Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"

by Linda Williams

Paperback, 1991

Status

Available

Genres

General Nonfiction

All Topics

Nonfiction

Publication

University of California Press (1991), Paperback, 342 pages

Description

In this now-classic study, Linda Williams moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate 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. For the 1999 edition, Williams has written a new preface and a new epilogue, "On/scenities," illustrated with 25 photographs. She has also added a supplementary bibliography.

User reviews

LibraryThing member rivkat

Williams argues that filmed pornography went through a trajectory in the twentieth century of increasing attention to the problem of women’s pleasure (or of how to represent women’s pleasure), which meant that pornographic films went from narrativeless “stag” films to narratives that, if

not great storylines, actually attempted coherence. Stags didn’t feature “money shots” (male ejaculation) as late 20th-century porn did; she argues that the male money shot is often a stand-in for female orgasm, which lacks the same type of visual evidence. As she points out, the term “money shot” unites commodification and sexuality as well as visuality. Twenty years on, I can’t help but want another chapter about internet pornography, gonzo porn (in contrast to the feature films she argues were at least responding to, if not incorporating, feminist critiques in that they no longer depicted rape as pleasurable for the victim), and the apparent return of the non-narrative stag-type film that’s just a bunch of sex acts.

Show Less

1 more

LibraryThing member deliriumslibrarian

Created a whole discipline that has yet to produce anything to surpass this revolutionary work of looking clearly.

Fewer