Intellect Handbook of Adult Film and Media

The Intellect Handbook of Adult Film and Media collects 36 chapters in six broad sections related to the study of adult film and media: History; Methodologies and Pedagogies; Representations; Production, Spectatorship, and Distribution; Area Studies and Transnationalism; and Law, Health, Policy, and the State. These chapters offer a survey of the discipline, with overviews of the primary literature, important histories, and essential arguments. The Handbook is designed as a reference work and resource for emerging scholars and educators teaching undergraduate courses on film, media, gender, sexuality, or porn studies.

This handbook fills an important gap within cinema and media studies by examining sexually explicit media content and the context for its circulation, production, consumption, and broader reception. Through these essays and the extensive body of literature they engage with, it aims to support the continued growth of adult film and media studies.

Peter Alilunas is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video (2016, University of California Press). His work has appeared in Film History; Camera Obscura; Television and New Media; JCMS; and Porn Studies, where he is a member of the editorial board. He is the co-editor with Whitney Strub of ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2023, Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and the co-editor of Screening Adult Cinema (2025, Routledge), with Desiree Embree and Finley Freibert.

Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His research interests include the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries, adult film, and the materiality of sexual media. His writing and editorial work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies; Information Society; Journal of Documentation; Porn Studies; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Scholar and Feminist Online; Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Litwin Books, 2013); Uncertain Archives (MIT Press, 2021); Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023); and elsewhere.

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (UC Press,2024) and co-editor ofSouth Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissibleand the Obscene (Routledge, 2024).