*CFP* "PORNOGRAPHY AS A CULTURE: A LOCAL PERSPECTIVE", SPECIAL ISSUE, GENDER/SEXUALITY/ITALY JOURNAL

This themed section seeks to examine pornography as a nexus of practices, knowledges, institutions, and economies primarily concerned with bodily pleasure. It considers pornography as a rich cultural field: a terrain on which is staged an ongoing struggle over the politics of representation, the social legitimacy, and the cultural visibility of desires, bodies and intimacies. Pornography has long been the object of censorship, surveillance and intense political critique. Once primarily associated with exploitative sexual practices and oppressive ideas about gender roles, it has now become a central sphere of intervention for queer and feminist activists, and for radical political work. Within pornography, consumption practices often intersect with participatory spheres of culture production and community-making dynamics. This intersection tests the thin line between social practice, representation and fantasy within which porn operates as a cultural and media domain.

In Italy, pornography first emerged as a noteworthy cultural phenomenon in the mid-1970s, with the proliferation of adult magazines and the first hard-core films by directors like Joe D’Amato. In the 1980s, Italian media (print, cinema, and intermittently even television) were flooded with sexually explicit images, the production and circulation of pornographic materials paralleling and sometimes exceeding the exploits of North-European countries such as France or Germany. During this time, a significant process of deregulation and legitimization of sexually explicit materials transformed what had largely been seen as a predominantly Catholic country prone to censorship into a libertarian paradise for pornographers and their publics. 

From the 1980s onwards, this process contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between porn cultural production and mainstream culture, with eminent representatives of the Italian porn industry who were able to cross over to mass entertainment and even politics (e.g., Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina, was elected member of the Italian Parliament between 1987 and 1991).  Over the last 30 years, no other country seems to have embraced porn icons (e.g., Rocco Siffredi, Moana Pozzi, Jessica Rizzo, and Valentina Nappi) so enthusiastically within its mainstream cultural fabrics. This peculiar relation between pornography and the mainstream represents one of the major objects of inquiry that this special issue proposes to consider.

Currently, the Italian porn industry has been engulfed and somehow erased by the processes of global conglomeration and delocalization that have reshaped porn production world-wide in the digital age – significantly, important ‘national’ players like Rocco Siffredi and Mario Salieri have offshored their operations to Eastern Europe. In other words, much of what we may call ‘Italian porn’ is now inextricably linked to the distinctive global networks of cultural production, distribution and consumption within which pornography operates. Nevertheless, the idea of a nationally-specific porn imaginary still seems to occupy a peculiar position in the globalization of pornography, one that self-consciously marks its imagined national boundaries, while also shedding light on their permeability. What does Italian porn culture look like then? Can ‘Italian’ function as a term that ‘localizes’ the global production and circulation of porn? What would this local perspective open up? And, finally, what would this eccentric cultural field say about Italian culture and about its relation to globalization and global media?

We invite proposals that explore, but are not restricted to, the following topics:

• The history of Italian pornography: from classic stag films to the ‘double versions’ and adult magazines of the 1970s, from the glorious video era of the 1980s and 1990s to the digital revolution and beyond
• Circulation and consumption of pornography in Italy, from illegality to the advent of web 2.0
• Italian performers, directors, producers
• Dissident and alternative pornographies, feminist/queer/anti-racist experimentations, the relation between pornography and activism
• Italian ‘cross-over’ porn stars (Cicciolina, Moana, Selen, Rocco Siffredi, Eva Henger, etc.) and their relationship with the Italian ‘mainstream’ entertainment industry, and with Italian culture, society and politics more in general
• Italian porn stars in US and European production, past and present
• The national industry: past productions practices and studios (e.g., Diva Futura), and present delocalization to Eastern Europe
• Nationally-specific trends, genres, styles, tropes
• Regional varieties and subgenres (e.g. Concetta Licata, Mario Salieri, 1994)
• Gender, age and dis/ability in Italian porn
• Sexualization of race and ethnicity in Italian porn
• ‘Italian porn’ as a (commercial and aesthetic) brand
• The notion of ‘Italian’ as an exotic signifier when related to the perception and the branding of specific stars, performers, and directors
• ‘Italian’ as a marker of ‘otherness’ and exoticism when related to specific series or products (e.g., Gape in Italy, Omar Galanti, 2013, Evil Angel)
• ‘Italian’ as a category in pornographic aggregators (pornhub, youporn, xvideos, etc.)
• Grassroots practices in Italian pornography and ‘local’ pro-am micro-celebrities
• Intersections between pornography and ‘legitimate’ Italian cinema
• Critical discourses on pornography circulating in the Italian public sphere

Guest Editors: Giovanna Maina (University of Turin), Sergio Rigoletto (University of Oregon), Federico Zecca (University of Bari)

Deadline for proposals: July 15, 2021

 

Send your proposals to: giovanna.maina@unito.it, srigolet@uoregon.edu, federico.zecca@uniba.it

 

Call for Submissions