Feb 122013
 

Feminist_Porn_cover

This week on Sex Out Loud I celebrate the release of The Feminist Porn Book, a new book I co-edited. The Feminist Porn Book brings together for the first time writings by feminists in the adult industry and research by feminist porn scholars, and this week on Sex Out Loud I’ll be talking to my co-editors – Celine Parreñas-Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young – about our 5 year journey to get the collection published. This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world’s most lucrative and growing industries. Then I’ll talk to Claire Potter about REACT: THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE AT 50, an upcoming two-day symposium and exhibition on Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book.

Celine photoCeline Parreñas Shimizu teachs film and performance theory and production as Professor of Asian American, Comparative Literature, Feminist Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is part of a decades long history of race and media production in the U.C. system. She is the author of the award-winning book The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Duke University Press, 2007) and Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her first feature documentary Birthright: Mothering across Difference (2009) won Best Feature Documentary at the Big Mini DV Festival in 2009. Her films The Fact of Asian Women (2004), Super Flip (1997), and Mahal Means Love and Expensive are distributed by Progressive Films and Her Uprooting Plants Her (1995) is distributed by Third World Newsreel. Her numerous articles are included in the journals Concentric, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Signs, The Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Wide Angle and Theatre Journal.

 

MireilleMireille Miller-Young, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in popular culture and the sex industries. Her forthcoming manuscript, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women’s sex work in the porn industry.

 

Penley-Constance-low-res_0002Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies and editor or co-editor of the influential collections Feminism and Film Theory, Male Trouble, Technoculture, The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender, and The Feminist Porn Book. Her books include The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, and the forthcoming Teaching Pornography. Her collaborative art projects include MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee and Biospheria: An Environmental Opera. Penley is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award and the Kenneth Burke Society Prize for Excellence in Rhetorical Studies.

claire potterClaire Bond Potter has been Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement since 2012. Prior to that I worked at Wesleyan University. I am currently writing a political history of anti-pornography campaigns, Sex in Public: Feminism, the Reagan Revolution and the Politics of Pornography, 1968-2000 (due to be completed in 2014.) I received my BA in English Literature from Yale University and my Ph.D. in History from New York University. I am the author of War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1998) and an editor, with Renee Romano, of Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Since 2007 I have blogged at Tenured Radical, which moved to The Chronicle of Higher Education in July 2011.

Sep 242012
 

This Friday, September 28th on Sex Out Loud radio, USC Professor and Cultural Critic J. Jack Halberstam joins me for a discussion as part of my “Live in Los Angeles” series, recorded in studio in LA. We’ll talk about Halberstam’s new book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Queer Ideas Book) and how the well-renowned academic Halberstam brings sex and gender theory to a mass audience. Hear Halberstam riff on the lesbian baby boom, the divide between academics and activists, and gender representations in pop culture from Lady Gaga to Bridesmaids. Plus, Halberstam will confess how the Occupy Movement informed and inspired this book, how reproductive technologies have shifted the landscape of the family, and what “gaga feminism” is.

Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)(Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Queer Ideas Book) (Beacon Press, 2012) and has written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book on Fascism and (homo)sexuality.

Halberstam has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative) (Indiana University Press, 1995) and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures around the country and internationally every year. Lecture topics include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, and animation.

CONTEST TO WIN a copy of Jack Halberstam’s new book GAGA FEMINISM:

It’s simple: listen to Friday’s episode of Sex Out Loud. Listen either live at 5 pm PST/8 pm EST or on demand as a podcast. Then post your FAVORITE quote from the episode on Facebook or Twitter.

For Facebook: post on your public page in a public post. Tag my public page, Tristan Taormino, in your post so I can find it AND include this link to the show: http://www.voiceamerica.com/show/2096/sex-out-loud. (Note: you cannot use a shortened URL or FB will block it.)

For Twitter: include @SexOutLoudRadio and the link http://tiny.cc/SOLoud

You can enter a maximum of 5 times. Each quote posted during the live show will be entered twice, giving you up to ten chances to win! All posts must appear before this Sunday (Sept. 30) at midnight Pacific Time. Winner will be announced on Monday at 12 noon Pacific Time.

Aug 192012
 

 

This Friday, August 24th, I’m thrilled to welcome Jessica Valenti, writer and founder of feministing.com to Sex Out Loud. Jessica Valenti will talk to us about her latest book, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women, which was also turned into a documentary. We’ll discuss abstinence-only education, recent attempts by legislators to control women’s reproductive health care, and long term effects of the current climate on women and sexuality. I will also talk with Jessica, author of Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, about her experiences as a feminist writer and activist, and where she thinks the next generation of online organizing will lead us. Tune into our show at 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT.

Jessica Valenti – called one of the Top 100 Inspiring Women in the world by The Guardian – is the author of three books: Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut…and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, and The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women which has been made into a documentary by the Media Education Foundation. She is the editor of the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, which was named one of Publishers Weekly‘s Top 100 Books of 2009.

Jessica is also the founder of Feministing.com, which Columbia Journalism Review calls “head and shoulders above almost any writing on women’s issues in mainstream media.” Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian (UK), The American Prospect, Ms. magazine, Salon and Bitch magazine. She has won a Choice USA Generation award and the 2011 Hillman Journalism Prize for her work with Feministing. She has appeared on The Colbert Report and the Today show, among others, and was profiled in The New York Times Magazine under the headline “Fourth Wave Feminism.”

Jessica is also a widely sought-after speaker who gives dozens of speeches at universities and organizations in the U.S. and abroad. She received her Masters degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University.

Jun 122012
 


My next guest on Sex Out Loud is author, performer, playwright, and gender theorist Kate Bornstein. Join us on Friday, June 15 at 5:00 pm Pacific time/8:00 pm Eastern time on the VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network when we’ll talk about her new memoir, her years as a high-ranking Scientologist working directly for L. Ron Hubbard, her transition, BDSM and kink, her time as a collared slave, the documentary being made about her, her own mental health and the struggles LGBT folks with mental health issues face. Plus, she’ll read one of the most provoactive sections from A Queer and Pleasant Danger.

Kate Bornstein is an author, playwright and performance artist whose latest book is her memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger. Other published works include the books Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, My Gender Workbook, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives To Suicide For Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws and the cyber-romance-action novel, Nearly Roadkill with co-author Caitlin Sullivan. Kate’s plays and performance pieces include Strangers in Paradox, Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex Is Neither, Virtually Yours, and y2kate: gender virus 2000.

Kate’s books are taught in over 120 colleges and universities around the world; and she has performed her work live on college campuses, and in theaters and performance spaces across the USA, as well as in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria. Kate is currently touring colleges, youth conferences and high schools, speaking, leading workshops, and performing. Follow her on Twitter @KateBornstein.