Sissy hypno in a trans-affirming register: Shifting orders of pornography online

This article suggests that, in a world emerging in and through mediation, branded sex bloggers and portals become (re)mediators of queer and feminist politics. It examines the websites of two porn production companies, Nofauxxx and Furry Girl, and analyses how they respond to older media forms, re-articulate long-standing debates about pornography in new mediated environments and re-signify the pornographic object. Key in this process is the circulation of 'authenticity', 'real bodies', and 'diversity' discourses. Through this circulation, sex blogger/brand portals mediate models of queer and feminist political engagement entrenched with notions of digital networks and free markets more generally.

Social Philosophy Today, 2012

This paper is a critique of pornography from within the framework of Heideggerian phenomenology. I contend that pornography is a pernicious form of technological discourse in which women are reduced to spectral and anonymous figures fulfilling a universal role, namely that of sexual subordination. Further, the danger of pornography is covered over in the public sphere as a result of the pervasive appeal to its status as mere fantasy. I argue that relegating the problem to the domain of fantasy is superficial and specious at best, inasmuch as fantasy itself is ultimately grounded in everyday reality. When not concealed as innocuous "fantasy," pornography has been defended under the rubric of "free speech." One of my aims is to repudiate this approach by revealing it as grounded in a highly suspect and self-contradictory phallocentric view of language. Rae Langton's (2009) recently published collection of essays on pornography attacks the problem largely in terms of "objectification" and the Austinian notion of "illocutionary disablement" from a position of authority. In this paper, I too confront the issues of language, objectification, and authority, but as articulated by means of Heidegger's critique of technology.

How does pornography subordinate on the basis of gender? I provide part of an answer in this paper by framing subordination as something that works through everyday classification. Under certain material and social conditions, pornography classifies people through labeling them in ways that connect to structures of oppression. I hope to show two things. First, pornographic content is not the major driving force behind pornography’s subordination of women. Second, pornography, when repurposed in new ways, carries the potential to counter the ill effects of other kinds of pornography, as feminist pornographers have attempted to show through their words and actions.

Explicit Utopias: Rewriting the Sexual in Women's Pornography, 2015

Explicit Utopias explores a problem that has long haunted feminist, lesbian, and queer critics: the obstacles to imagining women’s desire and sexual agency. Pornography is one arena in which women have actively sought to imaginatively overcome this problem, yet pornography has also been an object of passionate feminist contention. Revisiting the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, Amalia Ziv offers a comprehensive and thoughtful reassessment of the arguments and concerns of both camps, tying these early debates to the contemporary surge of concern over the pornification of culture. She also sets out to rectify the lack of critical attention to marginal sexual representations by examining the feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic literature on several key issues, including fantasy, the phallus, identification, and gender performativity.

Pornography: Structures, agency and performance, 2015

Written for a broad audience and grounded in cutting-edge, contemporary scholarship, this volume addresses some of the key questions asked about pornography today. What is it? For whom is it produced? What sorts of sexualities does it help produce? Why should we study it, and what should be the most urgent issues when we do? What does it mean when we talk about pornography as violence? What could it mean if we discussed pornography through frameworks of consent, self-determination and performance? This book places the arguments from conservative and radical anti-porn activists against the challenges coming from a new generation of feminist and queer porn performers and educators. Combining sensitive and detailed discussion of case studies with careful attention to the voices of those working in pornography, it provides scholars, activists and those hoping to find new ways of understanding sexuality with the first overview of the histories and futures of pornography

