,
Amsterdam Polytechnic, for supporting our netporn research programme;
to Pierre Ballings and Maarten van Boven, Paradiso, Amsterdam, for
hosting the C’Lick Me event and supporting the production of the
reader. Thanks to all the authors of the book for collaborating with
us over the years, as well as to all the photographers and image-
producers on the web whose works have been cited in the different
articles.
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| Kink.com in the NYT | May. 4th, 2007 @ 09:23 pm |
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What is good porn?
Pro-porn feminists are increasingly pushing beyond the typical answer: that woman-positive porn means emotionally-invested plots and gentle, sensual sex. In particular, Tristan Taormino's Chemistry series makes the bold claim that good porn (in both political and aesthetic senses) can also be raw and dirty porn -- when it also portrays communication and sexual agency.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of the Kink.com suite of fetish sites, which do an utterly stunning job of negotiating the razor-edge between consent and coercion. Here you'll find some of the edgiest tortures (machine fucking, electricity, bondage with sex) framed by some of the industry's most responsible practices. An excellent article in the New York Times decribed Kink.com's (dare I say) revolutionary approach as well as I ever could:
[founder Acworth] describes the company as having a certain social mission. Too often, he told me, B.D.S.M. is conflated with rape or abuse. He realized early on that building a respectable company devoted to the fetish could help “demystify” it... Kink’s required pre- and post-scene interviews, like the one I watched Wild Bill and Adams tape, for example, are meant to break the fourth wall, assuring audiences that, as in real-life B.D.S.M. play, everything is negotiated in advance and rooted in a certain etiquette and trust — that everyone is friends. The company actually requires that each model be shown smiling during the segments... Acworth, in fact, seems to police his content simply by the values of the B.D.S.M. community, laboring to make its playful, consensual spirit transparent... Several industry people told me that Kink is known for treating its models courteously and professionally.
Moreover, Kink.com seems to have found the formula for appealing both to the mainstream consumer (a necessity in order to be financially viable) and to queers -- this looks to me to be as "authentic" as lesbian bdsm netporn gets. And if the few insiders I know personally are any indication, this is a welcoming environment for queer women to work.
If I've piqued your interest, you can check out free samples of Kink.com's offerings here!
The NYT article went pay, so I'm pasting the full text below:
A Disciplined Business
By JON MOOALLEM
Published: April 29, 2007
( if anyone asks, this is fair use for educational purposes ) |
| porn biz at the forefront of media change, again | Dec. 7th, 2006 @ 01:02 am |
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Feminist Law Professors » Blog Archive » Pornographers Trying To Muck Up Copyright Law
"Lawsuits brought by porn puveyor Perfect 10 against assorted credit
card companies assert a secondary liability theory for processing
payments to websites that allegedly infringe the copyrights in
pornographic works. If the Ninth Circuit finds the credit card
companies liable under theories of contributory and/or vicarious
infringement, this would represent an expansive extension of copyright
liability that is based on commercial ties with infringers, even if the
accused companies weren’t aware that they were doing business with
infringers."
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| upcoming Texte Zur Kunst issue | Nov. 20th, 2006 @ 12:57 pm |
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The next issue of German journal Texte Zur Kunst will feature essays on the pornographic. Blogger at The Pinocchio Theory issues procataleptic remarks:
...I don’t accept “the thesis of an increasingly pornographic logic of social relations and poltical conditions.” To the contrary: there is nothing exceptional, central, or privileged about pornography and the “pornographic” today. Pornography simply conforms to the same protocols and political conditions, the same commodity logic, as do all other forms of production, circulation, and consumption. Porn today isn’t the least bit different from cars, or mobile phones, or running shoes. It embodies a logic of indifferent equivalence, even as it holds out the thrilling promise of transgression and transcendence — a promise that, of course, it never actually fulfills.
Comments at the blog are of interest.
powered by performancing firefox |
| » netporn seminar |
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Saw a reminder for this on the Air-L list, sorry about the formatting:
Open Call for Contributions
( C ) lick Me
A manifestation about internet pornography
Dates: June 1 & 2 2007
Location: Paradiso, Amsterdam
Organized by: Paradiso and the Institute of Network Cultures in
collaboration with Katrien Jacobs and Matteo Pasquinelli
Paradiso and the Institute of Network Cultures would like to invite you to
send in your work for ( C ) lick Me, an international manifestation on
internet pornography. This edition will focus on topics as commerce vs.
individual, (gender) identity, social and ethnic minority groups, politics
and censorship.
