ANNOUNCING THE FEMINIST PORN MINI-CON

May 8, 2013, 12:00-9:00 pm
The Feminist Porn Mini Con  #fempornUCSB
Celebrating the publication of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, this event will showcase the new movement of feminist and queer pornography that is transforming today’s adult entertainment industry. Events include a Keynote Panel discussion featuring the editors and authors; Sex Ed! Education and Activism Workshop; and a screening of “The Feminist Porn Show,” a special show of film clips curated by Tristan Taormino showcasing the work of feminist porn pioneers and newcomers. Confirmed guests include Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Kevin Heffernan, Tristan Taormino, Jiz Lee, Dylan Ryan, Sinnamon Love, April Flores, and Carlos Batts. Keep up to date on our Facebook Page.

Location: University of California-Santa Barbara
Admission: Open to anyone 18 years or older. Please note: we will be screening sexually explicit material. Registration is free; register for the conference online.
Info: feministpornstudies at gmail.com
Sponsored by: The Interdisciplinary Humanities New Sexualities RFG, Asian American Studies, Film and Media Studies, Hull Chair of Feminist Studies, the Multicultural Center, the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences, the Carsey-Wolf Center, KUFF, Women, Gender, and Sexual Equity, Womyn’s Commission, Queer Commission, SCORE, Take Back the Night, Human Rights Board, Health and Wellness, AS Office of the Student Advocate, AS Office of the President, PRIDE, End Fake Clinics, VOX, Mujer, and Black Quare.

SCHEDULE

12-2 pm: The Feminist Porn Book Keynote Panel
Pollock Theater

What is feminist pornography? Why does it matter? The editors and authors of The Feminist Porn Book discuss the new movement of feminist pornography production. Speakers include Tristan Taormino, Jiz Lee, Dylan Ryan, Sinnamon Love, April Flores and Carlos Batts and Professors Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young, and Kevin Heffernan.

2-2:30 pm: The Feminist Porn Book Booksigning
Michael Douglas Lobby, Pollock Theater

Get a copy of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure hot off the presses! Three UCSB professors will be there to sign it, along with our guest speakers, all of whom wrote essays for the anthology.

3-5 pm: Sex Ed! Education and Activism Workshop
State Street Room, UCEN

Take part in an interactive dialogue facilitated by UCSB student organizations and sex industry professionals as they take on sex education and sexual activism. Topics to be discussed include visibility for sexual minorities, racial dynamics of the sex industry, sexual health and expression, sex work, and sexual media production.

7-9 pm: The Feminist Porn Show with Tristan Taormino
Pollock Theater

Join us for a special evening showcasing feminist porn, a genre of adult film and a growing movement. Tristan Taormino will share a brief history and definition of feminist porn, then screen a special compilation curated by her, which includes clips from the work of feminist porn pioneers and newcomers including Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, Petra Joy, Erika Lust, Shine Louise Houston, Madison Young, Courtney Trouble, and more. The screening will be followed by a facilitated discussion, where we’ll explore some of the current issues surrounding feminist porn.

About The Feminist Porn Book
An excerpt from our Introduction reads: “The Feminist Porn Book is the first to bring together writings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As collaborating editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one porn director who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics and pornography for years. Too often feminist opponents of porn have tried to demonize feminist pornographers and feminist porn professors, accusing both of operating in bad faith, deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of pornography and our ability to have any sort of credible agency in making or studying it. The Feminist Porn Book offers arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be simply dismissed, but instead provide a convincing account of the politics of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to gather some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography and to explore the emergence and significance of a thriving feminist porn movement. By putting our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking about the richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a way that helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn industry are doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges.”

Addressing questions of identity and power along lines of gender, race, class, ability, nation, and culture, the book traces the rise of women made pornography since the 1980s. Notably, it attends to the more recent emergence of feminist and queer production in the adult industry, and intervenes in longstanding debates about pornography’s role in defining gender and sexual relations in American society. Looking at the explosion of new media technologies that allow for the transformation of industrial and labor relations and modes of consumption, we seek to explore how the question of who makes explicit sexual media, and for whom, matters.

Published in February 2013, the book has received excellent reviews from Melissa Harris-Perry, professor of Political Science at Tulane University and host of the MSNBC show Melissa Harris-Perry, Lisa Duggan, professor of American Studies at New York University, Chuck Kleinhans, co-editor of media studies journal Jump Cut, and Susan Stryker, Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at Arizona State University, among others. It has been featured on The Joy Behar Show, Salon, Jezebel, and in Publisher’s Weekly.

