Constance Penley and the Lagoon

Peter Alilunas

[ PDF Version ]

In the spring of 2024, I interviewed Constance Penley over a few days at her home in Santa Barbara, California, an experience that gave me a view into both her personal and professional worlds.[1] Connie has been immensely important in multiple academic fields—Feminist Film Studies, Fan Studies, and Porn Studies, among others. She has observed, written about, and earned the deep respect of fans, astronauts, and adult film performers, navigated the corridors and hierarchies of academic leadership, co-founded and edited Camera Obscura, a premier scholarly journal with the ethos of the collective as its original guiding principle, and demonstrated for generations how to be a professor at the highest level.

Connie’s scholarly works are well-known and the very definition of influential. That includes her early work in feminist film theory;[2] her groundbreaking cultural studies contributions;[3] her work on fan cultures that helped create the field;[4] her theorizing about class and pornography;[5] her insights about porn pedagogy;[6] the way she has creatively mixed together her scholarly interests in unique and unexpected ways;[7] or the work she’s done on the edges of academia and culture that have broadened how we understand the profession, like when she worked with the GALA committee to create and place artwork on props on the set of the television show Melrose Place.[8]

Any of these individually would represent a significant career contribution; taken together, they speak to a scholar whose impact is not only deep and far-reaching but also remarkably interdisciplinary and enduring. Connie’s body of work has continually challenged conventions, opened new lines of inquiry, and expanded the boundaries of what counts as legitimate and necessary scholarship. Her career stands as a model of intellectual curiosity, political commitment, and academic generosity—a legacy that continues to shape and inspire multiple fields across media studies, cultural theory, and beyond.

Connie and I talked about all those things and much more over the course of the interview, some topics deliberately intellectually hefty and others more reflective on her life and experiences. I got to know her beautiful, oceanside home – Casa Di Connie – and its light-filled rooms filled with the ephemera of a life well-lived, academically and otherwise. Those fortunate to have visited know the powder room under the stairs, where you find the postcards, knick-knacks, and other kitschy bric-a-brac that summons, like faint echoes, some of Connie’s roots, not unlike the soft traces of the accent when she speaks, occasionally heightening when she’s talking about her childhood. The more you get to know Connie—and Casa Di Connie—the more you value that powder room, since it will signal to you that she comes from Mount Dora, a small town in the central part of Florida. It’s the only room in the house where you’ll find those traces.

As with most people, to know Connie means knowing from where she came rather than just where she ended up. One of the odd and unfortunate side effects of academia is that we tend to value each other mostly (and too often only) as scholars, so to enter Connie’s powder room is to immediately untangle that sort of impulse. Eventually, Connie left Florida, stowing away on an airplane to Los Angeles using the tactics laid out by Abby Hoffman in his 1971 counterculture guidebook Steal This Book, and then hitch-hiked to Berkeley, where her academic journey started, leading to all the work that has become her scholarly legacy.

Less well-known in Connie’s story is what happened in 1953 on a second unit film set in Silver Springs, Florida. James C. Havens, along with a small crew that included cinematographer Scotty Welbourne, shot the underwater sequences of actor Ricou Browning dressed in a latex suit. The film was Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, dir. Jack Arnold).

60 miles southeast, young Connie Penley, along with all the kids of her generation, was the target audience for the film. Creature From the Black Lagoon was part of the beginning of a run of gimmicky, sci-fi-horror films, many of which were aimed at teenagers and kids—or at least designed to appeal to their growing presence in theaters and drive-ins. It followed films such as It Came From Outer Space (1953, dir. Jack Arnold) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953, dir. Eugène Lourié). These films blended monsters, aliens, nuclear anxiety, and narratives about young people to capture the unique social contexts of the 1950s—and also to sell tickets.

One of those tickets for Creature From the Black Lagoon went to Connie. She remembers seeing it somewhere in the Mount Dora area—possibly at one of the drive-ins on the edges of Orlando, 30 miles southeast. Creature from the Black Lagoon opened at the Winter Park drive-in on May 19, 1954, and captivated audiences with its Gill-Man creature rising from the murky depths to abduct Kay Lawrence (played by Julie Adams), a scientist on a research trip into the Amazon with her fellow (all-male) scientists.[9] In a haunting sequence, the creature stalks from below a swimming Kay, entranced by her graceful beauty.

That vibrant imagery of the potential horrors under the water resonated for Connie, her three younger siblings, and their friends, since Mount Dora, like many towns in Florida, was nestled among lakes. In fact, one of their favorite activities was to swim and play in nearby Lake Dora. After The Creature from the Black Lagoon, though, the lake was transformed into a source of fear for them. What if the Gill-Man’s hand squeezed around their ankles and pulled them down to the depths?

Connie’s reaction wasn’t to abandon the lake, run away, stay on the shore, or pretend the fear didn’t exist. Instead, she suggested a simple solution to the group: divide the water and become the creature of your own lagoon. The result, as I’m sure you are imagining while reading this, was the restoration of the feeling of safety brought on by the confrontation of the fear and flipping it directly on its head. There’s something joyful about Connie’s strategy—playacting as the very thing causing the fear, which neutralizes its power but also offers some of that power, too.

Here in early form was future Connie Penley, entering the water of the lake, the others in tow, wary but bolstered watching her courage and no doubt her sense of fun. Here she was as the leader, willing to take risks when others were reluctant, ready with the plan to keep moving forward. Here she was taking back some of the power. And lest you forget or discount its importance, this moment of decision plus action was rooted in a piece of popular culture, likely dismissed by others as insignificant or trivial, but to those in the lake this was obviously of maximum importance. This was also a form of revision, with Connie taking Kay’s story and reversing it, capturing the power of the Gill-Man for herself.

For many there will likely be other enduring powerful symbols of Connie’s contributions to academia and the world. The books and articles she’s written, the conferences she’s organized, her countless talks and presentations, the thousands of students she’s taught, the organizations she’s led, the labor of building academic fields—all of these are of course completely valid and worthy of that recognition and represent her legacy far better than I can describe. These are works I deeply value. The success of Porn Studies, my own field, would not exist without her, and all of us now working in this area share the benefits of the wide spaces she helped carve. Alongside all of this, though, I will continue to think of Connie standing on the edge of the shore of the lake in Florida, confronting fear with her trademark, playful joy, as she leads us into our own lagoons, unafraid.

Notes

[1]This interview is forthcoming in The Handbook of Adult Film and Media, edited by Peter Alilunas, Patrick Keilty, and Darshana Sreedhar Mini (Bristol, UK: Intellect Press, 2026).

[2]The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

[3]“Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 479-500.

[4]“Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology,” in Technoculture, ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 135-162.

[5]“Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn,” in White Trash: Race and Gender in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997), 89-112.

[6]“A Feminist Teaching Pornography? That’s Like Scopes Teaching Evolution!,” in The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, ed. Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), 179-199.

[7]NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, (New York: Verso, 1997).

[8]William Grimes, “The Plot to Put Conceptual Art on Melrose Place,” New York Times, September 28, 2016, C1.

[9]Advertisement, Orlando Sentinel, May 19, 1954, 11.

Peter Alilunas is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video (University of California Press, 2016) and the co-editor of several collections related to adult film history. His work has appeared in such places as Film History, Camera Obscura, and Porn Studies, where he is a member of the editorial board.