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.