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Hope, Possibility, and Cruelty: Porn Consumption and Neoliberalism's View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ASU Digital Repository Hope, Possibility, and Cruelty: Porn Consumption and Neoliberalism's Everyday Affective Subjects by Joseph Moreno A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Approved April 2018 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Marlon M. Bailey, Chair Marisa Duarte Yasmina Katsulis ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY May 2018 ABSTRACT In the wake of the post-2000s internet and technology boom, with the nearly simultaneous introduction of smartphones, tablet, IPads, and online video streaming, another moral panic around pornography has reared its head. While much has been written about pornography from the perspective of media analysis and, more recently, ethnographic work of the industry and with performers themselves, very little work has been done with consumers. What has been undertaken, by psychologists and antiporn academics in particular, suffers an unfortunate lack of diversity in terms of how consumers are defined. That is, psychologists and antiporn academics alike appear to think only white hetero men consume porn. This research realizes its significance through the idea that porn looks and feels differently, and expresses different meanings through the historical and intersecting relations to power of a consumer, even in the young heterosexual men that antiporn feminists are so keen on using as a strawman for all porn consumption. With the help of an intersectional affects framework, I am able to articulate the manner in which pornography puts bodies in motion before the mind undertakes a hermeneutical exercise fundamentally framed by the consumer’s knowledge and subjectivity, which muddles how antiporn’s speech act approaches presume a direct propositional transmission from a pornographic object to the consumer. A digital object of any kind becomes pornography when it is used as such (Magnus Ullén, 2013); there is no necessary or logical consequence that outside of such a context that the object is inherently or intentionally an object of pornography (Mary Mikkola, 2017). With the help of my participants, I expose the manner in which subjective and intersubjective flows of affects expose entanglements of hope, possibility, and cruelty for porn consumers qua i affective subjects. This is particularly the case for those non-majoritarian subjects whose promise of sexual citizenship and/or legibility, within neoliberalism’s single-issue progress narrative and linear temporality, rests on both the transposition of illegibility and non-citizenship elsewhere, as well as the subject’s willingness to fix, label, and thereby commodify their desires as affective labor. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER Page 1 INTRODUCTION: WHY PORN? ........................................................................ 1 Heterogenizing the Consumer ................................................................................. 1 Layout of Chapters ................................................................................................ 12 2 THE PORN WARS: FROM A POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY TO RESPECTABLY PERVERSE ............................................................................ 16 The Roots of Antiporn .......................................................................................... 16 Antiporn: A Politics of Respectability .................................................................. 17 Nuanced/Proporn: Respectably Preverse .............................................................. 29 3 FROM WHENCE WE CAME: ON PARTICIPANT ANGLE OF ARRIVAL . 38 Who We Are ......................................................................................................... 38 Navigating Under Heteronormativity .................................................................. 56 4 BE.COM/ING: ADDICTS AND CREEPS? OR, EVERYDAY AFFECTIVE SUBJECTS? ......................................................................................................... 58 The Flux of Affects ............................................................................................... 58 Key Modalities of Affect ...................................................................................... 62 Mediums of Affects: Devices & Digitial Pornographic Objects ........................ 67 Modalities of Affect 1: The Pornosphere ............................................................. 76 Modalities of Affect 2: Immersions ..................................................................... 84 Hope and Cruelty: Porn through the Internet ....................................................... 93 iii CHAPTER Page 5 ASYMMETRIES: WHITE DESIRE, HETERONORMATIVITY, AND TOXIC AFFECTS ............................................................................................................. 97 What the Hell is Water? ........................................................................................ 97 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 109 REFERENCES ................................................................................................... 112 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION WHY PORN? HETEROGENIZING THE CONSUMER Who consumes porn and why do they do it? More importantly, do they consume it in the same way? In the wake of the post-2000s internet and technology boom, with the nearly simultaneous introduction of smartphones, tablet, IPads, and online video streaming, another moral panic around pornography has reared its head, the genealogy of which I cover in chapter 2, The Porn Wars. While much has been written about pornography from the perspective of media analysis and, more recently, ethnographic work of the industry and with performers themselves, very little work has been done with consumers. What has been undertaken, by psychologists and antiporn academics in particular, suffers a lack of diversity in terms of how consumers are defined. That is, psychologists and antiporn academics alike appear to think only white hetero men consume porn. Moreover, in their “appeals to emotional truths,” antiporn academics undermine certain testimonies in favor of those who “present themselves as addicts, victims, or rescuers” (Clarissa Smith & Feona Atwood, 2013, p. 54). Apprehending the lack of diverse and nuanced consumer research, Simon Lindgren (2010) urgently states that “the need for audience studies has become all the more urgent now that … pornography has moved online” (p. 171). Echoing as well as expanding that call, Lorelei Lee (2013) writes in The Feminist Porn Book: the Politics of Producing Pleasure that many scholars on porn fail 1 to consider how intersections of race, religion, class, sexual orientation, among other relations to power, effect the conditions and experiences of consumption. My work, which endeavors to shed some light on the lacunae discussed above, finds its primary inspiration in my own historical relationship with porn. Throughout my youth and early adulthood, porn consumption served a myriad of functions; and porn, even within the same genre, expressed a number of meanings over time. More importantly, porn added a richness to my life that I could not attain in any other space. The relationship was not always a straightforward or happy one. To discuss the entirety of that relationship is a book in itself. I can, however, provide three brief examples from my teens to early twenties (in that order). First, before having viewed porn with hetero men having sex with gay men or hetero men watching gay sex and masturbating—particularly, those in which the performers give a kind of pre or post scene interview as well—I lacked a community narrative allowing me to understand how gay fantasies were something apart from being or heading toward being gay or bisexual. This allowed me to expand my own intermittent and ambivalent gay fantasies into intermittent and still ambivalent gay porn consumption without necessarily feeling as if I were perverted or ill in some capacity, despite the fact that my straight friends would not understand had I told them. Second, I once showed a close friend a gonzo porn I found particularly hot because of how much pleasure the woman performer expressed. He emphatically disagreed, countering with the personal fact that he could only be turned on if it appeared as if the woman were actually coerced into the scene. I never thought about actual coercion or rape being the case within porn. I neither 2 understood1 how he could have such a desire, nor was I able to enjoy the porn he recommended. I did not, however, stop consuming hardcore porn that played with coercion or reluctance, whenever it was apparent that all performers were enjoying themselves. Finally, I began to notice how my relationship to porn shifted depending on the friends and sexual partners I had at any time. Sometimes I felt very sure about my porn consumption. It allowed me to explore fantasies I did not necessarily intend to explore physically. It also showed me countless amounts of sexual positions and ways to receive and give pleasure, which I employed in my sexual relationships to virtually wholly positive responses. Simultaneously, when in the company of certain lovers, friends, or family who were not comfortable discussing, watching, or even thinking about porn, I too began to feel ill about my porn consumption. To be sure, there were moments of critique that I took to heart. It was part of maturing into
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