CIN339H1

Adult Film Histories

From the birth of cinema and the legal emergence of “hardcore” to the rise of the internet, adult film covers a broad span of periods, genres, geographies, venues, and technical formats: stag and grindhouse films, peepshows, sexploitation films, avant-garde cinema, “Golden Age” pornography, video, animation, adult theatres, and digital contexts. This course offers a critical and historical survey of adult films in social, legal, technical, and political contexts of production, consumption, and circulation. The course balances global and U.S. perspectives with attention to entanglements of race, class, gender, sexuality, feminism, and labor. Course content augmented by guest lectures from the adult industry.