*Trigger warning* This thesis contains sexually explicit imagery.
WIRED FINGERS, STICKY KEYBOARDS:
TECHNO-EMBODIMENT IN ONLINE PORNOGRAPHY
Research Master Thesis
Goda Klumbytė
Media and Performance Studies
Utrecht University
First reader: Prof. Maaike Bleeker
Second reader: Dr. Kathrin Thiele
August, 2013
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Contents
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 4
Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................................ 9
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A BODY? EMBODIMENT IN PORNOGRAPHY AND MEDIA STUDIES ........................................................................................................................................ 9
1.1. Embodiment and pornography: wars, speech and practice .................................................. 10
Anti-pornography and anti-censorship feminism: laying out the basics of pornography as
practice and speech/discourse paradigms .............................................................................. 12
The “Practice Paradigm”: Mason-Grant's embodied approach to pornography ................... 16
1.2. Embodiment and media technologies: incorporating “the other” ......................................... 19
Don Ihde's phenomenology of technology .............................................................................. 20
Mark Hansen: fusing body-technology-world ........................................................................ 24
1.3. Focussing on relations: pornography as dispositif ............................................................... 26
Chapter 2 ...................................................................................................................................... 31
EMBODIMENT IN ONLINE PORNOGRAPHY: PORNOGRAPHIC DISPOSITIF AND THE PRODUCTION OF BODY IN E-PORN ........................................................................................ 31
2.1. The Dispositif of Online Porn ............................................................................................. 35
The Basic Apparatus ............................................................................................................. 35
Mode of Address .................................................................................................................... 42
Viewing Situation .................................................................................................................. 46
2.2. Body in e-Porn: enacting the desires of mediated flesh ....................................................... 49
Chapter 3 ...................................................................................................................................... 51
MATTER RE-CONFIGURED: FROM BODY IN E-PORN TO THE POLITICS OF TECHNO-EMBODIMENT ........................................................................................................................... 51
3.1. Posthumanist take on the body: re-defining matter and information .................................... 53
3.2. Techno-embodiment in online porn: media, porn and politics ............................................. 57
The informational flows of vulnerability ................................................................................ 58
Towards the affirmative politics of sexual technobodies ......................................................... 61
CONCLUSION. FOR THE ETHICS OF WORKING WITH/IN ..................................................... 68
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 72
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to a number of people who made this thesis possible and supported me throughout
the years of studying in Utrecht.
First of all, I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Maaike Bleeker and my second reader Kathrin
Thiele for being an inspiration not only to take up this project in the first place, but also to stick
with it till the end. I would not have made it without your professional support and understanding.
My gratitude also goes to my dear friend Lina Žigelytė: your insights and comments were
invaluable, yet no less than all the conversations (on porn and theories, on desires and politics, and
– of course – on life in itself) that I had the joy to engage in with you.
I would also like to thank my friends in and outside of the classroom: Mari, Virginia, Martina, Inga,
Domitilla, Sarah, Noor and all of you, who made my life a bit less wired and a bit more sticky.
To my mother and my brother I am grateful for unconditional support no matter what I ventured
into (even if sometimes you would think I am too much of an “angry feminist” for your taste).
And finally, to Eva – for being there.
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INTRODUCTION
Sometimes I get the sensation that I’m actually having sex with my Mac, holding it between my legs,
which tremble with the imminent orgasm, with the keyboard impregnated by my flow.
María Llopis, Revising Gender Roles and Stereotypes Through Art and Technology
The Guardian commentator Martin Robbins has labelled contemporary debates on censorship and
sexually explicit imagery on the Internet as “porn panic” (Robbins, 2012). The knee-jerk responses
from anti-porn activists come together with passionate calls for a better moral judgement, pleading
to protect children from degrading influence of online pornography and shelter women from
insulting representations of them as insatiable sluts. The carnality-invoking discourse that labels
porn as “dirty,” “disgusting,” and threatening to “healthy” sexuality point to the fear of alterations
and invasion of the body by the perverse power of the technological and the excessive. As more
countries are starting to implement or at least consider banning online pornography (for instance,
UK, Iceland and Germany), I believe the question of the relation between the body, pornography
and technology is an urgent one. Thus in my thesis I wish to explore the interconnections between
embodiment and technology through online pornography. To do that I first would like to outline
several disciplinary contexts in which this question is situated and that will frame my analysis.
