2019/01/01 by Whitney Strub · 1 citation
Psychology · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology #Cinema and Media Studies #Gender, Feminism, and Media
paper · doi:10.1525/fmh.2019.5.2.19
openalex publication_date 2019/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
During the 1980s US feminist sex wars, pornography edited its own history, leaving a distorted record both less problematic and less queer than scholars have yet recognized. Academic inquiry into pornography coincided with home-video boom years, and research often took place in adult backrooms, necessarily because pornography was so poorly archived. Yet even as access has shifted from VHS to digital, the field has yet to reckon with how its interpretive frameworks were shaped by a material history in which the films that scholars watched were often altered from the versions patrons had seen in theaters. Gone from both straight and gay films were many transgressive sex acts that had frequently been staples of the genre, affecting the perceived oeuvre of nearly every hardcore filmmaker of the era. This article recovers the lost history of sexual media editing, arguing for a more carefully historicized interrogation of the commercial sources of our porn archives.