Pornography's Performatistic Screen
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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Plotting Sex: Pornography's Performatistic Screen Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2rd5j4k8 Author Hukku, Sanjay P. Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Plotting Sex: Pornography’s Performatistic Screen By Sanjay P Hukku A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Linda Williams, Chair Professor Kristen Whissel Professor Richard Hutson Spring 2014 Plotting Sex: Pornography’s Performatistic Screen © 2014 by Sanjay P Hukku Abstract Plotting Sex: Pornography’s Performatistic Screen by Sanjay P Hukku Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Linda Williams, Chair The early 1970s witnessed the mainstreaming of feature-length, hard core pornography. Though derided by critics, this newly minted genre had two notable features: broader narratives within which sex occurred, and an insistent focus on the visual display of male pleasure. Plotting Sex claims that, by embedding sex within a story, sex itself takes on narrative qualities. To support this claim, it teases out small shifts in the twentieth century’s episteme that collectively contributed to the early 1970s emergence of what it terms pornography’s performatistic screen, or the base, plotted structure of bodily performance and engagement underpinning sexual displays as enacted over time in orgasmically-oriented hard core film. This project starts with the twin Foucaultian poles of law and “human sciences” as represented by the metonyms of American obscenity jurisprudence and sexology, finding in both a late 1960s pivot to issues of social construction and utility as tethered to narrative. Following this, it narrows focus to look at increasing rates of oral sex in American sexual practice and the changing production and exhibition of filmed pornography. After analyzing then-contemporary concepts of desire in readerly narrative, it finishes by proposing a model for how plotted sex works both within and alongside broader narrative. In all of these analyses, this project pays particular attention to the shifting role narrative occupies in matrices of power, knowledge, and pleasure. It argues that narrative plotting, when applied to sex, increasingly functions as a tool for both policing and reduplicating social and cultural norms. 1 Plotting Sex: Pornography’s Performatistic Screen By Sanjay P Hukku Table of Contents Introduction. 1 Chapter 1. The Push to Narrative: Law, Sexology, and the 15 Performatistic Screen (Representation I) Chapter 2. Oral Sex, Narrative Pornography, and the “Money Shot” 61 (Representation & Structure) Chapter 3. Readerly Desire in Narrative 115 Chapter 4. The Performatistic Screen in Feature-Length, 146 Narrative Pornography (Structure & Process) Conclusion. 181 i Acknowledgments When I sat down to write these acknowledgements, I immediately thought of two sayings. The first: “All the king's horses and all the king's men/Couldn't put Humpty together again.” The second: “A bone is strongest where it’s been broken.” The first is pessimistic. The second is optimistic. I mention these because, when I initially attempted to single out people to thank for helping bring this project to completion, my thoughts and feelings caught elsewhere at something I have to acknowledge. I’ve come to believe there is something deeply broken about academia at the macro-level. Standing in front of my students and teaching them Marx while the University failed to pay me a livable wage, for example, felt wrong. Watching my peers, who suffered through the same, emerge with their doctorates into an indifferent academic job market that primarily fails to offer them a living wage and fails to provide them health insurance, for example, feels wrong. And knowing those few who dare to question the rectitude of this brave new academia (full of adjuncts, rapacious middle-managers, and a mostly compliant and indifferent professorial academy) get beaten and pepper sprayed, for example, is wrong. I’m going to follow acknowledgement protocol and thank the individual people who have helped me complete this project. But I would be remiss to not at least acknowledge the system that turns the mind’s work and its dedicated workers into yet another set of bodies on the assembly line. It’s there. It’s broken. And it’s hung over my head as well as my heart, breaking both down while I worked on this project, making me repeatedly ask myself, “Why am I doing this? What’s the point?” Hopefully we will all realize academia is broken and work to repair it. And hopefully that second, rather optimistic saying is