Porn under the microscope

Very often invoked in public debates, pornography has only very recently attracted the interest of the scientific community. And if it still suffers from social contempt, researchers are now working to define it and specify its contours, products, actors, consumption patterns. In this context, the work edited by Florian Vörös contributes to the dissemination in France of studies developed within porn studiesa field of research founded in the United States at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s. These start from the heterogeneity of pornographic productions and representations. In doing so, they oppose discourses which, using a singular reductive approach, equate pornography with violent images, and uncritically denounce its potential dangers on the sexuality of supposedly socially vulnerable groups. Refusing the use of a misleading singular, they invite us to think about “pornographic cultures”, thus underlining the plurality of pornographic expressions, the diversity of uses and social, symbolic, even ideological appropriations, of which they are the object. Reluctant to make abusive generalizations, they require vigilance, observing the way in which individuals grasp these sexual representations and incorporate them into their sexuality.

This collection of founding texts articulates some elements of a theoretical and epistemological framing of this field of research, according to three resolutely political perspectives: sensation, gaze, appropriation. THE porn studies seek to understand, in individual relationships with pornographic images, the social principles that give rise to desire. These are certainly constructed in individual stories, but are also part of a social, political and moral hierarchy between representations, sexual acts and social groups. It is therefore just as essential to take an interest in those who define what pornography is and determine the practices and representations that relate to it. This definition is the subject of struggles between social actors registered in collectives and institutions, which lead to policies for regulating products and their circulation.

Being affected

In the first part of the work, “Politics of sensation”, the text by Susanna Paasonnen, “Strange promiscuities. Pornography, affects and feminist reading” returns to the heuristic relevance of reflexivity in the analysis of our relationships with pornography. This approach proposes to redefine our reading processes by advocating the integration of affects in the interpretation of sexual representations. It invites the researcher to question their experience, less with the aim of self-analysis than with an understanding of the scholarly body as also being traversed by social processes. Bodily sensations, such as pleasure, displeasure, attraction, disgust, participate in the interpretation of pornographic texts.

The exercise is not easy since, as the author points out,

(the) legacy of the separation between body and mind in Western society is certainly not easy to deny. Nevertheless, the “affective turn” recently diagnosed in feminist thought constitutes a significant step forward towards a more embodied approach to reading. (pp. 66-67)

This posture not only calls into question the traditional position of exteriority of the researcher supposedly guarantor of scientific objectivity, but it invites him or her to read the complexity of the affects aroused by pornographic images, to take seriously his subjective points of view, in the exploration of the “(…) gap between our political positions vis-à-vis gender and sexuality and our vulnerability to pornography and its generic and stylized presentation of control” (p. 77).

See

Kobena Mercer’s contribution, “Reading racial fetishism. The photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe” is part of the second part of the work, “Politics of the gaze”. The author returns to two readings he proposed of the series of nudes of black men produced by the photographer. The first was published in 1986 in Great Britain, the second in 1989 in the United States. Retrospective rereadings thus allow him to question the developments that have occurred in his relationship to these images. The researcher’s gaze is a central element here, which reveals the social relationships which underlie not only the interpretive work, but also the expression of desire. By comparing his different interpretations, Kobena Mercer shows that the successive shifts in his gaze are linked both to his position as a black gay subject, and to the struggles and controversies that the work arouses in American society at a given moment. The process consists of constantly resituating the subjective point of view of the researcher in the treatment of “the relationships experienced with difference which characterizes the complexity and incompleteness of any social identity” (p. 112).

This is how he initially reads the photographer’s works through the prism of the fantasies that white people develop about the sexuality of black men. He then emphasizes the way in which the artist plays with stereotypes, or how reified bodies become objects of desire. This reading “which is accompanied by a racial fetish » promotes a reflection on “the political unconscious of white masculinity” (p. 127). Secondly, the researcher makes an interpretive shift, no longer anchored solely in the social relations of race, but in the context of urban gay culture. Therefore, these images “disrupt and decenter dominant (white) racial identities as well as normative (hetero)sexual identities” (p. 142). This study therefore questions the plasticity of interpretations according to the social anchoring of the individual, of the viewer, and the imaginary relationship that he constructs with the text.

In this regard, the study by Clarissa Smith, Martin Barker and Feona Attwood on “the motives for pornography consumption”, published in the third part of the collection, is enlightening. From a consumer survey, the results show the complexity and diversity of audiences, uses and sexual representations offered in an increasingly segmented market. Thus, according to the authors, pornographers, anxious to diversify the audiences for pornography, varied the offerings, and notably “(…) facilitated the participation of women in the production and consumption of sexual imaginations” (p. 258). The survey not only collects information on the social affiliations of users and declared sexual orientation, but it especially focuses on understanding their consumption practices (frequency, types of products and media – DVDdownloads, sharing platforms, webcams, etc.), what they look for in and do with pornography. This is how, according to the authors,

(n)our statistics indicate a series of differences between the relationship of men and women to pornography. For example, men on average view porn as simply a means of expressing their arousal, while women view it more often as a means of arousal. Women also appear to use porn to reconnect with their bodies, as well as in their relationships with partners. Men seem more inclined to resort to pornography to relieve boredom or when they have nothing better to do. (pg. 260)

Pornography as a tool

The chapter written by Lisa Sigel, “When obscenity falls into the wrong hands”, introduces the third part of the work, “Politics of appropriation”, and continues this reflection at another level, that of the long term, and in the context of struggles between social groups. Through the example of photographs of naked girls in France and England at the end of the XIX^e and at the beginning of XX^e centuries the researcher shows the change in status of pornography. Socially and politically tolerated when these images are seen exclusively by white, aristocratic or bourgeois men, they become suspect and dangerous when they concern the working classes, women, non-white people or children. According to the author, “this new form of sexual representation produced on a large scale and at low cost changed verbal obscenity into visual obscenity” (p. 213). The shift from private to public, from the elite to the masses, triggers a movement of moral panic, and the establishment of a system of control and repression by public authorities and private organizations, arguing for the protection of groups the most vulnerable.

However, it is also about fighting against the political appropriation of these forms of expression, and their circulation in the public space. Indeed, as they become more democratized, these photographs of naked girls diversify, and become postcards, they widely disseminate political critiques of society. If some play on social relations of gender, class and race, through the prism of a colonial imagination, others summon sexual representations to make fun of aristocrats or the working classes. Thus, as Lisa Sigel points out,

The collected texts therefore seek to define a common theoretical and epistemological framework for the study of pornography, capable of thinking about the heterogeneity of its definitions, its objects, its uses, and its audiences. THE porn studies are a field of research which gives an important place to reflexivity as a heuristic tool for the construction of knowledge. Reflexivity of the researcher’s view, reflexivity of a collective on itself. It combines affects and sensations with intellectual work. Furthermore, this approach simultaneously thinks about processes of social assignment and stigmatization, tactics and interpretive shifts. It deserves to be mobilized on other grounds, considered more noble, or less vulgar.