HON 465 - Porn Studies

Prerequisite, admission to the University Honors Program. According to a 2012 businessinsider.com story, “Worldwide, pornography is reported to rake in anywhere from fifty-seven billion to a hundred billion dollars annually. In the United States, it generates more revenue than CBS, NBC, and ABC combined and more than all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises.” Pornography and the porn industry thus demand careful critical consideration as historical, social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena. Moreover, Chapman students have a special proximity to this topic, since the San Fernando Valley, less than 60 miles north of Chapman University, is still considered the porn capital of the world. The course will survey scholarship in the field of porn studies, including work by pioneering feminist and queer porn theorists like Linda Williams and Thomas Waugh, and more recent scholarship at the intersections of critical race studies and porn studies, and trans studies and porn studies. The class will focus mainly on the United States and on film and video. Rather than rehashing decades old pro- vs. anti-porn debates, students will be engaging with scholarship in the field of porn studies that refuses simplistic condemnations of pornography and other kinds of sex work. Students will consider the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability in pornography; questions of representation, production, and authorship; the porn industry from a business and economic perspective; and how new technologies, media, and platforms have transformed the production, consumption, and cultural meanings of pornography. In this course students will watch, read about, and discuss sexually explicit material-students should not enroll in this course if they are unwilling to do this. Student must be 18 or older to enroll in this course. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits