constance penley


We are pleased to share with you Constance Penley‘s Keynote address title and abstract:

Sex Work in Industry and Academe: Feminist Porn

connieThe Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (2013) was the first collection to bring together writings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to engage, challenge, and reimagine pornography. Strongly influenced by other social movements in the realm of sexuality, like the sex-positive, LGBTQI rights, and sex worker’s rights movements, feminist porn aims to build community, to expand liberal views on gender and sexuality, and to educate and empower performers and audiences. It favors fair, ethical working conditions for sex workers and the inclusion of underrepresented identities and practices. Feminist porn challenges the hegemonic depictions of gender, sex roles, and the pleasure and power of mainstream porn. It also challenges the anti-porn feminist interpretive framework for pornography as bankrupt of progressive sexual politics. As a budding movement, it promotes aesthetic and ethical practices that intervene in dominant sexual representation and mobilize a collective vision for change. This erotic activism, which is in no way homogeneous or consistent, works within and against the marketplace to imagine new ways to envision gender and sexuality in our culture. Penley, who edited The Feminist Porn Book for The Feminist Press with author/sex educator/pornographer Tristan Taormino and professors Mireille Miller-Young and Celine Parreñas Shimizu, will address the response to this unprecedented coming together of feminist academics and feminist pornographers. She will also address some of the discoveries that came out of this collaborative effort, including the shared recognition of how precarious labor conditions affect our work in both the adult industry and academe.

Constance is a Professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also the founding Director and Co-Director Emerita of the Carsey-Wolf Centre. Constance was a founding co-editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media. Constance will be delivering her Keynote address at 4pm on 24th November 2015.

Feminist Porn Mini Con
Recently, Constance was involved in the Feminist Porn Mini Con at UCSB. At this event, on 2nd April 2014, a number of the contributors to the The Feminist Porn Book collection got together for a photo. They are (Top from left to right) Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Tristan Taormino, Jiz Lee and Carlos Batts; (Bottom left to right) Kevin Heffernan, Dylan Ryan, Mireille Miller-Young, Sinnamon Love and April Flores.

The Feminist Porn Book was published by The Feminist Press (CUNY Press) and you can find out more about it here: http://www.feministpress.org/books/feminist-porn-book

You can check out the conference’s tentative timetable here: http://transformingfeminisms.noblogs.org/post/2015/09/25/tentative-timetable/

constance penley


Our fourth, and final, keynote has been confirmed! Constance Penley works in film and media studies at the Carsey-Wolf Centre at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Constance’s work is interdisciplinary and includes research on the intersections between women and technology, pornography and sci fi. Constance is also a practicing artist and has written the libretto for an Biospheria: An Environmental Opera.

Find out more about Constance here.