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August 2010, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
Bo Baker <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 9 Aug 2010 16:20:49 -0400
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An announcement from a colleague, please contact her off-list at
[log in to unmask] (also, please excuse cross-postings):

Hello all,
I am writing today to solicit feedback that hopefully will be included in a
forthcoming anthology. *Porn Archives*, to be published by SUNY Press, is a
compilation of essays exploring how archives preserve and provide access to
pornography, among other topics related to the burgeoning field of Porn
Studies. I have included an overview of the book at the bottom of this
message. My contribution will be an annotated bibliography of archives that
house collections of probable interest to researchers in this field.

In addition to searching library catalogs for materials, I am sending out
this inquiry in the hope that institutions with un-cataloged or
under-publicized materials can respond and be included. I am aware of some
of the more well-known organizations collecting these materials (such as the
Kinsey Institute), but I hope that my contribution to this volume will
highlight institutions that most scholars overlook in the course of their
research.

I know what you might be thinking: *pornography is difficult to define! How
can I determine what counts?* To aid in that process, I have included some
specific criteria below. Of course, I also welcome further questions if
you’re unsure about a particular item or collection.

Collections of interest should include published or gray literature (thus
excluding materials like letters and diaries), and may include significant
collections of books from publishers that are known for publishing
pornography, even if some of the books in the collection may not be
pornographic (examples include Grove, Olympia, and Naiad).
Other examples of materials of interest include:

   - erotic pulp fiction
   - sex manuals
   - substantial runs of mainstream publications such as *Playboy,
   Penthouse, Oui, Hustler, Adult Video News,* and *Players*
   - zines, small press items, and limited edition vanity press publications
   - penny papers, Tijuana bibles, and adult comics

If you have collections that you think fit these criteria, please respond
off-list by *August 27* with:

   - the name and address (both web and physical) of the institution
   - names and descriptions of collections to be included
   - any other information you think may be useful to researchers

Please let me know if you have questions, and I look forward to hearing from
you!

Thank you for your time,
Caitlin

Caitlin Shanley
Assistant Professor
Instructional Design and Technology Librarian
Lupton Library
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
[log in to unmask]
(423) 425-5279 (office)

*Overview of PORN ARCHIVES

Where and how is pornography archived? How have archives conditioned access
to pornography? How do archives preserve, while simultaneously restricting
access to, their contents? If our modern understanding of pornography came
into being with the gathering of Pompeian artifacts in the “secret museum,”
how might pornography and the archive be mutually constitutive?

Pornography, more readily available now than ever before, saturates our
political debates, our inboxes, and our imaginations. Yet, our public
institutions have historically identified pornography in the process of
trying to regulate it. As its presence has increased in the public sphere,
however, debates about porn’s place in our society have become not only
increasingly urgent but also increasingly complex. By the late 1980s several
scholars, Linda Williams most notably, called for a move beyond the
anti-censorship / anti-pornography debates that characterized discourse in
the United States during the post-WWII era.

In the spirit of that critically engaged scholarship, which broadened the
field of discourse, we recently organized a public conference on pornography
in Buffalo that attempted to take stock of where Porn Studies exists twenty
years after its emergence. Following that successful conference, and spurred
by ongoing work in a graduate seminar on pornography that Tim Dean taught at
the University at Buffalo, we envision a lasting contribution to the field
of porn studies by putting together a blockbuster anthology titled Porn
Archives, to be published by SUNY Press. The volume seeks to build upon the
solid foundation of porn scholarship from the past twenty years, while also
enlarging the field by investigating how public institutions mediate our
experience of sexuality, our definitions of obscenity, our access to
pornographic texts, and our understanding of material preservation. The
question of the archive has a long history of academic engagement that
warrants further consideration, as digital technologies—from cell-phone
cameras to online databases—reconfigure how we produce and transmit sexually
explicit representations. As the common parlance of porn increasingly
denotes the pornographic (moving) image, we are interested in the altered
status of written pornography and in how classifications of pornography are
made and remade. With this volume, we aim to turn porn studies back on
itself to discover and attend to its as yet unearthed objects of study. Porn
Archives will inaugurate a more expansive and nuanced field of porn studies.
*

----
Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org

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