Dwelling in the House That Porn Built: A Phenomenological Critique of Pornography in the Age of Internet Technology (original) (raw)
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The Cultural Motion of Pornography Thesis20191003 49784 op5lno
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 Cultural Motion of Pornography Thesis20191003 27304 cpie2d
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.
An Object of Discourse for Studies of Pornography
Questions de communication, 2014
This English translation has not been published in printed form/Cette traduction anglaise n'a pas été publiée sous forme imprimée. Pornography has been the subject of much recent discussion, particularly in France. It has become an everyday theme in media discourse as the numerous articles, special files and columns in the printed and online press demonstrate, as does the multiplication of "sex" features under various names in nearly all the French daily and weekly papers, on numerous radio stations and television channels 1. Pornography has also become a research subject and is now an integral part of humanities and social science studies in France 2 , although it is new and somewhat controversial for some. A recent object for sciences of discourse and communication Pornography is rarely studied from a standpoint involving language, discourse and, more broadly, representations. This is the subject of this thematic issue devoted to the discourse of pornography in all senses of the term whether written, oral, techno-discursive, verboiconic, photographical or even, as we shall see, unconscious. At first glance, pornography may seem to escape language and communications specialists given that everyone appears to agree that it is above all a matter of sexual organs, images, fluids or positions-bodies in a word. What is more, it would take a wise person to draw up exact borders between pornography, eroticism and sexuality-all fields An Object of Discourse for Studies of Pornography Questions de communication, 26 | 2014
The cultural position of pornography has gone through evident and drastic transformations during the past decades. These transformations involve an increase in the public visibility of all kinds of pornographies that have, since the 1990s, been increasingly distributed through online platforms, as well as a wave of academic and popular titles diagnosing the mainstreaming of porn and sex in contemporary culture characterized as " pornified, " " porned, " and " raunchy. " 1 This chapter addresses these recent developments within the pornographic, as well as diagnoses thereof, from two intertwining perspectives. It starts by asking whether the term " pornification " can be put into productive analytical use that would not efface the complexity of the cultural tendencies involved, or truncate the potential meaning of the term " pornography " itself. This is followed by a brief discussion of the binary legacy of porn studies as it connects to diagnoses of pornification. The second part of the article investigates how the genre of porn has been transformed in the course of its digital production and distribution, and what challenges contemporary porn poses for scholarly analysis that still remains largely rooted in studies of print media, film, and video productions distributed as material commodities (such as magazines and DVDs). In sum, this chapter asks how transformations in the visibility and ubiquity of pornography have been diagnosed, how the genre itself has been transformed, and what kinds of modifications within scholarly investigation all this may necessitate.
MA Thesis: Wired Fingers, Sticky Keyboards: Techno-Embodiment in Online Pornography
In my thesis “Wired Fingers, Sticky Keyboards: Techno-Embodiment in Online Pornography” I present an analysis of embodiment in online pornography by weaving together pornography studies, media theories of body-technology relation and posthumanist thought. Taking a step back from the analysis of the content of pornography and focusing on media-specific practices around it, I claim that phenomenon of online pornography invites to re-think the pro/anti and speech/discourse versus practice debates in pornography studies. Through the lens of phenomenological approaches to new media and a theoretical framework of "dispositif", I look at the free pornographic tube-websites and argue that through the complex intertwining of bodies and technologies in the consumption of online pornography, embodiment gets re-defined as techno-embodiment. Finally, I ask what kind of implications does this have to the kinds of modes of power that operate in the realm of online pornography, and what kind of spaces of constraint and potential do they open up for consumers and producers.
