It’s not always perfectly reciprocal, but it has that potentiality for reciprocity which straight porn, geared to the man boffing the woman and the woman exhibiting a sometimes very fake-looking ecstasy, rarely has. I look at you and you look at me and it goes back and forth. More importantly - and this is something interesting I appreciate in both gay porn and lesbian porn - you get these reciprocal, cruising looks. But in gay male porn there aren’t any women to be objectified.
Man was seen as the subject, woman as the object of the gaze. One of the first ways feminist critics began to look at heterosexual pornography was to identify the problem of a “male gaze” at an objectified woman. And this is why it is unfortunate that so many of the debates around pornography from the very beginning assumed that it was only heterosexual. In this week’s conversation, Williams discusses her long-running interest in cinematic “body genres” - among them horror films, melodramas, and pornography - that aim to move the viewer “in often quite literal ways.” She also explores the distinctive imperatives of gay porn (both male and female), and discusses the many ways in which it can’t be truly said that “a kiss is just a kiss.”ĭoes queer porn differ from straight porn? Williams described the nature of academic porn analysis, focusing on changes in the field since the late ’80s in the primary context of heterosexual porn. Pornography, she maintains, is no longer “hidden away” but has incrementally become more visible - first in the early 1970s, when it began to show up on movie-theater screens, and on into the present day, where it comes into the home via videocassettes, DVDs, and the Internet.
Williams, a pioneer in the field of academic pornography research, spoke about the pervasiveness of moving-image pornography and the accompanying change in the public’s attitude toward that cinematic genre. 30 issue we published the first part of an interview with Linda Williams, professor of rhetoric and film studies and former director of the campus Program in Film Studies. Kissing, once the sex act for all occasions, is today's foreplay and afterplay, says film-studies professor Linda Williams.įor Linda Williams, screen kisses of the past were less lascivious than today’s, but far more interesting.