UNIVERSITY OF CHICHESTER An accredited institution of the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON Department of English Contemporary Understandings of the Pornographic: Transgression, Affect, and the Displacement of Sex by Helen Hester Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy This thesis has been completed as a requirement for a higher degree of the University of Southampton September 2011 2 UNIVERSITY OF CHICHESTER An accredited institution of the University of Southampton ABSTRACT DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Doctor of PhilosOj>hy CONTEMPORARY UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE PORNOGRAPHIC: TRANSGRESSION, AFFECT, AND THE DISPLACEMENT OF SEX By Helen Hester This thesis represents an attempt to think through the displacement of sex within contemporary understandings of the pornographic and to theorize the apparent explosion of the pornographic as a cultural concept. Chapter 1 discusses the conflation of three highly significant discourses within contemporary culture - feminism, pornography, and transgression. This chapter analyses the complex dynamics of transgression, and argues that sex may be being gradually displaced as the privileged locus of transgression within contemporary Western society. It examines the surprisingly diverse nature of both the material and the affective responses that our culture labels pornographic, and considers the significance of transgression in the extension of the applicability of this concept. Chapter 2 seeks to problematize the extension of the pornographic in relation to a range of examples, and discusses materials such as political propaganda and documentary images of war in order to demonstrate just how wide-ranging contemporary understandings of the pornographic can be. This chapter considers the manner in which the ideas of intensity and prurience can be seen to inform the displacement of sex within popular perceptions of the pornographic, and attempts to contextualize this displacement in relation to ideas ofthe postmodern. Chapter 3 brings the concept of the real to bear on the analysis of current understandings of pornography, and reflects upon why it is that memoirs of abuse, trauma, and precarious lives have come to be aligned with ideas of the pornographic. In its attempts to theorize the content, affects, and appeal of' misery porn,' Chapter 3 brings together many of the currents which run through the thesis as a whole in order to highlight the importance of both the extra-textual real and the real asjouissance to contemporary understandings of the pornographic. The thesis concludes with a consideration of the problems raised by the explosion of the pornographic. 4 J Contents Introduction: Critical Voices in Porn Studies 13 1. Feminism, Pornography, Transgression: The Critical Response to Charlotte Roche's Wetlands 27 2. Beyond Explicit: The Explosion of the Pornographic 67 3. Misery Porn: Authenticity, Authorship, and Autobiography 127 Conclusion: Pornographication and the Explosion of the Pornographic 179 6 List of D1ustrations Fig. 1: An image of the tortures at the Abu Ghraib prisoner camp showing a male prisoner attached to a leash 84 Fig. 2: Still from the video of Nicholas Berg's execution 85 Fig. 3: An image of the tortures at the Abu Ghraib prisoner camp showing four hooded male prisoners 106 Fig. 4: Francesco Bartolozzi's frontispiece for John Gabriel Stedman's The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) 112 Fig. 5: An anonymous copper engraving of items used in the slave trade, produced for Thomas Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1807) 113 These images are available to reproduce here because they are not considered to be under copyright. 8 Declaration of Authorship I, Helen Hester, declare that the thesis and the work presented in the thesis are both my own, and have been generated by me as the result of my own original research. I confirm that: § this work was done wholly or mainly while in candidature for a research degree at this University; § where any part of this thesis has previously been submitted for a degree or any other qualification at this University or any other institution, this has been clearly stated; § where I have consulted the published work of others, this is always clearly attributed; § where I have quoted from the work of others, the source is always given. With the exception of such quotations, this thesis is entirely my own work; § I have acknowledged all main sources of help; § where the thesis is based on work done by myself jointly with others, I have made clear exactly what was done by others and what I have contributed myself; § none of this work has been published before submission. Date: '~/\1_/l\ 10 J J Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Benjamin Noys, for all his support, guidance, and patience over the past three years. His encouragement has been unwavering, and he has had a significant influence upon this thesis and, indeed, upon my thinking more generally. I would also like to thank the English Department at the University of Chichester for providing such a warm and lively research context, and for affording me so many wonderful opportunities to challenge myself as both a teacher and a researcher. Thanks are also due to Lucy Scholes, whose insights have proved an invaluable resource, and whose strength of personality has been a constant source of inspiration. I am also extremely grateful to those who have commented on my work or otherwise assisted and encouraged me, including Michael O'Rourke, Adam Locks, Alex Williams, Michael Amherst, Mark Mason, Alex Napier, and Georg Zipp. My thanks go to my family - the Butchers, the Hesters, and the Prides - for all their love, reassurance, and goodwill, and I dedicate this thesis to Diarmuid Hester, who keeps me afloat. 