HARD-CORE - WILLIAMS,L

Hard Core is initially a historical study showing how the sexual explicitness of hardcore is located within cinema's initial promise of the visually real. The book is informed by a Foucauldian perspective on this 'will to truth' but also utilizes psychoanalytic and Marxist concepts of fetishism and its discussion of the main hardcore films is through genre. Its aim is to show how a seemingly male-oriented discourse actually exhibits ambiguities and polymorphously perverse pleasures, therefore making it possible for women to gain some erotic purchase on pornography. However, there are a number of problems with this analysis: in its use of Foucault, which promises a setting of pornography in more of a socio-political formation than is given; in the arguments on truth and fetishism, in the treatment of hardcore as a genre, which uses a restricted body of films to make a more general argument. A deeper attention to the institutional and social settings of varieties of pornography is therefore needed to give a more nuanced picture.