What can post-catastrophe films tell us about our current real-world circumstances?

This book proposes that a new sub-genre of film called ‘post-catastrophe’ is emerging that displays narratives directly analogous to our current predicament of runaway climate disruption. Post-catastrophe film sits in the space between blockbuster disaster movies that use scenes of destruction to blow the world up and disrupt the flow of humanity and post-apocalyptic films where a version of society has formed in the ashes of the disaster.

In these narratives, the characters are thrown into a world of unsettling circumstances in which they have to adapt and strive for survival and reimagine the world as it changes around them. We face a similar predicament."

Presents a diverse range of perspectives on contemporary superhero scholarship. It links in-depth close readings of central texts of the superhero discourse from a variety of media (comics, TV, film) with larger societal and cultural discourses such as cross-medial, meta-textual and more general intersections and negotiations between the figure of the superhero and culture.



The book explores various functionalizations of superheroes such as Batman, Iron Man or Watchmen within society, analysing how superheroes reflect and problematise ideology, the military industrial complex, public and private responsibility. Processes of identity construction are analysed by looking at the superheroes’ secret identity and the notion of masking. Furthermore, cultural and personal grief and trauma in relation to such discourses as race and politics are investigated.

The book presents an interpretation of neo-noir filmmaking through the lens of economics, based on readings of central neo-noir works from the noir revival of the early 1970s to recent films. Analyzing key themes and figures of neo-noir – desire and betrayal, corruption and alienation, the private detective and the femme fatale – the project reads neo-noir filmmaking as a privileged site for the expression of anxieties around work, money, trust, and exchange. Neo-noir filmmaking embodies a profound reflection on the hollowing-out of economic and social life, the collapse of trust, the erosion of institutions, and fears regarding legacy and identity, developments that have undermined the promise of American life in the long twilight of the American dream since the end of postwar prosperity.



Aimed at the many scholars and faculty who study and teach film noir and neo-noir at levels from high school to post-graduate. It will appeal as well to the extensive community of cinephiles enthusiastic about noir, those who attend “Noirvember” screenings at repertory movie houses, who read the websites of the Film Noir Foundation or Eddie Muller (the self-styled “Czar of Noir”), and participate in discussions of noir and neo-noir filmmaking on online forums.

China’s film industry policies play a pivotal role in governing production, distribution and exhibition, shaping the industry’s development. This study empirically analyses 32 national film policies (2001–20) to trace China’s strategic shift towards a state-controlled socialist cultural market – a framework designed to counterbalance the cultural impact of China’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession in 2001. By introducing the concept of the socialist cultural market, this article offers a novel analytical framework for understanding the evolution of China’s film policy and industry dynamics. The findings demonstrate that the government has institutionalized this model, enforcing ideological conformity through censorship, licensing and screening controls to prioritize ‘social effects’. Meanwhile, to enhance economic returns and global competitiveness, authorities have selectively liberalized production and co-exhibition regulations. This dual approach, however, generates a fundamental tension between ideological control and cultural exportation, which raises a concern on the global reception of its film industry. As of now, new policy documents have yet to be introduced to tackle this institutional tension.

This chapter begins with the story of breaking into a storage unit in an undisclosed location and the contents therein: some 2,700 boxes piled over six feet high—all that remained of the formerly legendary library and archives of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. I use the history of this collection and my involvement with it in order to forefront the work of archives and archivists. I review the state of the conversation (i.e. the lack thereof) between porn studies and archival studies—but I also draw from and discuss literature in museum studies, library and information science, cultural heritage preservation, knowledge organization, history of sexuality, and studies of film, media, and porn. Gathering these various scholarly threads together allows a turn to a discussion about the issues that result from humanists’ lack of engagement with GLAMS (galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and special collections) scholarship and practitioners. I conclude by offering some potential directions for future work, which might explore the “intersextions” between porn and archival studies. Appendixed to the chapter is a list of research archives and collections of interest to adult media scholars and porn studies.

This chapter provides a critical review of the literature on pornography in/and Africa. Through an examination of the existing literature, it argues that much of the popular and scholarly discourses on porn in Africa emphasize its harmful effects on African subjects, particularly women, teenage boys, and adolescent girls. Much of the discourse on porn is informed by moral panics and infantilizes Africans, reducing them to being susceptible and vulnerable to Western sexual cultures, which are often portrayed as being incompatible with African values. This chapter critiques the current state of “porn studies” in Africa for its limited social science and behavioral studies methodological approaches, which, unsurprisingly, conclude that exposure to porn at a young age negatively affects male adolescents’ sexual behavior and cognitive development. Furthermore, the emphasis on risk, behavior, and moral panics reiterates colonial imaginaries of African sexualities as deviant and dangerous, erasing the complex terrain of African sexual subjectivities, desires, and pleasures. By focusing solely on the “negative effects” of porn, researchers reinscribe dangerous “patriarchal and heterosexist policing of women’s freedom and rights.” Informed by African feminists’ calls to center pleasure and alternative frameworks, this chapter asks us to rethink the role of sexual pleasure in Africa to generate more productive ways to understand African sexual agency and erotic autonomy away from discourses of danger, contamination, and harm.