DiGeST, 2019
Twenty years after their broad diffusion in most Western countries, digital technologies are still considered a media space that holds risks for users and primarily young users. Experiences with content considered potentially harmful such as mediated sexual content or sexting falls within a context of public and academic concerns but also within a context of moral panics about the ethical deprivation and loss of childhood. In this article I revisit data from a qualitative project undertaken between 2010-2012 addressing young people's accounts of experiences with mediated sexual content. I attempt to provide a broader analytical framework for young people's constructions of sexuality and mediated sexual content, one that acknowledges their agency to talk and negotiate the topic in social, cultural and ethical terms. My objective is to demonstrate that young people's constructions of sexuality through accounts of mediated sexual content contribute through a development of sets of porn literacies to further negotiations of sexual citizenship.
Discourses of pornification: From civil society to “porn society”
This paper examines how the concept of civil society relates to the porn/sex industry as well as to individual internet users who actively participate in e-moves aiming at exchanging pornography content and information/views on commercial sex. By describing the porn portal bourdela.com, and presenting evidence from a conducted discourse analysis on the reviews/evaluations which the commentators post, there will be an effort to apply the concept of pornification to the everyday use of on-line communities. Hence, it will be suggested that this leads to the formation of a certain kind of civil society which one can call 'porn society'.
2017
The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography Heather Brunskell-Evans This edited collection examines pornography as a material practice that eroticises gender inequality and sexual violence towards women. It addresses the complex relationship between pornography and medicine (in particular, sexology and psychotherapy) whereby medicine has historically, and currently, afforded pornography considerable legitimacy and even authority. Pornography naturalises womens submission and mens dominance as if gendered power is rooted in biology not politics. In contrast to the populist view that medicine is objective and rational, the contributors here demonstrate that medicine has been complicit with the construction of gender difference, and in that construction the relationship with pornography is not incidental but fundamental. A range of theoretical approaches critically engages with this topic in the light, firstly, of radical feminist ideas about patriarchy and the politics of gender, and, secondly, of the rapidly changing conditions of global capitalism and digital-technologies. In its broad approach, the book also engages with the ideas of Michel Foucault, particularly his refutation of the liberal hypothesis that sexuality is a deep biological and psychological human property which is repressed by traditional, patriarchal discourses and which can be freed from authoritarianism, for example by producing and consuming pornography. In taking pornography as a cultural and social phenomenon, the concepts brought to bear by the contributors critically scrutinise not only pornography and medicine, but also current media scholarship. The 21st century has witnessed a growth in (neo-)liberal academic literature which is pro-pornography. This book provides a critical counterpoint to this current academic trend, and demonstrates its lack of engagement with the politics of the multi-billion dollar pornography industry which creates the desire for the product it sells, the individualism of its arguments which analyse pornography as personal fantasy, and the paucity of theoretical analysis. In contrast, this book reopens the feminist debate about pornography for a new generation of critical thinkers in the 21st century. Pornography matters politically and ethically. It matters in the real world as well as in fantasy; it matters to performers as well as to consumers; it matters to adults as well as to children; and it matters to men as well as to women.
Postmodern Openings
The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the fact that the consumption phenomenon constitutes a characteristic of postmodern culture, in this case played by the process of objectification of the body, under the auspices of pornography. The concept of ‘cultural recycling’ analyzed by Jean Baudrillard brings out not only the undermining of the values of cultural and historical tradition by postmodern culture, but also the establishment of reference systems built around simulation and simulacrum, making possible the capitalization of pornography in the name of advertising and sexual entertainment. With this process of body objectification, especially with the female gender body, pornography becomes the cultural fetish the mass culture needs. ‘Sexual solipsism’, analyzed by Rae Langton, within whose limits this objectification mechanism is being built, is helped by the shift in paradigm produced between soul and body, the body being the one taking the soul’s place and governing the cultural-human existence, through a mechanical deconstruction of sexuality and a technological fetishism, as we see in J. Ballard’s novel, Crash or in the homonymous film directed by David Cronenberg. The manipulative mechanism through which the pornographic device infiltrates mass culture environments makes it present in art, in the form of a presence, through absence for starters, given by what Brian McNair conceptually calls ‘porno-chic’. And then, through ‘pornographic imagination’, analyzed by Susan Sontag, pornography enters postmodern culture and constituted a way of life for the contemporary individual.