( C ) lick Me will take place in Amsterdam on June 1 & 2 in 2007. We are
currently looking for people who are working on the subject of pornography
and sexuality and would like to present their work to an international
audience. If you are a theorist, artist, researcher, producer or in
another way engaged in the field of netporn, we encourage you to send in
an abstract of your work.
Program
The event will take place on Friday June 1st and Saturday June 2nd. On
both days opening lectures will be held by keynote speakers. After the
keynote lectures, each day will be filled with clusters of presentations
and lectures concerning one of the four themes. In the evening of the
second day there will be an extensive artistic program with screenings,
performances and installations.
Topics
Four main themes shall be used as focus points for the presentations:
- The revolution of alt pornography: in what way has alternative
and do-it-yourself pornography democratized porn production? What are the
reactions of the commercial industry? How does it influence our perception
of porn?
- Porn niches and “trans” gender: stereotypical social divisions
with groups like hetero, gay, transsexual and transgender seem to matter
less and less. What new revolutionary identities are arising? Are old
patterns making way for a larger network of sexual possibilities?
- Globalization of porn and the influence of ethnic minorities:
this session wants to define the way various ethnical groups make use of
the possibilities of porn. In what way do they they shape their own
sexuality, making use of new technologies like the Internet?
- Politics of netporn; censorship, new rights and nightmares: Porn
is subject of repression (censorship) as well as progression
(emancipation, liberalization). Where do we draw the line? What are the
newly acquired rights that we already got out of this still expanding
subject?
During this manifestation, we want to give an in-depth look and sharper
focus, based on the four themes that are provided. The organisation aims
to create an atmosphere where people from different backgrounds can meet
and exchange views on the topics that are raised.
Significant dates
Deadline for submission abstract (250 words) and biography (100 words): 30
November 2006
Submit to: marije@paradiso.nl
Acceptance notification:
21 December 2006
Further enquiries: marije@paradiso.nl
Organizers
Paradiso
Institute of Network Cultures
Katrien Jacobs
Matteo Pasquinelli
Location
Paradiso – Amsterdam
www.networkcultures.org
www.paradiso.nl
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Nov. 15th, 2006 @ 02:09 pm
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| » Sex in Video Games conference |
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The Sex in Video Games conference was held June 8-9. Apologies for posting after the conference. Regina Lynn from Wired did a first-day speech.
Game Girl Advance (blog) has [I II III] posts on it. [via GrandTextAuto]
Organizer's keynote speech at Gamasutra
Wired story
Jun. 22nd, 2006 @ 11:14 am
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| » Tentacle Porn: technically on-topic |
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The About page for this community begins: for critical/academic discussion of pornography. It's implicit that that discussion should arise from the humanities. Taking advantage of that oversight, here's an essay by an ecologist friend of mine on the biology of various marine invertebrates and their associated pornographic potential. Enjoy!
Mar. 1st, 2006 @ 10:59 am
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| » Submissions wanted |
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Hi,
I am a sex worker, community educator, and more...
I am currently working with some sex workers on a website site (Sex Work Assistance Guide) and we would are seeking writing about the porn industry and more. http://www.sex-work.org.
This site is basically info on how to get into the business, interviews by clients, sex workers and their partners - along side of the politics of sex work. We have a section for porn writing yet have had very limited submissions.
Please comment here or write us at info @ sex-work.org if you would like to assist in getting this section of our website up and running.
Keep up the good work ;)
enjoy,
Hailey
Jan. 31st, 2006 @ 03:42 pm
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| » Sexuality and Gender |
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I work for a government agency that deals with issues around gender and domestic violence and as i discuss the work i did on pornography in my university dissertation i seem to encounter the same rhetoric.
"Women are always forced into pornography, sex is sacred and no women would do that willingly"
I have mulled over this sentiment time and time again and really it frustrates me no end to see the obvious failure in the discursive argument.
Simply because using such feminist discourse only implies that women are by nature creatures that are fragile and have an almost sacred sexuality. It is setting up patriarchial discourses embedded in the notion that a man's sexuality is a given but a women must always be in some sense a puritan. We never question why men get into pornography or feel like a man is disempowered by porn.
Foucault would base this in the Victorian Era mentality that seems to have progressively stuck with our culture. I agree.
But i wanted some new thoughts on this.