Speaker Biographies

Jiz Lee is a genderqueer adult performer straddling genders and porn genres, with over 200 projects from indie and mainstream, American and International porn houses under their belt. In 2010, Jiz was awarded Feminist Porn Award’s Boundary Breaker, a defining moment within their exploits in adult. Throughout the years, Jiz has their fingers in a lot of good places: they moonlight behind the scenes at Pink & White Productions (CrashPadSeries.com, PinkLabel.tv), and run the erotic philanthropic experimental Karma Pervs. It was through pornography that Jiz began writing — first through their blog on JizLee.com and later as a contributor in various web and print publications, from Jezebel.com to the recent academic sensation, The Feminist Porn Book! Talking publicly about porn has also helped Jiz overcome (for the most part!) their fear of public speaking. Jiz has lectured at numerous colleges and universities, causing a stir that headlined on Fox News, MSN and UK’s Daily Mail (made it!). Despite the hype, Jiz hopes simply to bring authenticity and diversity to sex in porn, and to help culture more understanding and open-mindedness around sexuality in general. Walking that talk, Jiz is currently taking on their most challenging project to date: coming out to their family about P-R-0-N. The result is a powerful conversation, channeled into their forthcoming anthology: How to Come Out Like a Porn Star: Adult Industry Essays on Family Matters.

April Flores, flame-haired vixen of the new porn order, is one of the most striking examples of the new sexy, from her work as a BBW adult film star to her unrepentant feminism and body-positive smash­ing of stereotypes. Flores has graced the covers of Bizarre and AVN magazines, been featured in several fine art photography books, and appeared in adult films in every genre of the porn industry. April lives and creates in Los Angeles with her husband, artist Carlos Batts.

Carlos Batts [C. Batts FLY] is an award winning artist, photographer, and director. Batts’ artwork has appeared on book covers, album covers, music videos and movies. Carlos has 4 internationally distributed hardbound coffee table books: FAT GIRL (Rarebird/Barnacle Books 2013), Wild Skin(Edition Ruess 2001), Crazy Sexy Hollywood (Edition Ruess 2003) and American Gothic (Scapegoat Publishing 2005) that showcase his artistic approach to photography. Batts has directed independent features Voluptuous Biker Babes as well underground art films American Gothic and April Flores World. Born in Baltimore, Batts now lives and creates in Hollywood with his muse, April Flores.

Sinnamon Love is an adult performer and fetish model. She began performing in adult films in the early 1990s, and has since appeared in approximately two hundred movies. She directed the movie My Black Ass 4, which received nominations at the 2001 AVN Awards for Best Ethnic-Themed Video and Best Anal Sex Scene (Video). Love was admitted into the Urban X Hall of Fame in 2009, and the AVN Hall of Fame in 2011. She was profiled in the book Money Shot: The Wild Nights and Lonely Days Inside the Black Porn Industry by Lawrence C. Ross Jr. Her writing has appeared inHos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex, edited by David Henry Sterry and R. J. Martin Jr.

Dylan Ryan is a porn star, writer, social worker, performance artist, and self-professed gender and sexuality geek living in San Francisco, California. Dylan holds a double bachelors degree and recently com­pleted a masters in social work from a Canadian university where she studied the rise of feminist pornography and the intersections between sex work and social work. A yoga instructor and amateur filmmaker in her spare time, Dylan hopes to continue her academic career and to become Dylan Ryan, PhD.

Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, radio host, and feminist pornogra­pher. She is the author of seven books including The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn and Per­version. She runs the adult film production company Smart Ass Pro­ductions. She has directed and produced twenty-four adult films, including the groundbreaking series based on real female kink fan­tasies, Rough Sex and the Expert Guide sex education series, which she created for Vivid Entertainment. The winner of multiple Adult Video News (AVN) and Feminist Porn Awards, she was the first female director to win an AVN award for Best Gonzo Movie for the first film in her reality series Chemistry. She received the Trailblazer Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Feminist Porn Awards in 2010. She is the host of Sex Out Loud, a weekly radio show on The VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network. She was a columnist for The Village Voice for nearly ten years and writes a column for Hustler’s Taboo. She was the found­ing editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning series Best Lesbian Erotica and is editor of twenty-five anthologies. She’s written for a multitude of publications from Yale Journal of Law and Feminism to Penthouse, and served as editor of On Our Backs. She has appeared on CNN, HBO’s Real Sex, The Howard Stern Show, Loveline, Ricki Lake, MTV, Oxygen, MSNBC, Fox News, The Discovery Channel, and on over fifty radio shows. She lectures at top colleges and universities and teaches sex and relationship workshops around the world.

