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.
