The Department of Film & Media and the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley present

Porn Studies

A symposium honoring the work of Linda Williams

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the journal Porn Studies, scholars of sexuality, media, and performance revisit Linda Williams’ pioneering work in the field and reflect on its ongoing legacies.

Program schedule

2:10 Introduction
Damon R. Young (UC Berkeley)

2:20-4:00 Hot takes, revisitations, and reflections

Elena Gorfinkel (King’s College, London): “Carnal Densities”

Katie Horowitz (Davidson): “Trans Youth On/Scene: The Child Pornography of the US Right.”

Dolores McElroy (UC Berkeley): “(Not) Getting There: Jane Fonda, Cont.”

Kevin Wynter (Pomona): “When the Man Looks”

Charles-Antoine Courcoux (Lausanne): “Desperately Seeking the ‘Seventh Hard’: A Time to Think the Pornographic Masterpiece”

Nguyen Tan Hoang (UC San Diego): “Sad Porn in Berkeley (For Linda)” (video essay, 6:30 minutes)

Ariel Osterweis (CalArts): “From the the Money Shot to Squirting”

Simon(e) van Saarloos (UC Berkeley); “My Back, My Butt, Your Beat: The Encore of Sound in Hard Core Porn”

Eva Hayward (Utrecht): “She & Male”

Ara Osterweil (McGill): “Embodied Criticism”

4:10-5:00 Plenary discussion

Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Susie Bright
Moderated by Shannon Jackson 

5:00-7:00 Reception in the Hazel Wolf Gallery

Cosponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster, the Department of English, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, and the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies,

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact Eve Letendre at rfa@berkeley.edu by November 28).

Free and open to the public.
A Zoom option is available here: https://bit.ly/UCB-Williams