"In this paper, I want to sketch something of the relationship between pornographic film and modernity. Specifically, I want to show how these two terms have been brought together through several decades of scholarship in disparate disciplinary fields. My story is a selective Anglo-American one and engages with the two terms separately as well as together. I will present it chronologically, and it starts, although it doesn't begin, in 1979."

Professor Jill Matthews is Head of the School of Cultural Inquiry at ANU and a former professor in the School of History. Her research interests include popular culture, modernity, sexuality, silent cinema, pornography, and Australian and transnational cultural, social and gender history.