Kevin Heffernan teaches courses in media culture and history in the Division of Film and Media Arts at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1952-1968 from Duke University Press and co-author, with Frances Milstead and Steve Yeager, of My Son Divine from Alyson Publications. His essays on the horror film, Asian cinema, queer filmmakers, sexploitation, and porn can be found in a number of journals and critical anthologies. He is currently writing a book-length industrial, cultural, and aesthetic history of contemporary moving-image pornography.

Constance Penley is professor of film and media studies and co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her major areas of research interest are film and media history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies and editor or co-editor of the influential collectionsFeminism and Film Theory, Male Trouble, Technoculture, and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender. She is the author ofThe Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, and the forthcoming Teaching Pornography. Her collabora­tive art projects include “MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee” and “Biospheria: An Environmental Opera,” on which she was co-librettist. Penley is a 2009 winner of the MacArthur Founda­tion Digital Media and Learning Award.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu works as a filmmaker and film scholar and is professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the Uni­versity of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, The Hypersexual­ity of Race: Performing Asian/American on Screen and Scene won the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian Ameri­can Studies in 2009, and her second book is Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies. Recently, her first feature film, Birthright: Mothering Across Difference, won the Best Fea­ture Documentary at the Big Mini DV Festival. She teaches popular culture, social theories of power and inequality, race and sexuality, and film and performance theory and production. She is currently at work on her new film, Stoop Labor.

Mireille Miller-Young is associate professor of feminist studies and affiliate associate professor of black studies, film and media stud­ies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores race, gender, and sexuality in visual culture, media, and the sex industries in the United States. Her forth­coming book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography, examines African American women in pornography.

The editors, Feona Attwood (Middlesex University) and Clarissa Smith (University of Sunderland), and Routledge are pleased to announce the launch of a new journal devoted to the study of pornography.

Porn Studies is the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts. Porn Studies will publish innovative work examining specifically sexual and explicit media forms, their connections to wider media landscapes and their links to the broader spheres of (sex) work across historical periods and national contexts.

Porn Studies is an interdisciplinary journal informed by critical sexuality studies and work exploring the intersection of sexuality, gender, race, class, age and ability. It focuses on developing knowledge of pornographies past and present, in all their variations and around the world. Because pornography studies are still in their infancy we are also interested in discussions that focus on theoretical approaches, methodology and research ethics. Alongside articles, the journal includes a forum devoted to shorter observations, developments, debates or issues in porn studies, designed to encourage exchange and debate.

Porn Studies invites submissions for publication, commencing with its first issue in Spring 2014. Articles should be between 5000 and 8000 words. Forum submissions should be 500-1500 words. Book reviews should be between 800 and 1500 words. Submissions will be refereed anonymously by at least two referees.

In the first instance submissions, queries and suggestions should be sent to: editorspstudies@gmail.com

Tristan Taormino, Shar Rednour, and Nan Kinney

Lynsey G blogs about this idea of audience after attending the joint press conference with the Feminist Porn Awards and Feminist Porn Conference.

SevErin Fauteux wrote a review of The Feminist Porn Book for xoxoamore, including some of their favorite questions that are posed by the various contributors.

Nina Hartley’s chapter from The Feminist Porn Book is currently featured on Vitamin W.

Publishers Weekly interviewed the editors of The Feminist Porn Book. The article is currently only accessible to PW subscribers (we’re hoping to get full text available later).

Read the full text of the video right here.

Were you unable to attend the Feminist Porn Conference? Lucky for you Dusk! TV was there and got some great footage and interviews — check out their YouTube channel and see what you missed. All content is SFW (Safe For Work).

Here’s an interview with The Feminist Porn Book contributor Ms. Naughty:

Zosia Bielski wrote a great article for The Globe and Mail covering the Feminist Porn Conference, as well as the FPAs and The Feminist Porn Book.

Check out “The rise of ethical porn: She chooses her co-star and the fantasy.”