Published in 2014
224 pages
Helen Hester joined UWL from Middlesex University, where she had served as Lecturer in Promotional Cultures and Senior Lecturer in Media. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks.
Helen is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (2014) and the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (2015) and Dea ex Machina (2015). She is also the series editor for Ashgate’s ‘Sexualities in Society’ book series.
What is this book about?
This original contribution to porn studies aims to interrogate previously untheorized changes in contemporary understandings of the pornographic. Helen Hester argues that the words “porn” and “pornographic” are currently being applied to an ever-expanding range of material and that this change in language usage reflects a wider shift in perception. She suggests that we are witnessing a seemingly paradoxical move away from sex within contemporary understandings of porn, as a range of other factors come to influence the concept. Using examples from media, literature, and culture, and discussing the rise of notions such as “torture porn” and “misery porn,” Hester’s argument ranges from sexually explicit German novels and British policy documents to a discussion of the differences between European and American editions of pornographic films. She concludes that four factors in particular–transgression, intensity, prurience, and authenticity–can be seen to influence the way that we think about porn.
