Pornohealing: Pornography as a healing process for individuals with a history of sexual violence

By taking as a starting point “The Clit List,” a pornographic database that includes porn material addressed to individuals who have experienced sexual harassment(s) and/or assault(s), this essay brings forward the following question: can pornography take the form of a healing process for individuals with a history of sexual violence? In order to provide an answer, alternative uses and aspects of pornography will be explored, with a particular focus on queer, feminist, and ethical porn. Following the contemporary history of pornography, I engage with both Queer Theory by discussing queer feminist approaches to porn, but also Affect Theory by sharing queer feminist approaches to trauma and the potential healing that an (erotic) film can induce in the spectator. More than simply seeking for alternative aspects of porn, this essay accounts for the (re)introduction of pornography as a productive media with a sexual healing possibility.

Loving a Disappearing Image

ABSTRACTThe author explores how a viewer identifies with a decaying or disintegrating film or videotape, given that cinema is, in effect, dying even as we watch it. She discusses several experimental films and videos that take as their subject the disintegration of film, often erotic film. A psychoanalytic model of melancholia is posited for this identificatory process, but it is found to be unsatisfactory since it is premised on the maintenance of the ego's coherence. Instead a model of devotional melancholia is posited for how one might love a disappearing image.

3 Continents Nantes 2005

FESTIVAL DES 3 CONTINENTS NANTES 2005 The 27th Festival of 3 Continents in Nantes (22-29 November 2005), a pioneer in France for exploring unknown film industries around the world has been hard pressed in recent years to find virgin territories as the world has come to resemble a global village. With the success of the Afghan program last year, Libya was on the agenda for 2005 but to negotiate with Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi did not prove to be such an easy matter. Ivory Coast was the replacement, a tiny film industry that nonetheless gave us perhaps the most erotic film to come out of Africa, Désiré Ecaré's 1985 classic, Visages de femmes (Faces of Women). From Turkey, Melein Düüü (Angel's Fall), perhaps Turkey's first incest story told in a minimalist, reflective mode was part of the competition that included eight films from Asia, two from Latin America (Play by Alicia...