On Constance Penley: Feminist Trailblazer, Mentor, and Champion of Dangerous Ideas

Celine Parreñas Shimizu

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The first time Constance Penley defended my work, I hadn't even finished it yet. Sitting across from me at a Thai restaurant in Santa Barbara in 2001, when I was interviewing for an assistant professorship in Asian American film theory and production, this giant of feminist film theory leaned forward with unmistakable enthusiasm as I outlined my research on race and sexuality—including feminist pornography. She affirmed my decision as an early career faculty member, to write about pornography and women of color as an important and urgent contribution that needed to be pursued. In that moment, I glimpsed what would become the cornerstone of our twenty-five-year collaboration: her unwavering belief in scholarship that disrupts disciplinary boundaries and entrenched power structures to reveal new ways of seeing and feeling the world needs. And to be alive in the academy means we can choose to deploy our power to speak. Have courage, be bold, enact change.

Constance Penley isn't merely a scholar of cultural critique—she embodies it. Through her groundbreaking work as a feminist film theorist and trailblazer in feminist porn studies, she has systematically dismantled patriarchal assumptions, unraveled misogynistic narratives, and challenged rigid thinking about how we experience and interpret media. She teaches us not just how to see and write, but how to fearlessly engage with what popular culture often labels as "dangerous ideas."

From Mentor to Collaborator

Despite tempting offers from Ivy League and small liberal arts college institutions that promised greater prestige and resources, I chose UC Santa Barbara to work alongside Penley in public higher education. What followed were years of oceanfront or mountain home dinners, rigorous intellectual exchange, and collaborative projects that shaped and strengthened my academic trajectory. When I published my first book, The Hypersexuality of Race (2007), which analyzed representations of Asian and Asian American women in filmic and theatrical representations, including pornography, Penley celebrated my work. She introduced me to editors and engaged me in dissemination events that amplified my voice in the field. At my book release event at the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Penley served as an interlocutor, discussing humor in pornography and the sophisticated ways audiences engage with adult content. The panel—featuring Penley, myself, and fellow feminist porn scholar Mireille Miller-Young—demonstrated the multigenerational approach to porn studies that we had cultivated, a scholarly lineage that continues to influence the field today. Our intellectual kinship culminated in co-editing with Tristan Taormino, The Feminist Porn Book (2013), a groundbreaking collection that gathered feminist approaches to a historically disparaged and highly popular genre.

Penley’s Intellectual Legacy

Long before our collaboration, Penley had transformed feminist film theory as co-founder of the influential journal Camera Obscura. Her pioneering work deployed psychoanalysis in feminist terms, appropriating Freudian and Lacanian frameworks to decode how cinema constructs love, lust, desire, and broader relations across social identity categories. She revolutionized our understanding of identification and spectatorship, theorizing the female gaze as necessarily emerging from within male-dominated apparatuses while forging paths for feminist agency.

In my personal favorite, her classic tour-de-force essay “Crackers and Whackers,” which I read as a student, Penley chronicles her own childhood as quintessentially white trash in Florida. This usually unmarked whiteness described her heritage of race and class as a topic of exploration and acknowledgment for her and her brother which they interrogated and explored across multiple generations in their lineage. She claims this inheritance as a wealth for it enables her to understand the importance of critical and social theories of inequality and power as she ascended in the academy and became educated.

The “linguistic nature of the unconscious, the disciplinary microorganization of power, and the distinguishing operations of tastes and culture”[1] were already the structures of understanding under which she operated in growing up, in interrogating her family dynamics, and culture and ethnicity that defined whiteness against blackness. She points to the similarities of “enduring poverty and the daily humiliations that come with it” as a point of solidarity without denying how whites clung to superiority in order to demean non-whites. What she calls the loss of a more intersectional approach in her childhood haunts her development as enabling and disenabling both—for it is also her white trash culture that offers a needed critique deployed by pornography of what is considered proper, a form of perception that ultimately stifles the poor, the subjugated, and those outside what Gayle Rubin calls the charmed circle of privilege.

The Classroom as Transformative Space

Penley's legendary pornography course at UC Santa Barbara—taught for over thirty years—stands as testament to her pedagogical courage. This large lecture class invited students to critically analyze culturally vilified content, assessing for themselves its potential for cultural critique and liberation. I marveled at Penley's ability to bring industry figures like John "Buttman" Stagliano into academic spaces, creating dialogues that complicated simplistic narratives about power and pleasure. She analyzed the ways in which the disparaged anal sex act is a complicated construction, where rather than simply and easily about male domination, the butt of the joke is the man, even him, the director and the star. As cultural interventions, she models studying pornographic films with rigor as an American genre of cinema deserving study, rather than keeping their power untouched and uninterrogated. In doing so, she exposes the power within the category and experience of bottomhood, in how the top depends on the bottom to secure affirmation and authority. By treating pornography as worthy of serious study, she demystified its impact and equipped generations of students with analytical tools to engage critically with all forms of media and the social forms of sexual relations.

Defender of the Next Generation

Beyond her intellectual contributions, Penley has been a fierce defender of scholars like myself who follow in her footsteps. To study pornography academically is to risk professional disparagement, and Penley has consistently used her influence to protect junior colleagues from institutional backlash. When senior scholars have attempted to block tenure, appropriate ideas, or delegitimize research on sexuality, Penley has intervened with characteristic boldness. Her commitment to empowering subjugated voices extends beyond her writing to her actions as a colleague and mentor.

A Legacy That Transforms Institutions

I write now as Dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television and Distinguished Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA, with Professor Penley concluding her remarkable career as head of the academic faculty union at UC Santa Barbara. Our conversations have evolved to encompass fundraising and institutional transformation—areas where she excelled at UCSB and which now inform my work at UCLA.

As the new Dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA, I carry forward Penley's legacy of fearless inquiry and institutional change. That a scholar from a white trash Southern heritage could mentor a colleague with a refugee background from the Global South to leadership positions in elite academic institutions speaks to the transformative power of her approach to education and mentorship.

What Constance Penley has shown us is that the most powerful scholarship doesn't just analyze cultural critique—it performs it, embodies it, and uses it to create space for those who follow. In a time when higher education faces unprecedented challenges, her example reminds us that our work must be both intellectually rigorous and politically courageous.

Thank you for paving the way on so many fronts, Professor Penley! Your legacy lives on in the countless scholars, students, and institutions you have transformed.

Notes

[1]“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), 90.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Dean of Theater, Film and Television and Distinguished Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. An award-winning filmmaker and film scholar, her latest book is The Movies of Racial Childhoods (Duke, 2024) and her films include 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (Women Make Movies, 2022).