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Recently, there has been increasing academic interest in the historical foundations of the pornography business. However, these studies tend to focus on individual national contexts rather than exploring the transnational relationships that exist, or have existed, between these countries. This article considers how a transnational approach can further understandings of entrepreneurship in the pornography business. It suggests the need for an interdisciplinary framework to examine transnational enterprise in the pornography business, combining ideas from enterprise alongside criminology and economic geography to frame the enterprise history of the Netherlands-based company Your Choice. Based in Amsterdam, but run by British entrepreneurs, Your Choice's activities can be dated back to the 1970s, specializing in the transnational distribution of hardcore pornographic films to customers in Britain, where the sale of such material is legally problematic. Drawing on ethnohistorical research, which includes primary interviews, workplace observation, and archival and doctrinal research, I use Your Choice as a case study to show how transnational entrepreneurship in the pornography business can create opportunities as well as help to manipulate restrictive laws and regulations. I also suggest that negotiating such legalities carries risk, as does the need to respond and adapt to ongoing shifts in the market.

This article presents findings from my research into the British hardcore pornography business. Porn studies has given little coverage to the British pornography business, with much of the academic literature focusing on the American adult entertainment industry. Recently, there has been a rising interest in the historical framework of porn cinemas both in popular culture and in academic work. This article contributes to this debate, taking both a cultural and an economic approach to explore the conditions that led to the emergence of British hardcore production as an alternative economy in the 1960s. In this economy, entrepreneurs make use of new technologies to produce artefacts that are exchanged for an economic benefit, while circumventing laws to distribute their artefacts. To historicize this economy, I draw on ethnohistorical research, which includes interviews with people involved in the British hardcore business and archival research. I argue that a combination of glamour filmmaking, a relaxation of political and cultural attitudes towards sexuality, the location of Soho, London, and emerging technologies for producing films collectively contribute to the emergence of an alternative economy of British hardcore production. I focus specifically on the practices of two entrepreneurs within this economy, Ivor Cook and Mike Freeman, considering how their actions inadvertently created the British hardcore film business, and played a significant role in the development of hardcore production outside of the United Kingdom.

Brings together a breadth of perspectives addressing media materialities, and their significance to the study of media, culture, and society. Offers new thinking and perspectives on media materialities, including work that explores media materiality, and the past, physical and digital tensions and media materialities in digital games. 32 b&w illus