I've been teaching, for the first time, a course on pornography this semester. It's been quite an amazing experience. We've of course read a lot of philosophical writing on the topic (syllabus here), but also work in sociology, sexuality studies, and so forth. By far the most interesting, and enjoyable, part of the course, though, has been the several sessions we have devoted to talking about specific films. My students never cease to impress me with their thoughtfulness.
There's a lot I'll do differently next time. We spent too much time on 'free speech'-type issues and not enough on aesthetic issues (which got even more truncated due to scheduling changes). But it's been a joy to re-read a lot of this material, and I've been reminded how much more interesting a lot of the work outside philosophy is, and how little philosophers seem to know of it.
Which brings me to the title of this post. One of the last things I'm having the students read is a now famous article by Richard Dyer, "Male Gay Porn: Coming To Terms", which appeared in Jump Cut in 1985 (freely available here). It is one of the, perhaps even the, first papers to address pornographic films as films. It's an extraordinary article, whose central idea is that "A defense of porn as a genre (which...is not at all the same thing as defending most of what porn currently consists of) would be based on the idea that an art rooted in bodily effect can give us a knowledge of the body that other art cannot".
It's a powerful idea, it seems to me, and one that still has not been explored as much as it should be. Indeed, the only other paper known to me that takes this approach, and which was directly inspired by Dyer, is Linda Williams's "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" (JSTOR) which explores the relations between pornography and other 'body genres'---horror and melodrama, specifically---which aim to effect a bodily response in the viewer. I hope, at some point, to take up this idea myself.
