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Doctoral Candidate

• Fields of Study

  • Gender and sexuality
  • Pornography
  • Industry
  • Technology
  • Feminist and queer theory
  • Historiography

• About

  A doctoral candidate (ABD) in Screen Arts & Culture, Peter is a former co-editor-in-chief of flowtv.org at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-editor of the Michigan Feminist Studies Journal.   

  Peter is currently working on his dissertation, "Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video, 1976-1986," which traces the industrial transition of the adult film industry from celluloid-based production and distribution to home video with the introduction of the Sony Betamax in 1976.  Arguing that this industrial transition was concomitant with a cultural shift in the regulation of gender and sexuality, this dissertation examines the myriad ways in which adult video both triggered and contributed to a wide-ranging set of tensions and anxieties surrounding the understanding of mediated sexualities.  From legal constraints to community censorship efforts, alongside the internal re-framing of pornography as a "respectable" object, the story of the transition of adult film to home video offers much to larger histories of gender, sexuality, and technology.

• Education

  • M.A. in Media Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2008
  • B.A. in English, University of Oregon, 2006

• Selected Publications:

• Articles

  • (2011) They Can't Do This to Us!: Alan Alda as (Anti)Feminist Signifier, Camera Oscura
  • (2011) The (In)visible People in the Room: Men in Women's Studies, Men and Masculinities
  • (2010) The Death and Life of the Back Room, Media Fields Journal
  • (2010) The Past is All Used Up: Orson Welles, Touch of Evil, and Erasure, Screening the Past