Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex

Introduction

Introduction Critical Voices in Porn Studies This book represents an attempt to contribute to the branch of cultural theory known as Porn Studies. This emerging academic discipline takes as its object pornographic representations of various kinds, and aims to extend the understanding of a genre that has historically received too little in the way of sustained and dispassionate scholarly analysis. As a critical approach, Porn Studies is still relatively young; many of the edited collections that have been influential in shaping the discipline were first published in the opening decade of the new millennium, including Linda Williams’ Porn Studies (2004), Pamela Church Gibson’s More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography, and Power (2004), and Peter Lehman’s Pornography: Film and Culture (2006). Nevertheless, Porn Studies has quickly gained a sense of its own identity and developed its own disciplinary conventions, and I address some of these conventions here. The valuable work of Porn Studies in generating new strategies for talking about adult entertainment within an academic context has very much informed my own perspective on pornography. Like many Porn Studies scholars, for example, I am keen to go beyond repetitive and simplistic discussions about whether pornography should be viewed as either a positive or a negative phenomenon in terms of its cultural influence— discussions that are widely understood to be the legacy of the partisan feminist politics of the 1970s and 1980s. I agree with Williams when she states that these feminist debates have “impeded discussion of almost everything but the question of whether pornography deserves to exist at all. Since it does exist, however, we should be asking what it does for viewers; and since it is a genre with basic similarities to other genres, we need to come to terms with it” (Hard Core 4–5). Beyond Explicit, therefore, 1 2 Beyond Explicit turns away from questions of whether we should be for or against adult entertainment in favor of a more nuanced analysis of the contemporary pornographic landscape. This kind of approach unites much of the work currently being undertaken within a Porn Studies context, with historians and theoreticians staging “a partial escape from the dead-end of the feminist censorship debate” (Preciado 26). As Feona Attwood notes in her survey of new directions in twenty-first century research, contemporary theorists of porn have increasingly sought to move away from “a debate about whether pornographic texts have fixed and simple meanings, embody and encourage clearly oppressive power relations, produce direct and quantifiable effects and can be challenged only through the regulatory mechanism of the state” (“Reading Porn” 92), in favor of a “re-examination of pornography, sexuality and the politics of representation” (“Reading Porn” 92). This departure from the polemical feminism of old involves both a commitment to studying specific pornographic texts (rather than trying to generalize about pornography as a whole) and a new sensitivity to the diversity of adult entertainment as a genre. Porn is no longer discussed as if it is a single thing to be either condemned or defended, but is instead viewed as being as mutable and multifaceted as any other regime of representation.1 One of the first scholars to attempt a more nuanced and historicizing analysis of adult entertainment was Linda Williams. Her book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” first published in 1989, is arguably the founding text of Porn Studies, and represents a groundbreaking attempt to think critically about pornography as a moving-image genre. In Hard Core, Williams goes beyond generalizations and value judgments in an attempt to develop a more subtle critical vocabulary. She foregrounds the centrality of the “principle of maximum visibility” (Hard Core 48), for example, stressing that this principle “has operated in different ways at different stages of the genre’s history” (Hard Core 48). It is testament to the quality and critical sophistication of Williams’ work, I think, that it remains so influential and widely cited today; indeed, ideas regarding the frenzy of the visible will surface repeatedly throughout the present study, providing a valuable insight into the mechanisms of contemporary pornographic texts. Problems Within the Discipline Despite my engagement with and my esteem for certain of its central texts and theorists, however, there remain several key points on which 3 Introduction I am at variance with Porn Studies. For example, despite its admirable attempts to transcend the reductive arguments of previous approaches to pornography, I feel...