A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten: Tristan Taormino, with Lynn Comella

October 5 12:00 pm

Virtual

About the Event

Please join UNLV’s Dr. Lynn Comella for a discussion with author, speaker, and sex educator Tristan Taormino, about Taormino’s new memoir, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten. The memoir explores Taormino’s coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Dr. Comella serves as department chair of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies, and she is working with UNLV Special Collections and Archives to launch a new collecting area in January 2024 devoted to sexual entertainment and economies.

Tristan Taormino is a writer, sex educator, speaker, podcaster, and retired feminist pornographer. A former columnist for The Village Voice, she is the editor of 25 anthologies and author of nine books, including her latest, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten: A Memoir (Duke University Press). She is the founding editor of the Best Lesbian Erotica series and co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, the first collection that includes writings by scholars, academics, producers and performers about feminist porn. She directed and produced twenty-four sex education and porn films, and her films have garnered 40 award nominations, 6 AVN Awards, and 8 Feminist Porn Awards.

Lynn Comella, Ph.D. is a professor of gender and sexuality studies in the department of interdisciplinary, gender, and ethnic studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. An expert on sexual economies and the adult entertainment industry, her research has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Jezebel, BUST, and more. She is the author of Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure (Duke University Press, 2017) and co-editor of New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law (Praeger, 2015). Her work has also appeared in the International Journal of Communication, Porn Studies, Feminist Media Studies, The Feminist Porn Book, Commodity Activism, Contexts, Sex for Sale, and New Sociologies of Sex Work, among other venues.

She is co-chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group and a regular contributor to Forbes, where she covers the business of sex. She received the 2015 Nevada Regents’ Rising Researcher Award in recognition of early-career accomplishments and is a frequent media commentator. Comella received a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; an M.A. in gender studies and feminist theory from the New School for Social Research; and a B.A. in psychology, with minors in anthropology and women’s studies, from Penn State University. She lives in Downtown Las Vegas with her husband and their three mischievous cats.
Questions? Please email blackmountaininstitute@unlv.edu or call (702) 895-5542.