more than just palliative. At the micro-level, I’d like to thank (in alphabetical order) Robert Alford, Diana Anders, Ronessa Butler, Sylvia Chong, Todd Deck, Kate Drabinski, Dan Farber, Ben Fife, Kevin Ford, Jake Godby, Hunter Hargraves, Bharati Hukku, Suman Hukku, Richard Hutson, Matt Johnson, Ben Katz, Kwong Li, Kristen Loutensock, Vandana Makker, Lauren Maxwell, Franklin Melendez, Kathleen Moran, Anne Nesbet, Sabrina Rahman, Matt Rudary, Amy Rust, Sapna Shahani, Kaja Silverman, Noelle Trinidad Taylor, Chan Thai, Lenora Warren, Kristen Whissel, and Linda Williams. In particular, I’d like to thank my committee members: Richard Hutson, thank you for stepping up when I needed help. Kristen Whissel, thank you for being with me from the beginning to the end. Linda Williams, thank you for forcing me to be better…even when I didn’t believe in myself. You’ve all said or done something that informs both the head and the heart of this project. And I thank you for that. To close, I’d like to infinitely expand out my acknowledgements in a way that acknowledges what’s broken but is, as acknowledgements should always be, optimistic: I thank you for hearing me. SPH 12.May.2014 ii Introduction I. Sex and the City’s Sexual Chronology During my graduate studies at UC Berkeley, my work increasingly focused on “sex.” And by “sex” I do not mean part of the concomitant humanist triptych, gender, sex, and sexuality, but rather something I thought approached “sex proper”…bodies in congress…fucking. Granted, the academic triptych served (and continues to serve) as a theoretical spine supporting the corpus of my writing, but, nevertheless, I found my optic evermore insistently focused upon particular arrangements of bodies and these arrangements’ potential significances as pinpoint metaphors within the flux of gender, sex, and sexuality. My engagement with prurient academic interests accelerated so much, in fact, that when new acquaintances asked what I “worked on” in grad school, I’d slide over known fields (Film Studies, Critical Theory, Gender Studies, etc.) and saucily say “Sex.” This met with varied, intriguing responses—the pertinent one here being my then-roommate, Vandana, asking me my opinion of Sex and the City. I had no idea what I thought about Sex and the City. Of course I’d heard of it, but I’d only caught one full episode during its initial run—the second half of the series’ finale, “An American Girl in Paris (part deux).” At Vandana’s insistence, and with her assistance, I vowed in the summer of 2006 to become fully fluent in Sex. Sex and the City is a cable television show originally aired between 1998 and 2004 on HBO. The series, based on a weekly column-turned-book by socialite author Candace Bushnell, became a worldwide fin de siècle phenomena, receiving numerous industry accolades,1 engendering a rabid fan base, spawning consumer trends (cosmopolitans, Manohlo Blahniks, forename jewelry, flower pins, etc.), academic interrogation,2 a top- grossing major motion picture franchise, and even another television series. Both the original television comedy and its two movie sequels chronicle the lives, loves, lusts, friendships, and, perhaps most importantly, non-pornographic fucks of four women living in a rarefied New York City. However, much like pornography had been in the 1970s, Sex and the City was a major component in America’s shifting sexual discursive. Reading the series’ Wikipedia page, one immediately encounters the following: “the quirky series had multiple continuing storylines that tackled relevant and modern social issues like sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, safe sex, promiscuity, and femininity while exploring the difference between friendships and relationships” (“Sex and the City”). Indeed, over the course of the series and even to this day, though its overall ideological merits remain debatable, Sex and the City engendered many conversations about feminism, sex and sexuality, sex acts, and the socio-sexual landscape of America in the late 90s and early 2000s. In an initial review of the series entitled “In Pursuit of Love, Romantically or Not” published June 5, 1998, New York Times author Caryn James cleverly contrasts the series’ main character’s concerns to the more formulaic ones of fictional characters past. 1 She finds Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City’s focal, and her constellation far removed from both Audrey Hepburn’s iconic Holly Golightly and the litter of “hopeless romantics” filling out Amistad Maupin’s More Tales of the City.3 “More than she realizes,” James writes, “Carrie is torn between her longing for romance and her knowledge that there is no free