[csaa-forum] 'Sam Steward's Porn Archives' - Tuesday 14 October 2014

[Meredith Jones]

In addition to presenting Transforming Cultures’ Annual Lecture, Tim Dean will present a second, more intimate, lecture to which you are invited. Places are strictly limited, so RSVP early to guarantee your seat at:
Sam Steward’s Porn Archives
Professor Tim Dean, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

WHEN: Tuesday 14 October 2014
TIME: 5.45pm
WHERE: Meeting Room CB10.14.201 - UTS Building 10, Level 14 – 235-253 Jones Street, Ultimo MAP<http://maps.uts.edu.au/map.cfm>
RSVP: Essential, please RSVP to Claire.Moore at uts.edu.au<mailto:Claire.Moore at uts.edu.au>

This paper examines issues surrounding the preservation, storage, and organization of historical pornography, focusing on Sam Steward’s papers and personal effects.  It discusses the creation of a Steward archive in the broader context of the preservation—and destruction—of sexually explicit material.  Focusing on his sex journals, his sex Polaroids, and his meticulous recording of illicit liaisons between men over the course of half a century, I consider how Steward used pornography to archive sex against historical obliteration.  In so doing, my analysis explores how sexual minorities utilize the archival potential of porn, its capacity to capture and preserve the otherwise ephemeral sexual encounter, as a form of cultural memory.  What I find especially striking about Steward’s pornographic practice is that, thanks to its documentarian impulse, it offers evidence in multiple registers, from the historical to the scientific, and from the erotic to the forensic.  In this way, I suggest, Steward’s porn archives confound the distinction between erotica and scientia sexualis that, according to Michel Foucault, organizes the modern deployment of sexuality.  Finally, I claim that Steward’s porn archive remains resistant to publication not only because it contains biographically sensitive information, but also because it contains material traces of the bodies he encountered, in the form of pubic hair and semen samples.  The obdurate materiality of Steward’s pornography poses an ongoing challenge to its wider dissemination.  His archive preserves material that remains extraordinarily difficult to unconceal.


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