whoa

I went to a talk on pornography tonight, specifically queer pornography and sex work and feminism. The first speaker talked about more mainstream representations of sex work and about the changing thoughts of feminism about sex work, fairly straightforward stuff but interesting. The second woman, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, used to film queer porn for a now-defunct website. She brought a slideshow of about 170 stills from movies she had filmed that played constantly while she talked. Every once in a while, she'd glance up and say something like, "Oh, this is kind of a mother-and-child representation" or whatever. She talked about how she felt that a lot of the difference between queer porn and straight porn was just the bodies portrayed, the range of available bodies that you chould show. She also said that on their website, queer viewers liked porn that showed a heteronormative situation much more than one that didn't, which I found pretty interesting. Her talk culminated in us all watching about 15 or 20 minutes of porn videos. It was so weird, to be watching these really really hardcore videos of transgendered porn and d/s porn and just stuff I've never come close to seeing before, in a classroom full of people. People were covering their eyes, or just looking somewhat stunned, or really uncomfortable. It is pretty hard to watch porn in a large, self-conscious group. I wish I had been able to focus more on what she was saying, but porn is super distracting from spoken text, I have to say.