“It’s 2am, and I am filming a threesome scene in a hotel suite…” begins Dr Zahra Stardust’s Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance. Stardust goes on to recount her experience at the ninth annual Feminist Porn Awards, where pornographic films were played in an established cinema, replete with popcorn — an unimaginable scenario for readers in Australia, where criminal penalties exist for publicly screening sexually explicit material.

It is just one of many vignettes weaved through the rigorous research of Indie Porn. By pairing personal anecdotes from Stardust’s first-hand industry experience with a wealth of material drawn from in-depth interviews, critical theory and legal and archival scholarship, Indie Porn paints a vibrant and heartily political picture of the international indie porn scene. Stardust demonstrates her ability to be both a rigorous academic and a powerful storyteller.

Personal anecdotes provide a peek behind the curtain that those outside of the porn industry are unlikely to ever encounter, creating a humanising counter-narrative to those that seek to depict porn as devoid of community, political or cultural value. Indeed, a core purpose of the work is to articulate why indie porn is valuable. Some stories are titillating, sure, but they are also dynamic, politically charged, at times funny and others troubling. They exemplify the breadth of experiences within indie porn: as an industry, a social movement and a community. A standout comes towards the end of the book, in which Stardust is shooting a documentary about pornstar parents while six months pregnant. It is warm and intimate, painting a familial picture of pornography that will be surprising to many.

By drawing out the cultures of indie porn, Stardust pushes readers to see beyond issues of content classification, aesthetics and representation to consider the political economy of pornography. Crucially, this de-centres those who have only ever sat on the consumption side of the screen. Instead, Stardust positions pornography within broader systems of economic inequality, trade relationships and globalisation, and frames indie porn in terms of its efforts to “redistribute power, labour, and wealth in global media production.”

There is no shortage of examples of how indie porn producers and performers are making waves: from exploring collective ownership models and collaborative decision-making that devolves the conventional hierarchical relationship between producers and performers, to systems of mutual aid, resource exchange and skill-sharing. Stardust emphasises that “the liberatory promises of indie porn … are not simply about the content. They are about our relationship to work.” Such an emphasis on porn as labour is important, because too often the public debate focuses on issues of representation and consumption — porn as a product to consume or a text to analyse — but not so often as a workplace and a site of political organisation.

In this sense, Indie Porn sits within and builds upon a small but growing field that includes but goes beyond an articulation of sex work as work, including Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s anti-work and anti-capitalist politics in Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers Rights and Heather Berg’s use of pornography as a vehicle to unpack of the problems of work under capitalism in Porn Work. Indie pornographies, as articulated by Stardust, “aim to revolutionize conventional relations of worker/producer and labor/profit.”

In addition to in-depth interviews conducted with producers and performers of indie porn and other stakeholders, Stardust also draws from extensive legal and archival research to excavate and examine various frameworks of risk, harm and offensiveness spanning from historical obscenity and classification laws to today’s new forms of online content moderation.

It is here that the “regulatory fantasies” come into play. That is, the out-of-touch normative imaginary of what porn is and does that in turn leads to

sexist, queerphobic, ableist, and racist legal frameworks that govern pornography are based on simplistic narratives about the value and effects of sexual representations and do little to protect the well-being of performers.

Stardust’s interviewees exhibit frustration with lawmakers being “archaic” and “wildly divorced from sexual cultures.” In Australia, this is worsened by a severe lack of consultation with porn performers and sex workers in processes of developing legislation that targets their work. As someone who has been present for many of these consultations, Stardust’s account rings disappointingly true.

The resulting political debates about porn become polarised: “socially conservative positions that emphasize the harm of pornography and purport to protect women and children” versus “liberal positions that advocate for an unfettered right to freedom of speech.” Such a framing dilutes a multifaceted issue into blunt adversarial terms, which — as Stardust highlights — ultimately defers responsibility for structural issues that shape power in the media landscape.

