Join us for the launch of DMRC Chief Investigator, Dr. Zahra Stardust‘s new book, Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance. Zahra will be in conversation with Dr Hilary Caldwell at Avid Reader, West End.
DATE: Thursday 21 November
TIME: 6.00pm for a 6.30pm start | 60 mins
LOCATION: Avid Reader, West End
TICKETS: Book your ticket here
ABOUT THE BOOK
In Indie Porn, Dr. Zahra Stardust examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy. Herself a porn performer and participant, Stardust takes readers behind the scenes, offering intimate insights into this sociopolitical movement. She finds politicians who watch porn in parliament, protesters leading face-sitting demonstrations, sex workers making COVID-safe pornography, and artists reverse-engineering porn detection software. Against the backdrop of a global gig economy, Stardust documents the promises of indie porn to democratize content, revolutionize production, and redistribute wealth while outlining the fantasies of regulators, whose illusions of what porn is and does foreclose possibilities for transformation. Inevitably, as these paradigms collide, porn producers engage in creative tactics to hustle for survival and visibility, from ethical certification to law reform, sometimes reproducing hierarchies of stigma themselves. By highlighting how porn stigma is bound up with intersecting oppressions, Stardust identifies these junctions as coalitional opportunities for changing social relationships to sex, work, and capitalism.
Zahra will also be holding book launches across November and December. For tickets and further details, see below.
Sydney Book launch:
Zahra Stardust in-conversation with Tilly Lawless | Better Read Events
Public porn panel in Perth:
Policy Taboos: Let’s Talk About…Pornology, Pornucation & Pornocracy
Perth Book launch:
BOOK LAUNCH Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance