Post Porn Practice as Disobedient Pedagogy

Dr Nicholas C. Chilvers, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
2025 Conference

This paper argues that post pornography functions not simply as a field of artistic practice or sexual representation but as a disobedient mode of pedagogy. Drawing on the development and delivery of Post Porn Practice, a third-year seminar taught in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, it demonstrates how post pornography functions as a critical methodology for understanding contemporary life. Students examined how medicine, media, surveillance, platform capitalism, ecology, and care shape bodies, desires, identities, and relationships. Building on the foundations established by Tim Gregory and Astrid Lorange’s Post-Pornographic Bodies course at UNSW, the seminar expanded post-pornographic pedagogy through case studies in performance art, ecosexuality, queer methodologies, HIV/AIDS activism, ASMR, algorithmic intimacy, sex work, and digital labour. Rather than treating sexuality as a discrete object of study, the course invited students to investigate the infrastructures through which intimacy, care, visibility, and embodiment are organised. Framed through the conference theme of Disobedience, Post Porn Practice challenges not only normative understandings of sexuality but also the institutional habits of thought through which knowledge is classified and produced, proposing a model of arts pedagogy grounded in embodied inquiry, critical self-reflection, and situated knowledge.

 

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About the author

Nicholas C. Chilvers is a researcher and educator in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. His research spans queer theory, performance, post-pornography, HIV/AIDS cultural histories, and digital and networked embodiment. His current practice explores embodied modes of speaking and writing, with particular attention to sexuality, pedagogy, media cultures, and the changing relations between bodies, technologies, and power.