One thing I didn't expect when my book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography was published in 2011 was that it would become grist for the academic mill. I was unaware of the extent that pornography had become a legitimate subject of study on college campuses in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere. And I was astonished when Beaver Street found its way onto required reading lists for pornography courses and was cited in at least a dozen academic books.
But it was, and its wake there's been a rising tide of (mostly unreadable) academic papers on pornography. I've written about this before, because the titles of these dissertations are like an exercise in self-parody. But if people want to go to college to learn about the kind of material I spent too many years producing while working in the salt mines of a survival job, I think it's great. Pornography is important because it shows capitalism in its most raw and naked form. That's why I wrote Beaver Street.
Below are 10 real titles of academic papers on pornography, chosen at random from a site called Academia. It could be called "The Porn Scholar's Reading List."
1. Pornodialectics: From Coming to Becoming, by Bradley Tuck
2. Doing it Ourselves: Alternative pornography as activist prefiguration, by Sarah Lawrance
3. Female Subordination in Pornographic, by 懿 张
4. Autopornography and the struggle for the recognition of a sexual subjectivity: a theoretical analysis from Loree Erickson's testimony in The Feminist Porn Book, by Julie Lavigne
5. "The Hardest of Hardcore": Locating Feminist Possibilities in Women's Extreme Pornography, by Jennifer Moorman
6. Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography, by Mireille Miller-Young
7. Conceptualizing Pornographication, by Kaye Quek
8. Dwelling in the House That Porn Built: A Phenomenological Critique of Pornography in the Age of Internet Technology, by Justin L Harmon
9. Pornographication: A discourse for all seasons, by Clarissa Smith
10. The Honesty of Pornography, by Bikram Lamba
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