Screening Adult Cinema

This collection of 39 original essays is designed to support film screenings. Each chapter focuses on a single adult film―a category broadly construed as films that foreground sex as a primary narrative, aesthetic, or marketing element. The chapters draw on a variety of perspectives, contexts, histories, themes, and politics in examinations of style, genre, authorship, performance, and stardom.

The first of its kind, Screening Adult Cinema brings together a broad range of established scholars alongside new voices to demonstrate the global breadth and diversity of adult cinema, from a variety of time periods and transnational contexts, paying particular attention to regions and films that have been underrepresented within existing adult film scholarship. Following the Screening Cinema series, Screening Adult Cinema is intended as a teaching text and reference for courses in which film screenings are a core activity, while also appealing to adult film scholars.

This unique collection will be invaluable for courses on adult or exploitation film history, feminist film studies, global queer cinema, and porn studies. It will also be useful for general courses in media studies with a focus on gender, sex, and sexuality.

Farrah Freibert is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Southern Illinois University, USA. Her work has appeared in venues such as Camera Obscura, Film Criticism, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, Porn Studies, and the Spectator. Farrah Freibert was a co-editor with Alicia Kozma of ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman (2021). Her monograph Nothing Censored, Nothing Gained: Obscenity Law and Histories of Queer Distribution and Exhibition in Los Angeles is forthcoming.

Peter Alilunas is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon, USA, and the author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video (2016). His work has appeared in Porn Studies, Film History, Post Script, Television & New Media, Camera Obscura, JCMS, and Creative Industries Journal. He is the co-editor with Whitney Strub of the collection ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2022).

Desirae Embree is an independent scholar living in Los Angeles, USA. Her work focuses on the history of lesbian pornography, softcore adult film, and gender and sexuality in visual media. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture, and more. Her dissertation is on the emergence of lesbian-produced hardcore during the video era.