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Book Launch: Indie Porn by Zahra Stardust
December 3 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm AEST
Join us for the Book Launch and In Conversation for Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance (Duke University Press) by Dr Zahra Stardust.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In Indie Porn, Dr Zahra Stardust examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy. Herself a porn performer and participant, Stardust takes readers behind the scenes, offering intimate insights into this sociopolitical movement. She finds politicians who watch porn in parliament, protesters leading face-sitting demonstrations, sex workers making COVID-safe pornography, and artists reverse-engineering porn detection software. Against the backdrop of a global gig economy, Stardust documents the promises of indie porn to democratize content, revolutionize production, and redistribute wealth while outlining the fantasies of regulators, whose illusions of what porn is and does foreclose possibilities for transformation. Inevitably, as these paradigms collide, porn producers engage in creative tactics to hustle for survival and visibility, from ethical certification to law reform, sometimes reproducing hierarchies of stigma themselves. By highlighting how porn stigma is bound up with intersecting oppressions, Stardust identifies these junctions as coalitional opportunities for changing social relationships to sex, work, and capitalism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Zahra Stardust is a Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S).
Zahra is a socio-legal scholar working at the intersections of sexuality, technology, law and social justice. Her doctoral research, which won the Dean’s award for Best PhD Thesis, examined the regulation of queer and feminist pornographies through criminal laws, classification codes, platform governance and the capitalist co-optation of sexual subcultures.
Over the last 15 years Zahra has worked in policy, advocacy, legal and research capacities with community organisations, NGOs and UN bodies on human rights in Australia and internationally. Zahra has taught in law, criminology, public policy, social research, gender studies and politics at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales.
Recently, Zahra has worked on ARC funded projects exploring intoxication evidence in sexual assault trials, the policing of public order offences and the criminalisation of homelessness.
As Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the QUT Node of ADM+S, Zahra will be aligned to the Institutions research program and will undertake research to investigate how automated systems can be held accountable against public interest standards.
Read Dr Stardust’s recent papers on financial discrimination against sex workers, police surveillance on dating apps, sex tech entrepreneurs, sex positive social media, automated whorephobia, sex work regulation, post-work politics, platform community standards and authenticity in a gig economy.
Watch Dr Stardust’s recent panels for the World Association for Sexual Health, on sexual and reproductive health and rights at the UN University and decoding stigma at the Berkman Klien Centre at Harvard Law School.