12 I,) Introductioni Critical Voices in Porn Studies This thesis represents an attempt to contribute to the branch of cultural theory known as 'Porn Studies.' As we shall see, this emerging academic discipline takes as its object pornographic representations of various kinds, and aims to extend our understanding of a genre which has historically received too little in the way of sustained and dispassionate scholarly analysis. As a critical approach, Porn Studies is still relatively young; many of the edited collections which have been influential in shaping the discipline were first published in the opening decade of the new millennium, including Linda Williams' Porn Studies (2004), Pamela Church Gibson's More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography, and Power (2004), and Peter Lehman's Pornography: Film and Culture (2006). Nevertheless, Porn Studies has quickly gained a sense of its own identity and developed its own disciplinary conventions, and I want to address some of these conventions here. Porn Studies' valuable work in generating new strategies for talking about adult entertainment within an academic context has very much informed my own perspective on pornography. Like many Porn Studies scholars, for example, I am keen to go beyond repetitive and simplistic discussions about whether pornography should be viewed as either a positive or a negative phenomenon in terms of its cultural influence - discussions which are widely understood to be the legacy of the bipartisan feminist politics of the 1970s and 1980s.1 I agree with Williams when she states that these feminist debates have 'impeded discussion of almost everything but the question of whether pornography deserves to exist at all. Since it does exist, however, we should be asking what it does for viewers; and since it is a genre with basic similarities to other genres, we need to come to terms with it' (Hard Core 4 - 5). This thesis therefore turns away from questions of whether we should be for or against adult entertainment in favour of a more nuanced analysis of the contemporary pornographic landscape. This kind of approach unites much of the work currently being undertaken within a Porn Studies context, with historians and theoreticians staging' a partial escape from the dead-end of the feminist censorship debate' (Preciado 26). As Feona Attwood notes in her survey of new directions in twenty-first century research, contemporary theorists of porn have increasingly sought to move away from 'a debate about whether pornographic texts have fixed and simple meanings, embody and encourage clearly oppressive power relations, produce direct and quantifiable effects and can be challenged only through the regulatory mechanism of the state' ("Reading Porn" 92), in favour of a 're-examination of 1 This is the subject of detailed and extended analysis in Chapter I. 14 pornography, sexuality and the politics of representation' ("Reading Porn" 92). This departure from the polemical feminism of old involves both a commitment to studying specific pornographic texts (rather than trying to generalize about pornography as a whole) and a new sensitivity to the diversity of adult entertainment as a genre. Porn is no longer discussed as if it is a single thing to be either condemned or defended, but is viewed as being as mutable and multifaceted as any other regime of representation. 2 One of the first scholars to attempt a more nuanced and historicizing analysis of adult entertainment was Linda Williams. Her book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", first published in 1989, is arguably the founding text of Porn Studies, and represents a ground-breaking attempt to think critically about pornography as a moving-image genre. In Hard Core, Williams goes beyond generalizations and value judgements in an attempt to develop a more subtle critical vocabulary. She foregrounds the centrality of the 'principle of maximum visibility' (Hard Core 48, original emphases), for example, stressing that this principle 'has operated in different ways at different stages of the genre's history' (Hard Core 48). It is testament to the quality and critical sophistication of Williams' work, I think, that it remains so influential and widely cited today; indeed, ideas regarding the frenzy of the visible will surface repeatedly throughout the present study, providing a valuable insight into the mechanisms of contemporary pornographic texts.