In my paper “BeautifulAgony. com and the Representation of Pleasure,” I examine a website launched in 2004 known as Beautiful Agony: Facettes de la Petite Mort in order to explicate the ways in which orgasm and pleasure are conceived and represented. Beautiful Agony is a subscription-based website featuring downloadable video submissions of both women and men experiencing orgasms. The videos are framed from the shoulders up and contain no nudity; the videos convey sexual pleasure entirely through facial expressions and sound. The creators of the site define it as “hardcore without nudity.”

The course, “Pornography in Contemporary U.S. Culture,” was offered as a senior capstone seminar by the Department of Women’s Studies. As the instructor, Ward approached the course with the explicit purpose of offering Women’s Studies students a perspective on pornography that they rarely encounter in our curriculum at UCLA, a perspective firmly rooted in both media studies and sexuality studies, but also contextualized within the field of Women’s Studies itself.