Peter Alilunas: "Closed (to the Profane) Due to Pressure from the Morality Squad: The Cinema 2000, Porn Studies, and Cultural Consecration."

Description

Peter Alilunas presented "Closed (to the Profane) Due to Pressure from the Morality Squad: The Cinema 2000, Porn Studies, and Cultural Consecration."  The growth of Porn Studies has been accompanied by an exciting surge in research related to adult film history, which has started to fill in long-neglected gaps in traditional film histories. With this growth, however, the field has also slowly begun constructing familiar boundaries and barriers, valuing and foregrounding some objects of study as worthy of scholarly interest while dismissing or ignoring others. To explore these tensions, this presentation explores a wide variety of historical moments, spaces, and places, and foregrounds the Cinema 2000, the legendary Yonge Street adult theater originally created by Max Allen. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s formulations of “legitimate” cultural pleasures—and the ways in which they must be “closed to the profane”—this presentation ultimately argued for an open and reflexive approach to studying adult film history.  

Peter Alilunas is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video (University of California Press, 2016). His work on the history and regulation of the adult film industry has appeared in various edited collections and venues, including Porn Studies, Post Script, Television & New Media, Film History, Cinema Journal, and Creative Industries Journal. He is the creator and co-director of the Adult Film History Project, an online archive dedicated to the preservation of documents related to adult film history, and serves on the editorial board of Porn Studies. He is currently researching material for a new book on the pre-history of online pornography.  Hosted by the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute, Centre for the Study of the United States, and Canadian Studies Program.