Hard core : power, pleasure, and the frenzy of the visible
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Hard core : power, pleasure, and the frenzy of the visible
University of California Press, c1989
- : alk. paper
- : pbk. : alk. paper
- Other Title
-
Power, pleasure, and the frenzy of the visible
Available at 17 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p.[297]-310
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this unprecedented and brilliant study, Linda Williams moves beyond the impasse of anti-porn/anti-censorship position-taking to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does - as a genre with a history, as a specific cinematic form, and as part of contemporary discourse on sexuality. Working against tendencies to oversimplify hard core - either as pure abusive power or pure liberatory pleasure - Williams sees the form as inherently contradictory. Hard core claims to speak confessional and involuntary 'truths' of sex. However, analysis of its forms (including its spectacular 'money shots' and sexual 'numbers' parallel to those in musicals) reveals that sex in the sense of a natural, visible 'doing what comes naturally' is in fact the supreme and deeply contradictory fiction of the genre. Gender, the social construction of the relation between the sexes, is what determines this fiction. For most of its history, pornography has been for men and about women.
Yet in hard core's attempt to solve the riddles of sex with more, different, or better sex, the monolith of masculine pleasure breaks down and the possibility of women using pornography for their own purposes begins to emerge. To this end, Williams traces the roots of contemporary hard core's quest to see the 'truth' of sex back to the origins of cinema itself - in motion studies of women's bodily movements. She then follows the generic development of hard core through its silent, primitive stag form and into feature-length narratives like "Deep Throat" and "Behind the Green Door", up to its recent sadomasochistic and 'couples market' permutations - showing how the form has begun to respond and react to changing gender relations. Neither a defense of what pornography has been nor a utopian dream of what it should be, this daring book refuses simply to scapegoat the form as the cause of all our ills. Instead, Williams utilizes the insights of recent studies of mass culture to show that hard core is a discourse, a genre, and a rhetoric that can only be understood through comparison with, rather than separation from, other forms.
by "Nielsen BookData"