2016

2015

From the early days of the Internet, online pornography was an immensely successful industry, with a consequent phenomenal increase in both production and consumption of cyber porn. Prior to 1995, Anti-porn feminists were working to legally censor violent pornography. They received considerable resistance internally from pro-porn feminists arguing from the perspective of rights and free speech. The exponential increase in pornography consumption has inspired significant psychological research on the possible implications of cyber porn consumption on gendered expectations and attitudes. This research adds a theoretical and historical component to research exploring cyber porn as cultural contributor to social and sexual gendered beliefs that may result in violent behaviors such as cyber harassment. Using Greg Urban’s theory of cultural motion and Michel Foucault’s theories on sexuality and disciplinary practices, this thesis analyzes discourses surrounding the motion of pornography—before and after the Internet—investigating potential consequences of pornography on the social construction of gender and misogynistic social behaviors. According to Urban, the internalization of cultural beliefs is directly proportional to exposure and frequency of contact with a sensibly tangible form he calls an object. Objects are conductors of social beliefs, myths, and messages. According to Foucault sexuality has become an instrument of oppression (rather than liberation). This thesis argues that pro-porn feminists underestimated the impact of pornography on the social construction of gender, and traces the cultural motion of pornography from 1981-2015 analyzing forces influencing cultural motion. Urban asserts we are now in an age of modern culture that focuses on newness and mass dissemination. Objects of traditional culture can adapt by cleverly reforming with new technology. As a historical object that has existed for centuries, pornography contains traditional culture that has transitioned with remarkable success into modern culture. The Internet is a space that has revolutionized dissemination as mass production and consumption. Consumer statistics support the hypothesis that present day pornography consumption in Western culture is normalized among young people and particularly men. This theoretical discourse analysis supports the hypothesis that pornography directly influences gender role construction that negatively impacts both men and women. This research was limited to the theoretical realm and relied on qualitative data from other studies. Further research is required on how the proliferation, anonymity, and accessibility of pornography is currently contributing toward a radical social construction of gender, unanticipated by the earlier feminist theorists.

The effect of pornography on the spectator is a particularly contentious issue. Yet pornography comes in many forms, and sexually explicit media cannot be dismissed as a monolithic medium that offers no value. Indeed, post-porn is dissident pornographic representation that subverts, critiques, and shatters normative codes. Post-porn texts are a contemporary rewriting of traditional pornographic tropes – by drawing on queerfeminist theory and practice, post-porn artists experiment and create their own sexually explicit artistic content. This dissertation argues for an acknowledgement of the sociocultural value of post-porn by analysing the French documentary film Mutantes (Féminisme Porno Punk), which offers an overview of post-porn, and by drawing on Barthes’s framework on plaisir and jouissance as a way of theorising post-porn spectatorship. Through textual analysis of the parodic and aggressive-defensive postporn portrayed in Mutantes, we can see the various ways in which post-porn subverts socio-cultural norms. This multifarious sexually explicit media also disrupts assumptions about what constitutes pornography (and art), and forces the spectator to question their own subjectivity. Indeed, by shattering normative codes, post-porn texts invite a spectatorship of jouissance – they disturb our sensibilities, encourage contradiction, and subvert our assumptions.

Pornographies: Critical Positions, 2018

Focusing on women’s online magazines produced between 2012 and 2014 in the UK and in Spain, this chapter examines peer responses to women feeling distressed about their male partners’ consumption of pornographies, in addition to editorial content around the subject. Moving beyond ‘for and against’ positions, and driven by a social justice agenda, the chapter utilises this commentary about hetero-male-oriented pornographies as a point of analytical entry into the kinds of gendered and sexual pleasures, bodies, subjectivities and intimate relational possibilities contemporary (new) media and public sex and relationship advice bring into being and render (un)intelligible. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to feminist interrogations of the politics of mediated intimacy and pornification under neoliberalism and postfeminism, incorporating a much-needed transnational perspective.

2017

Documentaries about pornography are beginning to constitute an entirely new subgenre of film. Big Hollywood names like James Franco and Rashida Jones are jumping on the bandwagon, using their influence and resources to invest in a type of audiovisual knowledge production far less mainstream than that in which they usually participate. The films that have resulted from this new movement are undoubtedly persuasive, no matter which side of the debate over pornography these directors have respectively chosen to represent. Moreover, regardless of the side(s) that audience members may have taken in the so-called “feminist porn debates,” one cannot ignore the rhetorical strength of the arguments presented in a wide variety of documentaries about pornography. However, the ways in which these filmmakers use audiovisual rhetoric to convey their respective arguments are far from simple. My research explores and analyzes the various types of rhetoric that filmmakers use when creating documentar...