When: Thursday, 6 November 2025 at 4:00pm
Where: Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, Northstar Ballroom A
Series: AMS Critical Race Lecture
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 this talk Elliott H. Powell 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? Powell argues 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, he will 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. He closes by reflecting on 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.
Elliott H. Powell is Associate Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. His work sits at the intersections of race, sexuality, and popular music. He is the author of Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), which received the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (US-Branch) Woody Guthrie Book Award as well as the American Musicological Society’s Philip Brett Award (given by the AMS LGBTQ Study Group). His work can also be found in many journals and edited volumes like GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Routledge History of American Sexuality, and The Black Scholar (where he co-edited their first queer and trans special issue). He’s currently at work on a book titled Erotic City, which examines the intertwined worlds of music, race, and sex in Minneapolis during the 1980s.