Indie Porn Launch

Join us in celebrating the launch of Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance by Dr Zahra Stardust on Thursday 5 December in conversation with Frankie Van Kan.

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 socio-political 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.

“There is no one better positioned to tell the story of the indie porn revolution than porn practitioner and scholar Zahra Stardust. From porn sets to festivals, to the online world of search engine optimization and algorithms, Stardust draws on an impressive archive of ethnographic and interview data to illuminate a rapidly changing industry shaped by transnational linkages, regulatory frameworks, political possibilities, and reactionary politics. Deeply researched, beautifully written, and impressive in scope, Indie Porn will have an immediate and lasting impact.” — Lynn Comella, author of Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure

"The story of indie porn, as told by one of its brightest stars. Zahra hails from an international league of erotic artists as a talented performer, passionate advocate, and esteemed scholar. In a world where porn is gawked at by the media, scapegoated by politicians, and shunned by everyone else, Zahra's nuanced perspective from the inside reveals an honest and enlightened angle that is rare to see unless you've lived it yourself. Indie Porn is the next great book to join the cannons of sex work and adult cinema." — Jiz Lee, editor of Coming Out Like a Porn Star

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.

Frankie van Kan, aka Frankie Valentine Kan (AKA Frankie Valentine)— is an interdisciplinary queer artist working with live performance, costume, the written word and dance. Writer, sex worker and parent living in Naarm, she is devoted to spreading the gospel of pleasure through her work both onstage and off. Her practise explores the liberation of the female body, sex/uality, and queerness. A recipient of the Wheeler centre’s Hot Desk fellowship 2024 Frankie is currently working on a memoir sharing the title of her debut solo show—A Body at Work. Dubbed “... A dynamite piece of theatre” by ArtsHub, A Body at Work directed by Maude Davey has been heralded by public and critics alike and continues to tour Australia and overseas. Other performance highlights include working with Briefs and the award winning Seen and Heard cabaret, starring in and co-producing Baby Got Back and currently producing Stripped Queer, a naked spoken word event exploring radical vulnerability through the body and the written word which platforms the voices of queer artists. She has performed all over Australia and Europe including Paris Burlesque Festival, Edinburgh, Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne fringe festivals, The National Gallery of Victoria, Sydney World Pride and Melbourne Writers Festival. She has written for Archer magazine, Lip Magazine and Bowen Street Press.