The analysis of regulatory pitfalls contained in Indie Porn could not be more timely in relation to the current Australian tech policy debate. Over the past several years, Australia’s approach to online safety has been persistently grounded not in challenging problematic and extractive tech company business models or improving support and education for young people, but in content moderation and policing. This urge to sanitise the internet is a modern-day knee-jerk reaction to long-established moral panic about pornography and anachronistic notions of decency and deviance. Only a few years ago, the Online Safety Act 2021 was passed, despite significant and ignored concerns from sex workers and digital rights advocates — including Stardust herself — who warned of the risk of increased censorship (including self-censorship) of sexual content online.

The requirement to age-gate adult websites under the Online Safety Act is also where seeds of the project to ban teenagers from social media were planted. Those of us in the digital rights and sex worker rights space have witnessed the expansion of calls to implement age verification to prevent children from accessing online porn into proposals to prevent access to social media entirely. Both the technologies and underlying ideological premise are the same. As emphasised to me while campaigning together years ago by Eliza Sorensen, co-founder of sex-worker-led tech company Assembly Four: sex workers are often the canary in the coal mine when it comes to repressive or invasive tech policy. They may be the first to suffer the consequences, but it ultimately expands much further. We are witnessing this in real time right now.

As many know, and many others try to deny: the internet was built on sex. Samantha Cole’s How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet changed Sex traces the history of how the demand for sex and sexual material developed the internet as we know it, including the shopping cart, the browser cookie, payment processors, and dynamic web pages. Those in the sex industry are often early adopters of technologies — popularising digital platforms only for the technocratic billionaires to flip, betray and deny sex worker access or sexual content online, despite having initially benefited from their patronage. Sex workers are regularly the first to warn about harmful legislation and dystopian tech futures when it comes to surveillance, censorship, discrimination and the weaponisation of technologies like facial recognition and AI. Listening to sex workers and centring their experiences in the development of technology regulation is not only essential for the structural change necessary for their rights to be fully realised, but also deeply entangled with the question of how to create a more liberatory online environment for everyone.

While the spirit of radical politics and revolutionary potential of indie pornographies is a central throughline of the work, Stardust does not shy away from turning her critical eye toward indie porn itself. It’s not a given, for example, that porn with aesthetics that differ from mainstream pornography from a consumer perspective offers any kind of meaningful improvement to worker conditions or production processes behind the scenes. Similarly, constructed narratives of authenticity or the “authenticity delusion” may provide both protection and profit as a survival strategy, but can also undermine “a lot of advocacy sex workers have done in illuminating the labour involved in gendered performance and sexual interactions.” While there are unique challenges within indie porn, the confusion of aesthetics for ethics plagues many progressive movements.

Even the category of “indie” pornography (sometimes referred to as amateur, DIY, fairtrade, organic, alt, queer, feminist, artisanal) is not without its challenges. In reflecting on her own experience, Stardust notes how such labels can offer a protective buffer, making her work seem more palatable in the public eye. “On these occasions,” she writes

our tactics risked furthering stigma rather than dismantling it, reproducing stereotypes rather than challenging them, and not doing enough to unpack the stratification of stigma across pornography and sex work more generally.

Towards the end of the book, Stardust turns her attention to the tactics and strategies of indie porn producers and performers in their attempts to survive in such a hostile climate. Here, Indie Porn expands from being an impressive and necessary work of scholarship, into a treasure trove of lessons in resilience and resistance, community solidarity and political organising strategy that many social movements could learn from.

Indie Porn does not shy away from the internal contradictions that arise when survival tactics overlap with respectability politics, nor does it eschew tensions between those who see the indie porn agenda as part of a “politics of inclusion” to protect the industry and livelihoods, while others see it as a “politics of resistance” to focus on more radical and structural change. As Stardust notes, “one of the challenges of indie pornographies is that they seek to intervene in the market (transforming its value system) while simultaneously participating in it.” This is a familiar dilemma to many movements that are caught between the desire to change society and the reality of living in it.