Porn Studies is an academic field which is concerned with pornography as film, as popcultural phenomenon, but also with discourse and contexts around the topic. It’s an interdisciplinary field and approaches pornography from various and sometimes quite diverse perspectives. Film and Gender Studies play a big role in it, obviously. After a – let’s call it: rather difficult start and little acknowledgement by the academic community to begin with, a quite vivid academic scene developed, with renowned scholars, international conferences, a lot of publications and even an academic journal with the same name. And still it happened to me once that a Dean tried to shut down my presentation at a conference – because I was showing explicit material. An academic field with its own place at conferences and still considered NSFW.
