REVIEW: Zahra Stardust, “Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance”

Cover, Indie Porn by Zahra Stardust. Image Courtesy Duke University Press.

REVIEW
Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance
By Zahra Stardust
Paperback ($28.95)
Duke University Press

By Alexandria Knapik

Mentions of sex, trauma, and crude language

Indie Porn by Zahra Stardust delivers a deeply researched and unapologetically diplomatic exploration of independent pornography as both a creative practice and a site of resistance. Drawing from over 2 decades of the movement’s history, scholarly research, and her own experiences as a performer, Dr. Stardust maps the precarious terrain in which indie pornographers operate. Often caught between criminalization, stigma, all types of censorship, algorithmic discrimination, and the digital world’s ever-present threat of content piracy. Rather than portraying these producers as victims or rebels on the margins, Dr. Stardust centers them as artists, activists, and laborers engaged in a broader struggle over sexual representation, technological access, and economic justice. It’s framed beautifully as a branch of performance art, normalizing the discussion in and of itself. In all frankness, it feels like a crazy read amid the political moment we’re in where there’s currently a bill moving in the legislative branch of the United States government considering a full national ban on porn (May 2025). Even so, that is ultimately what the book is about: everything that led us here and even suggests methods for meaningful change.

Through ethnographic storytelling and interviews across global contexts, Dr. Stardust invites readers behind the scenes of an underexamined industry in flux. She profiles sex workers developing COVID-safe filming protocols, protestors staging political demonstrations through performance, and artists hacking content moderation systems in acts of digital subversion. Across these encounters, Indie Porn demonstrates how independent producers across various art and activist disciplines can harness the aesthetics and ethics of DIY culture to envision alternative economies. In one case described in the book, sex performers are preparing for a fisting demonstration and use this opportunity to practice candor and reimagining with their audience.

“Like all sexual encounters, we never know what our bodies will be up for on the day. We explain to participants that our vaginal elasticity, lubrication, and capacity are affected by hormones, scar tissue, childbirth, menopause, medication, and trauma and that our relationships to them shift throughout our lifetime. We decide to present this lack of certainty not as a limitation, but rather as an opportunity to discuss why we deliberately avoid goal orientation. We decide to meet our cunts where they are at and expect no more from them than they are willing to provide in the moment.”

Dr. Stardust critically interrogates the regulatory fantasies of lawmakers, platforms, and those who attempt to sanitize or silence porn under the guise of safety and decency (even when it’s secretly what they’re looking forward to the most), while charting how producers navigate and challenge these constraints. At its core, the book argues that porn stigma is inextricably tied to intersecting oppressions and that confronting this stigma opens possibilities for coalition-building across movements for bodily autonomy, labor rights, and tech accountability. It reminds me of an Instagram post I saw recently from a trans woman who tops active Republican legislators who just want to “know what it feels like”. In its conclusion, there are important considerations about how dangerous it is to be part of the decision-making table, and yet how transformative it would be.

“Regulators fantasize that pornography is inherently dangerous, corruptive, and harmful and use this rationale to justify greater regulatory intervention, regulation, and surveillance… …Regulators tolerate pornography when it benefits them, and when it doesn’t, they treat it as expendable.”

A bold contribution to the fields of sex work, media studies, and critical legal theory, Indie Porn refuses respectability politics in favor of collective transformation. It’s a book about revolution, regulation, and resistance, the 3 words on the cool-toned blurred cover, and any radical absolutely should know it.

Alexandria Knapik is curator, organizer, artist and writer living in Chicago.

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