Zahra Stardust in-conversation with Tilly Lawless

In Indie Porn, Zahra Stardust examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy. Herself a porn performer and participant, Stardust takes readers behind the scenes, offering intimate insights into this socio-political movement. She finds politicians who watch porn in parliament, protesters leading face-sitting demonstrations, sex workers making COVID-safe pornography, and artists reverse-engineering porn detection software. 

Against the backdrop of a global gig economy, Stardust documents the promises of indie porn to democratize content, revolutionize production, and redistribute wealth while outlining the fantasies of regulators, whose illusions of what porn is and does foreclose possibilities for transformation. Inevitably, as these paradigms collide, porn producers engage in creative tactics to hustle for survival and visibility, from ethical certification to law reform, sometimes reproducing hierarchies of stigma themselves. 

By highlighting how porn stigma is bound up with intersecting oppressions, Stardust identifies these junctions as coalitional opportunities for changing social relationships to sex, work, and capitalism.

Our event space is wheelchair accessible via a stair lift. Please contact events@betterread.com.au with any additional access requirements and/or questions.

Zahra Stardust is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology.

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker, writer and - sometimes - performer. Her debut novel Nothing But My Body was published by Allen & Unwin in 2021 and her second novel Thora was published by Worms in 2024. You can find and follow her work most easily through her Instagram account @tilly_lawless