“The Hardest of Hardcore”: Locating Feminist Possibilities in Women’s Extreme Pornography.

Among the sites for examining the politics of pleasure, the production of extreme commercial pornography may be among the most controversial. But precisely because it is so fraught and contested, it is also among the most productive for considering women's often contradictory roles, perspectives, and positioning in the industry. The received wisdom in the porn industry, and in American society more broadly, is that if women are interested in porn at all—as producers or viewers—then they must prefer the softer side of hardcore: narratives with high production values and the trappings of romance. The women who create extreme porn therefore raise some interesting questions about the gendered (and classed) assumptions surrounding conceptions of women's porn. Original research, including personal interviews with forty filmmakers, demonstrates how women directors can challenge conventional notions of femininity and broaden understandings of female desire in unexpected ways, by exploring edgy or dangerous pornographic fantasies. Using production studies methodologies, this article argues that they do so through their films' content and/or through their labor as female cultural producers. Their creative control is constrained by governmental regulation, economic and industrial imperatives, and genre conventions. Women filmmakers creating "extreme" content, which edges up against the legal category of obscenity, nonetheless present a meaningful challenge to the repressive structure of government regulation. They contribute, if not as dramatically as the more politically motivated filmmakers making overtly feminist porn, to increasing the diversity of the industry's output, to revising conventional images of femininity, and, collectively, to opening up avenues of access for future women filmmakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]