Pornography E-Book

Rebecca Sullivan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PCPS - Polity Key Concepts in Philosophy series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 371

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Pornography and Porn Studies

Pornography and pleasure

Pornography in the media entertainment matrix

Media and cultural studies of pornography

Key concepts in pornography

1. The Global Creative Industry of Pornography

Pornography as a creative industry

Working hard for the money: Support players in the pornography industry

Stereotypes and discrimination

Workplace health and safety

Criminal involvement in pornography

The global pornography circuit

Global porn and the child abuse industry

Conclusion: The future of the business

2. Pornography and Communication Technologies

Pornography as a driver of technology

Online pornography and media moral panics

Rule 34

The business models of Internet pornography

Subscription sites

Aggregate sites

Community user websites

Interactivity

Big porn data

Conclusion: The future of technology

3. Pornography and Violence

Quantifying violence in pornography research

Radical anti-porn feminism and the harms framework

Neo-anti-porn activists

Neo-anti -porn responses to gay and feminist porn

Violence and consent

Conclusion: The future of consensual violence in pornography

4. Pornification and Sexualized Bodies

Sexualization and government surveillance

The pornification framework

Sexualization, pornification – and sexism

Whose pornographic gaze? Hip-hop and white prurience

Conclusion: The future of porn and the pleasurification of culture

5. Pornography Governance and Sexual Citizenship

Sexual citizenship and pornography

Whose community, whose standards?

(H)arming the citizen against pornography

Extreme pornography and mute/ant bodies

Conclusion: The future of pornographic citizenship

6. Performing Pornography, Practising Sexual Politics

‘Porn stars’: porn performance and sexual authenticity

Coerced performance and porn recovery

Feminist/queer porn and the performance of consent

The authenticity of performance

Re-assessing the ‘harms’ of mainstream porn performance

Conclusion: the future of porn performance politics

Conclusion

The Future of Pornography Studies

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Key Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies

Reality TV, June DeeryPornography, Rebecca Sullivan and Alan McKee

Pornography

Structures, Agency and Performance

Rebecca Sullivan and Alan McKee

polity

Copyright © Rebecca Sullivan and Alan McKee 2015

The right of Rebecca Sullivan and Alan McKee to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9484-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

The authors would jointly like to thank the wonderful staff at Polity who first envisioned this project and gave us unlimited support and freedom to express ourselves. Special thanks to Andrea Drugan, the one who made it all possible. We also extend our gratitude to all the Polity reps with whom we had the pleasure to work: Joe Devanny, Elen Griffiths, Lauren Mulholland, Neil de Cort and Susan Beer. Thanks as well to our book designer, David Gee. Our two peer referees gave thoughtful, supportive feedback that strengthened the final work and gave us renewed confidence in our arguments. We also acknowledge, with deep gratitude and respect, our incredible editorial assistant, Tiffany Sostar. She spent long hours and sleepless nights poring over our manuscript, not only correcting technical faults but also offering sharp insights into pornography activism. A more professional and passionate collaborator we could not have imagined.

I would like to extend personal gratitude to the students at the University of Calgary who have enrolled in my courses on pornography and taught me more about this subject than I think I taught them. The Women’s Studies and Feminism Club, Consent Awareness and Sexual Education Club, the Q Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity, and the Women’s Resource Centre have given me the gift of an intellectual and activist community, from which I draw sustenance and courage.

Special thanks to colleagues near and far who have inspired this work and provided support: they include Feona Attwood, Alison Beale, Karen Boyle, Paul Johnson, Catherine Murray, Katharine Sarikakis, Clarissa Smith, Lisa Tzaliki, and Thomas Waugh. Although in many instances our paths cross infrequently and briefly, you have all been a unique part of this journey. I especially want to thank my gracious and generous co-author, Alan McKee, without whom this project may never have been completed. I must also extend an additional thank you to Tiffany Sostar for introducing me to the world of feminist queer pornography and making it possible for me to begin my own discovery of the field. What I once believed impossible has now exceeded my wildest (political) dreams.

