This chapter explores the storied golden age of porn, a period from roughly 1972 to 1984, when hardcore porn took a form similar to that of Hollywood film: feature length, narrative and character driven, screened in theaters, and reviewed in mainstream publications. This era took shape due to a confluence of technological, cultural, and legal factors—factors that also contributed to the era’s disappearance. The golden age, a fleeting historical chapter in porn, remains a nostalgic touchstone for understandings of the sexual revolution, American cinema, and the porn industry. This status leaves the golden age in a peculiar, almost mythological position, symbolic of a range of concerns related to art, sex, censorship, spectatorship, and categories of art and pornography that risks glossing over the period’s complexity.

Although the dictum “I know it when I see it” has often been used to describe pornography, for the range of erotic materials emanating from south Asia this saying does not hold true. In south Asian countries what is considered “pornographic” often overlaps with discussions of obscenity. There is a fine line separating the obscene and the pornographic, and in the south Asian context the blurriness of this line often casts a shadow over what we think we know about pornography. Some of this has to do with colonial encounters and the legal ramifications thereof, which still linger in south Asia. By surveying legal regimes, institutional structures, and mediated sexual expressions ranging from audiovisual, textual, and performative forms, this chapter aims to demonstrate how the geopolitical and cultural nuances of south Asia can sometimes render non-explicit, non-normative sexual expressions “pornographic.”

This chapter explores the development, operations, and effects of pornography platforms. It deploys cases from leading porn platform companies to illustrate key principles of platform markets, infrastructures, and governance. Although the chapter considers the activities of actors moving within these network, as well as stakeholders adjacent to them, the focus is not porn content or creators. Instead, this overview is primarily concerned with the technological and commercial structures of platforms, and how power relations are defined through their systems.

This chapter explores the various research methods employed by scholars of adult film and media. As a nascent and interdisciplinary field, adult film and media researchers come from disparate disciplines and employ various methodologies, often in provocative combinations. This chapter begins with a summary of the emergence of the first academic texts about pornography from the discipline of film studies and the ensuing reliance on visual analysis or close reading, then explores other works that emerged out of history, film history, and sociology that utilize archival research and ethnographic methods, such as interviews and participant observation. The chapter introduces readers to some of the most influential scholars and texts in the field, and details methods for the study of film and video, periodicals, live theatre, and sex shops. Works covered include meditations on affect and form, readings of race and class, industry studies, studies of labor, and histories of various media formats. The purview of adult media studies is vast and its objects diverse; this chapter suggests that its method might in fact be methodological promiscuity.

This chapter surveys the state of pornography and sexually explicit audio-visual media in southeast Asian countries by considering the political, religious, economic, technological, and moral discourses surrounding it. Instead of doing an in-depth analysis of these discourses, the chapter attempts to describe them comparatively in the hopes of sparking scholarly debates informed by comparative approaches and initiating in-depth academic research on the local and national contexts in southeast Asia. The chapter considers pornography as a text that facilitates socialization and is crucial to the (re)production of gendered and sexualized knowledge. In terms of politics, law, religion, culture, and morality, pornography in southeast Asia is considered taboo, even illegal, because it disrupts established moral, religious, and political regimes. Economically, however, pornography sees more opportunities for production, distribution, and consumption, especially for queer individuals, as digital media enables individuals to build communities, socialize, and construct their identities using pornographic media. Lastly, the chapter charts the approaches of different southeast Asian countries in addressing child pornography, which is a pervasive issue in the region.

This article examines the linguistic and cultural politics surrounding New Nollywood’s pursuit of global recognition through the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (AABIFF). Using the disqualification of Nigeria’s first ever submission and the rejection of three Yoruba-language films by the Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) as case studies, the article explores how language, the question of authenticity and institutional gatekeeping intersect in shaping the international trajectories of Nigerian cinema. The analysis situates these controversies within broader debates about the dominance of English in African cultural productions, the legacy of colonialism and the ongoing efforts to valorize indigenous languages in cinema. Through historical contexts, the article argues that while economic motivations and the desire for wider circulation partly drive the preference for English, indigenous linguistic endowments remain central to how authenticity in cinematic representations is constructed and interpreted. Using examples from Old Nollywood, the article ultimately calls for a renewed investment in Indigenous language films. It argues that this is both an aesthetic and a strategic choice, not just for AABIFF but also for repositioning Nigerian cinema within global circuits.

Migration is an age-old phenomenon and a social issue that transcends geographical borders. In African cinema, it is a popular theme, as evidenced by Ousmane Sembène’s (1966)Black Girl and Djibril Diop Mambéty’s (1973)Touki Bouki, two films that account for most of the scholarly work on early African cinema and migration. This article contributes to African cinema and migration scholarship by analysing contemporary films released during the last decade. It focuses exclusively on voluntary migrants whose experiences are often delegitimized. It examines the representation of transnational migration from the perspective of sub-Saharan Africa, using Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri’s (2020)Eyimofe: This Is My Desire and Rosine Mbakam’s (2018)Chez Jolie Coiffure, as the source texts. The discussions combine film analysis with survey data received from African immigrants. The article suggests that the films analysed engage with and depict aspects of migrant life in ways that resonate with real experiences of migrants.