Porn Audiences and Prosumption: A Fannish Space in Porn (original) (raw)
The field of audience studies has undergone something of a change in the last twenty years. From considering film and television viewers to be passive consumers, scholars now recognise the active role that audiences play in the construction and reception of texts. This work has been fuelled by the development of fan studies, with academics like Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills and Jonathan Gray arguing that fans not only read a text in different ways depending on their social, political and cultural backgrounds, but actively work with the text and change its meaning through the creation of fanfiction, fan videos and fan art. Much work on porn, however, has retained the image of the porn viewer as a mere consumer: Zabet Patterson notes that the ‘cyberporn addict’ is a recent figure in contemporary accounts of porn audiences, while Feona Attwood writes that “Actual porn consumers are absent from public debate and are represented by figures which stand for consumption and sexuality” (2004). This paper problematises the notion of the passive consumer of porn adopting Ritzer and Jurgenson's 2010 concept of productive consumption, or ‘prosumption’. Ritzer and Jurgenson suggest that prosumption is the simultaneous role of being a producer of what one consumes, and argue that Web 2.0 facilitates its implosion. I suggest that prosumption is a useful means by which we can understand the dual role of porn audiences as producers and consumers, and draw on fan studies to analyse this. I examine fanfiction written by viewers of porn as well as the fan communities that have risen around the porn star James Deen. I argue that both these fanfic writers and 'Deenagers' are engaged in more fannish activities than previously recognised in porn viewership, and that each are engaged in practices that complicate current understandings of porn audiences.
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