Any new thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Dec. 12th, 2005 @ 02:47 pm
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| » CFP: Our Daily Porn |
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Call for Book Chapters:
Our Daily Porn: Media and Everyday Sexualities
- anthology on the mainstreaming of pornography
Kaarina Nikunen, Susanna Paasonen & Laura Saarenmaa, eds.
From street advertising for cosmetics and fashions to the dance moves on MTV, the proliferation of amateur porn practices on the Internet and retro fictions reminiscing the porn industry of the 1970s, pornographic styles, gestures and aesthetics have become ubiquitous and mundane elements of popular media culture. This is due to transformations in the production, distribution and consumption of pornography, as well as changes in local media legislation and censorship. The question is also one of mainstreaming ñ of referencing and quoting gestures and styles from pornography and integrating soft core elements into a wide range of media texts. All in all, pornography has increasingly become part of everyday life as commodities purchased and consumed, as individual self-representations and amateur porn productions.
Stepping away from the largely North American debates over censorship and freedom of speech that have tended to dominate feminist studies of pornography, this anthology considers the forms and implications of the mainstreaming of pornographic aesthetics -- also referred to as 'pornification' of media culture -- in an international perspective.
( Read more... )
Dec. 2nd, 2005 @ 06:39 pm
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| » CFP: porn anthology |
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http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=148639
Pornography is one of the most debated and most problematic issues in contemporary academia: there is no agreement as to its definition, function, cultural and psychological significance or its ethical status. This volume aims at presenting various approaches to the phenomenon of pornography, emphasizing the urgency of the need to re-think the ways in which it has been approached. We invite submissions dealing with, but not limited to the following themes:
( Read more... )
Nov. 23rd, 2005 @ 11:56 am
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| » netporn conference |
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I attended The Art and Politics of Netporn conference in Amsterdam last week-ish, so here I am with (at the very least) some links to share. it was a strange and wonderful event, far more diverse than your typical academic conference. much of the focus seemed to be on the polymorphously perverse permutations of porn that the internet enables -- one theory put forward is that NO netporn is normative, because *everything* becomes taxonomized as a fetish. intriguing, but this confirmed for me that my interest is really in netporn in (political) interaction with RL subcultures, not in netporn as an efflorescence of virtual sexuality. anyway, I'll be scrubbing my eyeballs out for years. for a taste, check out Mark Dery's blog about the event. Rogerio Lira also wrote a link blog. eta: and Sebastian Olma wrote a detailed and theoretically-oriented review of the conference.
my paper went over well, though I still wish I'd had more time to polish it (actual version had many of the quotations cut or cut out to shorten it). it was far more theoretically-oriented than a lot of the work there, which got me thinking about audience and accessibility. but given that the question of when or whether porn is "real" continued to be a preoccupation of many, my concern with trying to build a framework to understand this discourse was vindicated, imho.
a number of the conference presentations are online, in full or in part:
( linky )
Oct. 10th, 2005 @ 02:59 pm
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| » CFP: Critical Issues in Sex and Sexuality |
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2nd Global Conference
Critical Issues in Sex and Sexuality
Wednesday 30th November - Saturday 3rd December 2005
Vienna, Austria
Call for Papers
(please cross post where appropriate)
This research and publications conference seeks to
examine issues of sex and sexuality across a range
of critical and cultural perspectives, and seeks
to explore the associated contexts of love,
desire, intimacy, the erotic, betrayal and
cheating. Seeking to encourage innovative inter-
and multi disciplinary dialogues, we warmly
welcome papers from a variety of disciplines,
including but not limited to anthropology,
cultural studies, education, gender studies,
history, law, literature, medicine, philosophy,
psychology, religion and theology, sociology and
social work. We also welcome contributions from
queer activists and professionals in non-profit
and non-government organizations.
( Read more... )
Aug. 23rd, 2005 @ 09:47 am
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| » CFP: from pornography to politics |
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FROM PORNOGRAPHY TO POLITICS
An Inter-disciplinary Postgraduate Symposium
University of Newcastle, U.K.
Conference Organisers: Megan Todd and Melanie Waters
11 November 2005
Sponsored by the Feminist and Women's Studies Association (FWSA) & hosted by the Newcastle Institute for Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (NIASSH).
( Read more... )
Aug. 23rd, 2005 @ 09:43 am
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Has anyone heard about the new DVD from the Suicide Girls? I hear its being put out by epitaph records. It's supposed to be a documentery about the SG's first burlesque tour with some of their live performances, behind the scenes stuff, and tour antics. It should be interesting! There are a lot of great indie bands on there too. Has anyone heard anything else about this DVD?
