CENTER FOR SEX AND CULTURE

At Center for Sex & Culture, 1349 Mission
Donation suggested: sliding scale $5-30, NOTAFLOF

A special conversational event. Constance Penley has been teaching a porn studies class at UC Santa Barbara for years and has become one of the world's preeminent scholars of sexually explicit material, both the film/video kind as well as fan-generated slash fiction. Penley has taught "Topics in Film Genre: Pornographic Film" at UCSB since 1993; she'll talk about the many surprising responses to it both inside and outside the classroom -- including the way looking at porn historically as a genre and an industry invariably turns into a sex education class. Penley was also behind HBO's Porn 101 (where her expert role was reprised cutely by a naked Katie Morgan!), and she testified in United States v John Stagliano; she will address the crazy parallel universes of culture-as-we-live-it and the language of obscenity law.

Penley will be interviewed by professional sex and relationship geek Reid Mihalko of ReidAboutSex.com.

Professor Penley's major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of "Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies." Her most recent work includes NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender (ed. with Treichler and Cartwright). Her collaborative art projects include "MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee" (http://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/mpart/index.html) and "Biospheria: An Environmental Opera," on which she was co-librettist (crca.ucsd.edu/biospheria). Penley is a 2009 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award for "DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea." She currently serves as Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara carseywolf.ucsb.edu