[ecrea] CFP: Porn on the Couch: Sex, Psychoanalysis, and Screen Cultures/Memories

*Porn on the Couch: Sex, Psychoanalysis, and Screen Cultures/Memories____*

Ricky Varghese____

In a letter he penned to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, dated August 1, 
1899, Sigmund Freud made an uncanny observation: “I am accustoming 
myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process involving 
four persons.” What could he have meant by this suggestive remark 
regarding how a sexual act mediates desire between subjects and objects? 
How might we expand upon it as having something of importance to say 
about the complex relationship between sex and its mediation in the form 
of pornography?____

This special issue of Porn Studies will focus on the complex and layered 
relationship between pornography and psychoanalysis. As can be seen from 
Freud’s remark, theories of sexuality have always preoccupied 
psychoanalytic scholars. As such, it seems precisely urgent to consider 
the ways by which psychoanalytic theory could be applied to the study of 
pornography as an object given over to rigorous examination. To think 
psychoanalytically about pornography would mean to both explore and 
address how categories such as desire and pleasure come to influence the 
very means of pornographic production, the very modes by which it comes 
to be distributed, and how it mediates sex and sexual practices.____

What is the position of desire in relation to pornographic authorship 
and viewership/consumption? How do we reconcile the experience of 
pleasure with the complicated field of the visual that pornography 
represents? What would it look like to redeem pornographic consumption 
from the negative connotations of perversion and pathology? In other 
words, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, might there be the possibility 
for a reparative or redemptive reading of pornography that is informed 
by a psychoanalytic emphasis on the study of desire? Who or what are the 
subjects and objects of desire in the visual field of pornography? What 
sorts of psychoanalytic readings are possible of pornographic texts (in 
any media) and to what end might we endeavor at undertaking such an 
interpretative approach? How do well-worn psychoanalytic categories, 
such as that of loss, lack, mourning, melancholia, attachment, trauma, 
and the fetish, to name a few, inform pornographic interpellation in 
both the producer and viewer? What are the ethical and methodological 
implications connected to thinking psychoanalytically about pornography?____

Pornography could also be considered as a bridge between screen cultures 
and screen memories. The screen as a conceptual apparatus, in both 
pornographic production/viewership and psychoanalysis, becomes important 
to consider here – what does the screen hold in with respect to desire 
and pleasure? What does it keep out? Would it be correct to assume that 
memory and sex, in how it is mediated and/or consumed, might be 
interconnected? If so, what is the position of memory as it informs 
sexual choices, practices, and fantasies and, thereby, inform the use of 
porn?____

Fundamentally, this issue will attempt to stage a psychoanalytic 
interpretation (as opposed to an intervention) of pornography to 
critically delineate the ways in which the study of the representation 
of sex, sexuality, and sexual practice cannot be fully rendered or 
possible if the question of unconscious desire remains unanswered.____

This special issue invites papers exploring such questions across a 
range of media including, but not limited to films, internet videos, 
pornographic literature, and pulp fiction.____

*__ __*

*Possible topics might include:*____

·Pornography and theories of sexuality.____

·Psychoanalytic concepts (like attachment, investment, transference) and 
their relationship to porn.____

·Fetishes.____

·Screens and boundaries.____

·Subject/object, producer/consumer relationality____

·Porn and feminist psychoanalytic theory.____

·Mediation – production, distribution, circulation, use/consumption – 
and porn.____

·Porn, analysis, and queer(ing) sex and sexuality.____

·Trauma, memory, and pornography.____

·Ethics and politics of sex, porn, and psychoanalysis.____

·Pornography and the clinic.____

·Reception and affect.____

*Submission Details____*

Articles for peer-review should be between *6000-7000 words*. Shorter 
thought pieces of approximately *1500-2000 words *may also be submitted, 
and the editor will make a selection for the Forum section. All articles 
must include bibliographic information. For details about formatting and 
style please see Instructions for Authors 
<http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rprn20&page=instructions#.VYUQrhNViko>.

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