THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2024 | INSTORE EVENT
6.00pm for a 6.30pm start | 60 mins
Join us for the launch of Zahra Stardust's Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In Indie Porn, Zahra Stardust examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy. Herself a porn performer and participant, Stardust takes readers behind the scenes, offering intimate insights into this sociopolitical movement. She finds politicians who watch porn in parliament, protesters leading face-sitting demonstrations, sex workers making COVID-safe pornography, and artists reverse-engineering porn detection software. Against the backdrop of a global gig economy, Stardust documents the promises of indie porn to democratize content, revolutionize production, and redistribute wealth while outlining the fantasies of regulators, whose illusions of what porn is and does foreclose possibilities for transformation. Inevitably, as these paradigms collide, porn producers engage in creative tactics to hustle for survival and visibility, from ethical certification to law reform, sometimes reproducing hierarchies of stigma themselves. By highlighting how porn stigma is bound up with intersecting oppressions, Stardust identifies these junctions as coalitional opportunities for changing social relationships to sex, work, and capitalism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Zahra Stardust is a rainbow-haired, textile-loving artist and scholar. Her book Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance builds on her 15 years as a professional undresser, award-winning stripper, pole dancer and porn performer. With an international research portfolio spanning sex worker activism, LGBTQ+ health, sexual rights and sextech, she brings a cultural and media studies approach to sexual health. She is a Chief Investigator in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and is passionate about somatic sex education, intimacy coordination and maximalist fashion.