Aug. 18th, 2005 @ 04:05 pm
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One of the unfortunate but unavoidable oversights of last semester's porn syllabus was its exclusive focus on the US porn industry and its products. I rectified some tiny portion of my international ignorance when I saw Pink Ribbon last week -- a video documentary about Japan's "Pink" film industry (comprised mostly of interviews, with some archival clips). Pink films, I learned, are soft core features that are exhibited (on film) in a dwindling number of porn cinemas. Because of censorship rules, they have never been allowed to show genitals explicitly (though they can now show female pubic hair in non-sexual scenes), or any sex that appears too "realistic." This production context has given rise to several interesting characteristics of Pink films:
( Read more... )
So I suppose the overall question my exposure to this non-US genre raised for me is the ever popular and constitutively insoluble, What is porn? What are its boundaries? Is it about "real" bodies or performative constructions? Is it determined by content or reception?
(*)(*)
Pink films supposedly date from 1962, about 10 years before the so-called golden age of hard core film began in the US. Without reviewing my porn history, I seem to recall that US dirty movies existed before 1972 (of course), but tended to be shorter and less explicit (again, because of censorship). For an excellent and highly entertaining account of how hard core exploded onto the scene with Deep Throat, and the battles it sparked, I'd recommend the documentary (I'm tempted to say shock-umentary) Inside Deep Throat. (I saw it soon after it came out earlier this year, and I've been meaning to blog about it for months.) It offers a unique glimpse into hard core history, including invaluable interviews with Deep Throat's creators and stars. My favorite moment is when Linda Lovelace (in an interview filmed a few years ago, before she died) suggests that the anti-porn feminists, who appropriated her story for their propaganda, were exploiting her just as much as the pornographers were. So there!
In terms of its discourses around pornography, however, the doc is far from perfect. I noted historical inaccuracies in its narrative of obscenity law, when compared with Williams' well-researched version (wish I'd taken more specific notes on this). More troublingly, its thesis seemed to be a garbled cautionary tale about how the forces of censorship within today's right wing government may be gearing up for another massive assault on porn. Not that fans of civil liberties shouldn't be vigilant, but this warning was underpinned by a bland, self-congratulatory liberationist polemic that uncritically equated pornography with sexual freedom. Parallel to this (and seemingly contradicting it) was a tired reinscription of the art/porn binary, with its lines redrawn so that Deep Throat is on the leeward side. Now, I adore Deep Throat, but suggesting that it and its ilk are some pinnacle of nearly-legitimate filmmaking, which contrasts unfavorably with today's mass-produced and trashily-commercial product, seems ideologically hyperbolic.
(*)(*)
The class also watched Not a Love Story, a 1981 Canadian documentary that came out of the feminist anti-porn movement. I have only one comment about this one, because if I went on and on about the problems with anti-porn rhetoric I imagine I'd just be preaching to the converted. The most positive and negative aspect of the film is that it doesn't bypass all conversation with women who work in the sex industry, as anti-porn propaganda so often seems to. It closely follows Linda Lee Tracey, an articulate and fierce performance artist who does these totally fantastic strip shows that she sees as a self-empowering commentary on the objectification of women. Why is this also the most negative aspect of the film? It's a documentary, in large part, of Tracey's encounter with and brainwashing by the filmmakers and the anti-porn feminists they interview -- Tracey wants to learn more about the industry and its implications, which is why she's participating in the project. They take a form of sexual expression she feels good about, and make her feel bad about it -- not because of what she does, they emphasize, but because of how it's interlinked with the larger disease of BAD (anti-feminist) sexual culture. It's really heartbreaking. I can only hope that the forces of sex-positive feminism are established enough, decades later, that sex workers can be supported and empowered by feminism rather than guilt-tripped.
Aug. 1st, 2005 @ 04:39 pm
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| » art and politics of netporn, abbreviated |
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netporn wiki and netporn links from the conference I'm going to in October (the one I've yet to write the paper for). seemed like something you'd enjoy...
Jul. 28th, 2005 @ 08:09 pm
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| » CFP: Bisexuality and the Media |
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Call for papers:
Looking Both Ways:
Bisexuality and the Media
A Special Double Issue of the Journal of Bisexuality
( Read more... )
Jul. 28th, 2005 @ 07:32 pm
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