Finally, I wake up every day grateful for my loving husband, Bart Beaty, and our amazing son Sebastian. Just because.

Rebecca Sullivan

I would like to thank first of all Professor John Hartley – my first and best mentor, and a profound thinker whose democratic approach to culture radically challenges traditional academic thinking. His work has helped to make it possible for downmarket, trashy and vulgar people like me to work in the academy.

The writing-up of this book was made possible by the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology through a Long Professional Development Leave grant. My ten years at QUT were inspiring and exciting and I learned a lot. Thank you to everybody there.

I’m profoundly grateful to the colleagues who helped me develop my thinking about culture and sex – Rebecca Sullivan (of course), Anne-Frances Watson, Johanna Dore, Christy Collis, Jerry Coleby-Williams, Catharine Lumby, Kath Albury, Brian McNair, Feona Attwood, Clarissa Smith, Emma Jane, Sarah Tarca, Claire Starkey, Anthony Walsh, Clare Moran, Michael Dunne, Sue Grieshbaber, Ben Mathews and Juliet Richters. Any mistakes or eccentricities remain my own.

And finally, I send my love to my husband, Anthony John Spinaze – without you I would not be so sane. Thank you.

Alan McKee

Introduction

Pornography and Porn Studies

What is pornography? Who is it produced for, and what sorts of sexualities does it help produce? Why should we study it, and what should be the most urgent issues when we do? These are the questions that frame our analysis of how pornography is conceptualized as a sexual practice, a media form, and a social issue. This is a book about pornography as a concept, one that is charged with numerous political, social, and cultural concerns about gender roles and sexual relationships more generally. As such, we are largely interested in the debates and discourses that circulate about pornography – how they are organized, what sorts of assumptions lie behind them, who is most deeply implicated in them. The goal of this book is to situate those debates and discourses within networks of competing gender and sexual politics in globalized cultural systems, and to suggest new frameworks for the understanding of pornography. We treat pornography as an integral part of commercial media industries, national and international regulatory discourses, gendered social structures, and subaltern sexual praxis.

Pornography is notoriously difficult to define, and overburdened with assumptions concerning – at the very least – gender, sexuality, power, globalization, desire, affect, and labour. Yet that should not allow us to sidestep this demanding task: it is not good enough merely to repeat the famous dictum by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, ‘I know it when I see it’ (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 US 184 (1964)). At stake in the definition of pornography is the recognition that sexual pleasure is a highly contested and politically fraught concept, and that media and popular culture have a long history of perpetuating deep-set gender and sexual inequities and making them appear pleasurable. At the same time, we also appreciate that many of us create and consume media entertainment to enhance our sexual freedoms and pleasure-seeking. In so doing, the boundaries of what can and cannot be seen, spoken, or performed are challenged and redrawn. That is why pornography is such an important concept for anyone concerned with the role of media and popular culture in everyday life. It deserves to be studied in ways that take into consideration its multiple possibilities and in the context of who is making it, who is watching it, and how.

This book engages with some of the most well-known and current strands of public debate on pornography. We pay particular attention to Anglo-European countries including Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. At the same time, we recognize that, like all media, pornography is being transformed by forces of globalization: industrialization, labour migrations, technological advancements, and the mingling of cultural forms and symbolic systems. Analysis unfolds across six major vectors: industry, technology, violence, pornification, governance, and performance. Our attention is, unless otherwise clearly stated, on pornography produced in legal contexts by adults for adult consumption. Our reasons for this focus are that this is the most prolific and profitable sector of the pornography industry, and is also the most hotly contested in determining the gender and sexual politics of pornography. While we make reference to child abuse materials (the preferred criminological term for what some call ‘child pornography’) and to criminal acts such as ‘revenge porn’, our attention to these is in the context of their outright unethical and illegal practices. As such, the issues they raise are substantially at odds with consensual adult pornography and require a radically different approach from the one we take in this book.