"Who Wants to be a Porn Star? Sex and Violence in Today’s Porn Industry"

Women’s Heritage Slide Presentation, Michelle M. Sauer
March 18-Tuesday-11:00 a.m.-Olson Library, Lower Level

"Who Wants to be a Porn Star?" is a slide show written and produced by Gail Dines (American Studies, Wheelock College), Rebecca Whisnant (Philosophy, University of Dayton), and Robert Jensen (Journalism, University of Texas at Austin) for Feminists Against Pornography in conjunction with NWSA.

This presentation includes graphic, sexually explicit images, including some commonly referred to as hardcore pornography. No one under the age of 18 should be in the audience. The presentation discusses the idea that today’s world has become "pornified": it presents a feminist analysis of pornography and of the increasingly pornographic culture in which we live. As part of this conversation, the presentation addresses the constant bombardment of Americans with hypersexualized images of women and provides a critical analysis of these sexist and racist images that are so harmful to children, women, and men, and to interpersonal relationships. This presentation takes seriously pornography’s consequences in the lives of the women in the industry, the men who use pornography, and the women who live and work with those men. This critique of pornography is rooted not in a reactionary sexual morality, but in concerns about this material’s very real effects in the world.

Michelle M. Sauer
Michelle M. Sauer, PhD, is Associate Professor and Coordinator of English and Gender Studies at Minot State University (Minot, ND), and Managing Editor of Medieval Feminist Forum. She holds degrees from Purdue University, Loyola University Chicago, and Washington State University, all in English with an emphasis on medieval literature and culture. Her book the Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry will be out in May 2008. Several more volumes are forthcoming, including an edition of the Wooing Group (U Exeter), a translation of the Wooing Group & A Discussion of the Love of God (Boydell & Brewer), How to Write about Chaucer (Facts on File), and The Lesbian Pre-Modern (with Noreen Giffney and Diane Watt; Palgrave). She has also published on anchoritism, mysticism, asceticism, Church history, hagiography, lesbian history, and queer theory, among other topics. In 2006, she was the recipient of the first LGBT-Religious Archives Network (sponsored by the Chicago Theological Institute) prize for her article "Representing the Negative: Positing the Lesbian Void & Medieval English Anchoritism." Current projects include a book about the anchoritic movement in late medieval England, a photographic guidebook to extant English anchorholds, and various articles and essays.