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

This book explores pornography as a bridge between screen cultures and screen memories, focusing on the screen as a conceptual apparatus and its implications for desire, pleasure, sex, and memory. It suggests a reparative or redemptive reading of pornography informed by psychoanalytic emphasis on the study of desire and offers psychoanalytic readings of pornographic texts.

Format: Hardback
Length: 128 pages
Publication date: 21 March 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book delves into the intricate relationship between pornography and screen cultures, exploring the role of screens as both mediums for pornographic production and consumption and as conceptual tools in psychoanalysis. It raises crucial questions about the screen's potential to evoke desire and pleasure, as well as the barriers it may erect. The text also examines the interconnectedness of sex and memory, exploring how memories shape sexual choices, practices, and fantasies, and in turn, influence the use of pornography. Drawing on the insights of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the book suggests that pornography can be approached from a reparative or redemptive perspective, informed by a psychoanalytic emphasis on the study of desire.

The book further explores the subjects and objects of desire within the visual field of pornography, considering the various psychoanalytic readings that can be applied to pornographic texts across different media. It examines how well-worn psychoanalytic categories such as loss, lack, mourning, melancholia, attachment, trauma, and the fetish inform pornographic interpellation in both producers and viewers. Additionally, the book raises ethical and methodological considerations related to thinking psychoanalytically about pornography, challenging readers to consider the potential benefits and drawbacks of such an approach.

This collection of essays is of interest to researchers and advanced students in media and cultural studies, sociology, psychology, and mental health. It provides a comprehensive examination of the complex interplay between pornography, screens, desire, and memory, offering valuable insights into the multifaceted nature of this contemporary phenomenon.

Weight: 417g
Dimension: 246 x 174 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032434278