Rated A book cover

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Darshana Sreedhar Mini in Conversation with FARRAH Freibert

Darshana Sreedhar Mini discusses her book Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (University of California Press 2024) with Farrah Freibert, author of Nothing Censored, Nothing Gained: Obscenity Law and Histories of Queer Distribution and Exhibition (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming as part of the Screening Sex book series).

Are there Disciplinary Differences in Writing about Pornography?

By Alan McKee, University of Technology Sydney and Roger Ingham, University of Southampton, UK. In 2016, Professors Alan McKee (a humanities researcher) and Roger Ingham (a psychology researcher) submitted to the Australian Research Council a successful grant application for a project entitled ‘Pornography’s effects on audiences: explaining contradictory research data’ (DP170100808). We were approached by Feona Attwood, who knew of the grant and asked if we could provide a piece for this special issue that explored ‘writing about porn across disciplines’. The process of writing the grant application had already provided us with plenty of rich data about differences in disciplinary vocabularies and the ways in which various words implied different objects of study and different relationships to objects of study. Rather than trying to hide these differences we decided to make them the focus of the article. This piece presents three voices – Alan (AM), Roger (RI) and the original grant application (GA) – in trialogue, as a tentative beginning to the exploration of some potential differences between academic disciplines in conceptualising, researching and writing about pornography.