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Part III Pornography and the Real So far in this book, we have used the concepts of transgression, intensity, and prurience to help theorize the manner in which certain unconventional —and at times, nonexplicit—materials have come to be viewed as pornographic. In this section, I extend my analysis of the displacement of sex within contemporary understandings of the pornographic by considering the separate but related concept of authenticity. Authenticity, I demonstrate, is central to the way in which both adult entertainment and the more capacious notion of pornography are currently characterized, and an interest in the notion of the real can be seen as one important influence when it comes to perceiving or positioning a text as pornographic . Beginning with an examination of contemporary understandings of (and anxieties about) authenticity, Chapter 7 uses the work of Linda Williams, Pasi Falk, and Tanya Krzywinska to briefly outline some of the many ways in which adult entertainment can be seen to be invested in ideas of the real. It then analyzes how particular examples of contemporary porn—including the output of the well-known adult director Rocco Siffredi—work to generate an authenticity effect, or to convey an impression of reality. Chapter 8 focuses on a very different subset of representations that are labeled as pornographic. The key object of analysis for this chapter is the popular literary phenomenon known as “misery porn”—that is, the subgenre of autobiographical works that are based on the author’s real-life experiences of physical or emotional suffering. I interrogate exactly what it is about such works that makes them available for consideration as pornography, and consider what effect the ideas of genre and authenticity have on their reception. Life writing’s generic identity is heavily reliant on 125 126 Beyond Explicit the idea of reality, and this—combined with an emphasis on trauma—may be one reason why memoirs of a certain kind come to be identified as a species of porn, regardless of their level of sexual explicitness. I conclude the discussion by considering literary hoaxes, such as the one perpetrated by James Frey, as examples of the centrality of the authentic text to autobiography and pornography. In the final chapter, I discuss one particularly intriguing illustration of the intersection of the ideas of pornography, autobiography, and authenticity; that is, the work and authorial persona of JT LeRoy. Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy was a gender dissident street hustler from West Virginia, who spent “most of his teens with his truck-stop prostitute mother, who drew him into a nomadic life of drugs, destitution and abuse” (Crisell). However, after the publication of his novel Sarah in 1999, LeRoy (then still in his teens) managed to transcend these supposedly traumatic boyhood experiences in order to become a successful writer. Two books—the short story collection The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (2001) and the novella Harold’s End (2004)—followed in quick succession, and the author became involved in a number of journalistic and cinematic projects. LeRoy, however, turned out to be a hoax; articles by the journalists Stephen Beachy and Warren St. John, published in late 2005 and early 2006 respectively, revealed that LeRoy was the pseudonym of Laura Albert, a female writer and musician in her late 30s whose real life bore little in common with that of the LeRoy persona. I focus on JT LeRoy here not because “his” work is one of the more exemplary cases of the genre—far from it—but precisely because LeRoy is a figure existing at the intersection of what I perceive to be various significant fault lines within contemporary thinking on misery memoir. As is seen in the chapter, his work straddles the already tenuous boundary between fiction and autobiography—presenting itself, in a multilayered deceit, as thinly veiled memoir masquerading as make-believe—and draws attention to contemporary anxieties about the viability of the distinction between the phony and the genuine. In addition to this, LeRoy’s writing can be seen to trouble the distinction between misery porn and pornography proper,1 providing as it does various explicit accounts of acts of sexual abuse or prostitution, which supposedly have some claim to extra-textual authenticity. It is the marginal position of his work—the difficulty , evident both before and after Albert’s exposure, of knowing quite where to place it or how to talk about it—that makes it such a productive object for analysis in this context. After all, such instability or...

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