Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.

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Session Overview
Session
The Prince of Porn: The Racialized Politics of Minneapolis's Music and Sex Culture During the 1980s (Critical Race Lecture)
Time:
Thursday, 06/Nov/2025:
4:00pm - 5:30pm

 Location: Northstar Ballroom A
Session Topics:
AMS

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Presentations

The Prince of Porn: The Racialized Politics of Minneapolis's Music and Sex Culture During the 1980s (Critical Race Lecture)

Chair(s): Allie Martin (Dartmouth College), Diane Oliva (University of Michigan)

Presenter(s): Elliott Powell (University of Minnesota)

Organized by the AMS Committee on Race, Indigeneity, and Ethnicity.

This talk explores the relationship between the rise to fame of Minneapolis-based artist Prince in the early-to-mid 1980s and Minneapolis’ central role in shaping the anti-pornography feminist debates during the same period. In essence, this talk traces the resonances between Prince’s “porn rock” and the anti-pornography debates known as the “porn wars.” The central question organizing this talk is: What can Prince tell us about the porn wars and what can the porn wars teach us about Prince? I argue that we cannot understand Prince’s 1980s music without considering the porn wars in Minneapolis, and that histories of the porn wars are inadequate if they do not include analyses of Prince. Specifically, I show how Prince reoriented conventional understandings of the porn wars that framed them through white feminism, and instead drew on and centered Black feminist aesthetics of sexuality. I close with thinking about how this period in the 1980s can help us better understand and respond to the recent and growing attacks on sex work(ers) and queer and trans communities, especially those of color.