This chapter provides a history of trans pornography in the United States. It traces its origins back to the 1960s and charts its evolution from community-produced niche magazines to a highly commercialized genre of studio pornography that is increasingly being integrated into mainstream straight pornography. Initially a largely community-controlled genre during the 1960s and 1970s, trans pornography was popularized and commercialized in the 1990s by a string of cisgender men who marketed it to straight-identified men. From the 2010s onward some of the largest conglomerates in the pornography industry have begun taking a direct stake in its production. This history provides a detailed overview of the genre’s major players, featuring key performers, producers, and studios that have all crucially shaped it. It details the persistent exclusion trans people have faced in this area of the economy and shows how, against all odds, trans porn workers have managed to successfully assert themselves alongside their cisgender counterparts in some of the industry’s biggest productions.

Starting with the contested figure of the dick pic, this chapter explores the meanings and boundaries of the notion of porn. Combining conceptual reflection with empirical inquiry, it asks how the users of Alaston Suomi, a Finnish sexual social media platform dedicated to naked self-shooting, discuss the prevalence of dick pics on the site, and how they deploy the notion of porn when discussing user-generated content. Within this interview material, dick pics emerge both as objects of appreciation and as markers of deficient aesthetic ambition and social awkwardness. Meanwhile, porn weaves in and out of how self-shooters make sense of their output and the platform’s functions in ways pointing out the term’s limitations when seeking to understand networked sexual exchanges. I suggest that, in a context in which nudity is weeded out from mainstream social media in a horizontal manner in the name of safety, yet in which forms of online sexual content continue to multiply, scholarly inquiry holding on to the marker of porn as descriptive of the things circulated risks posing normative classifications and losing touch with how this content is made sense of.

This chapter tracks the development of gay male visual pornographies in Euro-American contexts from the early 1970s to the present. It highlights the problematic of gay pornography as visual documents of sex acts as well as fantasies underscoring those sex acts. The chapter’s subsections focus on gay male porn as an archive of abundance, the connections between gay porn and gay liberation, the role of HIV/AIDS, the operations of race and racial fetishism, and the ways that media technologies, formats, and platforms shape gay porn temporalities.

Bisexual male adult film and video and its successive reimaginings over time can be situated within the story of two distinct modes of the adult industry’s production and marketing. The theatrical and early home video eras attempted “crossover” to a larger “mainstream” audience through high production values, major stars, and well-crafted stories. This was replaced by a high-output mode of production, which led to a parsing of the (imagined) audience into ever smaller niches, each with its own (presumed) specialized interest(s). Beginning with the rapid growth of the adult video industry in the late 1980s, it expanded by orders of magnitude after the industry adopted online digital content delivery in the early twenty-first century. Bisexual male porn is one of the most illuminating case studies through which to chart this change, and it is also a useful example of decades-long debates within the industry itself about its audience(s) and how to effectively cultivate them. Key events in this process include the failed 1975 theatrical release of Both Ways (dir. Jerry Douglas); the successful reintroduction of these elements on home video; the creation of new stars, such as Jeff Stryker; and the dizzying variety of combinations and scenarios offered on the internet.

This chapter investigates the role of transnational entrepreneurs in the economic development of western Europe’s pornographic film business during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, it shows how these entrepreneurs were crucial to the growth of the industry by capitalizing on cross-border networks to expand markets and benefit from changing pornography regulations. The chapter outlines three key, interrelated features of transnational entrepreneurship in this context: 1) acquiring social capital through building international networks via events such as trade fairs, film festivals, and magazine classifieds; 2) converting this social capital into economic capital by expanding market reach across borders through smuggling and distribution, or by importing goods from more permissive countries; and 3) exploiting location-specific advantages by moving operations to countries with attractive business conditions, such as relaxed censorship. Examining figures such as Walter Bartkowski, John Lindsay, and Lasse Braun, it demonstrates how transnational entrepreneurs facilitated the cross-border movement of pornography by brokering relationships between economic actors. This enabled the transition of pornography from an illicit commodity to an industrialized, commercialized business. The chapter highlights transnational entrepreneurship as crucial for understanding western Europe’s evolving pornography trade and the role such “porn-brokers” played in its international development during this period.

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.