This thrilling anthology celebrates the power of desire, bringing together personal essays, manifestos, and scholarly research, turning the spotlight on an industry where feminism is thriving.
The Feminist Porn Book weaves together writing by producers, actors, consumers, and scholars of feminist pornography, investigating not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists "do" porn--that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world's most lucrative and growing industries.
With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, Lynn Comella, Jane Ward, Ariane Cruz, Kevin Heffernan, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the arguments of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women's movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and racial and sexual minorities produce power and pleasure.
"I predict this volume is going to find its way onto the bedside tables of several generations of American women. . . . At the core of the book is the question: Can porn coexist with the principles of feminism? No matter how one ultimately adjudicates this question, The Feminist Porn Book leaves no doubt about the inherent value in the inquiry itself." --Melissa Harris-Perry, author of Sister Citizen
Tristan Taormino is a sex educator, feminist pornographer, and the award-winning author of seven books including The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and Opening Up. As head of Smart Ass Productions, she has directed and produced twenty-four adult films. She is the host of "Sex Out Loud" on The VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network.
Filmmaker and film scholar
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books are
Straitjacket Sexualities and
The Hypersexuality of Race, winner of the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.
Constance Penley is professor of film and media studies and co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, University of California, Santa Barbara. A founding editor of
Camera Obscura, her work includes
The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis,
NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America,
Teaching Pornography (forthcoming), and influential collections
Feminism and Film Theory,
Male Trouble, and
Technoculture.
Mireille Miller-Young is associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in popular culture and the sex industries. Her book,
A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women's sex work in the porn industry.
