ABSTRACT
Focusing on pornographic content generated by amateurs begins, to a degree, to undo ‘pornography’ as a point of reference, object of common knowledge and topic of public debate, policy and regulation. Largely, albeit not completely, detached from the porn industry as a system of production and distribution, the developments and histories of amateur pornography remain ill documented. These cultural artefacts are notably absent from publicly available media archives, yet enough traces of images, films and texts have remained to suggest that amateur production was both lively and multi-medial well before the rise of digital production and distribution and so-called user-generated porn. While DIY content is often associated with the affordances and specificities of networked media (e.g. Jacobs, 2007; McNair, 2013: 29–30), such claims come with the risk of ahistorical generalisation.
