The Softer Side of Hardcore? Women Filmmakers in Pornographic Production Cultures

Women tend to be discussed exclusively as the object of the pornographic gaze, but what happens when they do the looking? In “The Softer Side of Hardcore,” Dr. Jennifer Moorman will offer a revised history of the US adult film industry, with a focus on women’s authorship in a cultural form utterly preoccupied with sexual difference. With some notable exceptions, throughout the 1970s through the late 1990s, women’s creative agency was contingent, restricted, and primarily limited to on-camera roles. Legal, technological, and cultural developments, however, have afforded an increase in women’s cultural production – culminating in the development of woman-helmed production companies, websites, apps, and content creation for sites like OnlyFans and Pornhub – and enabled performers to organize for collective gains, as in the BIPOC Adult Film Collective. The fact that women’s bodies have remained the genre’s primary form of currency is precisely what has enabled actresses who are able to capitalize on their branding to direct and produce at rates that far surpass those of women in Hollywood, even as the devaluation of performers whose bodies do not fit the (white, able-bodied, cisgender, thin, and conventionally attractive) industrial ideal generates and reinforces inequalities. In order to address the implications of these shifts and their accompanying complexities, this talk will focus on a moment when women’s creative labor proliferated dramatically: the heyday of DVD production at the turn of the millennium. Several case studies will illuminate gender’s often counterintuitive working within pornographic production cultures

Jennifer Moorman is Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University, where she also serves on the Executive Board of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and co-chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Adult Film & Media Scholarly Interest Group. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: The Softer Side of Hardcore? Women Filmmakers in Pornographic Production Cultures and Policing Queerness: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement in US Popular Film and Television. Excerpts of this research appear in Camera Obscura, Signs, Synoptique, Porn Studies, and several edited volumes.