STOYA - Porn, the reason for everything else - Robert Jelinek (Ed.)

If it was once God who pervaded and determined every last corner of human existence, it is now porn, the sibling of sex. Pornography is omnipresent in today's converged media environments. Never has porn reached so many – and such diverse – public spaces as now, in the era of constantly emerging distribution channels. A general “pornification” of society and its medial constitution is now being postulated, something that is ultimately reflected in the expansion of the “pornographic” category itself. Filmed sexuality is always located within a nexus of word, image, and action that defines bodies, historically suggests their specific forms of desire, divides legitimate from illegitimate practices, and assists in producing their sexualization in the first place. These entanglements are subject to complex, media-specific processes and procedures whose investigation in the usual literature all too often remains unexact. Filmic forms of mediation are readily tarred with the same brush, as if this were justified by the cultural status of the material, the language, or the market. Pornographic actor and producer Stoya has made it her business to develop more female autonomy in porn, to reduce its heavyhanded patriarchical leanings, and to help expose the negative side effects of its production industry. For years, she's been a prominent and sought-after figure in glossy magazines, a writer on her own blogs, as well as an advocate for sex workers in general. Stoya knows the porn business all too well. Since signing her first contract with a major porn company twelve years ago, much has changed for her personally as well as in terms of pornography's general social, legal, and technological environments. Stoya loves to show that she loves her work, acting refreshingly freely and, in the meantime, independently, whether as an author, blogger, performer, director, producer, theater or Sci-Fi movie actor, or by using her internet platforms to seek out new semantic concepts and search terms to make pornography more accessible and appealing to all genders. 
 
DER KONTERFEI 047 / Paperback / English / 60 pages / ISBN 978-3-903043-36-7 / Limited Edition of 300 / Release Date December 2018