Porn on the Couch

Book excerpt: This book considers pornography as a bridge between screen cultures and screen memories. The screen as a conceptual apparatus, in both pornographic production/ viewership and psychoanalysis, becomes important to unpack as such— what does the screen hold in with respect to desire and pleasure? What does it keep out? Are sex and memory interconnected? And if so, what is the status of memory as it informs sexual choices, practices, and fantasies and, thereby, informs the use of porn? Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, might there be the possibility for a reparative or redemptive reading of pornography that is informed by a psychoanalytic emphasis on the study of desire? Who or what are the subjects and objects of desire in the visual field of pornography? What sorts of psychoanalytic readings are possible of pornographic texts (in any media) and to what end might we undertake such an interpretative approach? How do well- worn psychoanalytic categories, such as loss, lack, mourning, melancholia, attachment, trauma, and the fetish, inform pornographic interpellation in both the producer and viewer? What are the ethical and methodological implications connected to thinking psychoanalytically about pornography? These are but some of the questions that this collection of essays explores. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of media and cultural studies, sociology, psychology, and mental health. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Porn Studies.