Join us for the Book Launch and In Conversation for Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance (Duke University Press) by Dr Zahra Stardust. Dr Stardust is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and Society based at the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology.

In Indie Porn, 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.

Date: Tuesday 3 December

Time: 6-8pm

Location: Rabble Book Store, Maylands

Dr Zahra Stardust is a rainbow-haired, textile-loving, queer femme artist and scholar. Her book Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance builds on her 15 years as a professional undresser, award-winning stripper, pole dancer and porn star. With an international research portfolio spanning sex worker activism, LGBTQ+ health, sexual rights and sextech, she brings a cultural and media studies approach to sexual health. Her work has been published in books such as Coming Out Like a Porn Star (ed. Jiz Lee), the DIY Porn Handbook (ed. Madison Young) and Queer Sex Work (Routledge) and journals such as Porn Studies, Big Data and Society, and Social Media and Society. She is on the World Association for Sexual Health’s Sexual Justice Initiative and is passionate about somatic sex education, intimacy coordination and maximalist fashion.

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.

This event is a collaborations between Edith Cowan University and the UWA Public Policy Institute.

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