First of all, there is a context of feminist debates on pornography, both academic and public. Late
1970s and 1980s witnessed a clash of feminist attitudes towards sexuality, sexual representation and
pornography both in academic and legal fields. This clash achieved names such as feminist sex wars
or porn wars, and roughly coincided with the growing interest in pornography research among
feminists in general. While anti-porn feminists, like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon,
argue that pornography entails objectification of and violence against women (for example,
Dworkin, 1981), pro-porn feminists (also often called sex-positive feminists) seek for sources of
women's empowerment in the very same images.
It is through the image and its discursive connotations that pornography is often approached
academically – research concentrates on the content of pornography, analysing the visual narratives,
filming techniques and subject positions that they provide. This approach seems to be in line with
the somewhat common sense of what pornography is: in the end, it is the sexual and explicit nature
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of the image that qualifies it as pornographic. However, some feminists, especially those from anti-
pornography movement, claim that pornography is firstly a corporeal practice that embodies
oppression and sexualization of violence. These two attitudes towards porn constitute two
paradigms: “pornography as speech/discourse” and “pornography as practice”, both entailing a
different account of the affectivity of pornography (i.e. the question of how pornography affects the
viewer) and therefore its subversive potentials and limitations.
However, much as important the content of pornography is, it must be taken into account that
pornography could not exist before sex became mediated – expressed in text, paintings, pictures or
videos. While scholars approaching pornography as discourse seem to do better justice to the
mediated nature of pornography (Williams, 1989; Gaines, 2004; Gillis, 2004; Patterson, 2004;
Jacobs et.al., 2007), those who analyse pornography as practice put the question of media aside
(Dworkin, 1981; Mason-Grant, 2004; Dines et al., 1998). Since the pro-pornography camp seems to
have gained solid ground and pornography is becoming more and more acceptable culturally,
leading to proliferation of alternative sexually explicit imagery and a true explosion of porn
websites, I believe what is rendered understudied is the possibilities that lie in the “practice”
approach that would take medium-specificity into account.
Thus we come to the second context, which is media and technology studies. In this field of study
there seem to be two broad approaches to technology and media: representationalist and embodied
approach. Media philosopher Mark Hansen in his phenomenological account on technology in
Bodies in Code argues that virtual reality has often been seen from a representationalist standpoint
(Hansen, 2006). Basically this type of approach makes a distinctive split between reality and virtual
reality, where the latter comes to represent the former, often “improving” the imperfections of the
“physical world”. Likewise, technology in general is then seen more as a prosthesis in a very
simplified way: we incorporate technologies only so much as to operate in place of sense organs,
but not change the way of experiencing.
While traditional accounts of cyberspace have often centred on freeing the mind from the prison of
the body, more contemporary virtual reality projects aim at placing the body as a primary point of
access to the virtual. Contrary to the representationalist approach, body and embodiment, according
to Hansen, not only serve as primary access to the lifeworld, but also are that through which
technology connects and makes impact on it (ibid.). This also has implications for choosing the
object of analysis: while representations are, of course, important, what is left understudied is the
practices of media consumption and how these practices engage the body.
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At the first glance this representationalist versus embodied approach, seemingly linked with the
pornography as speech/discourse versus practice discussion, comes down to the usual
matter/discourse dualism. As numerous feminist thinkers have shown, the world we live in is both –
it is material-semiotic, to use Donna Haraway's terms (Haraway, 1991), or material-discursive, to
follow Karen Barad's line (Barad, 2007). I do not wish to make my choices in the either/or
framework, nonetheless, I do believe that it is of academic and political importance to highlight the
embodied approach to technology, especially in contemporary technoculture where discourses of
virtual reality as a highly disembodied space still thrive. Thus I will situate my analysis in this
particular field of technology studies, employing concepts of phenomenology to highlight the
experiential and fleshy side of the digital.
However, the emerging post-human(ist) thought calls to re-think our notions of the human, body
and embodiment – and this is the third relevant context. While phenomenological analyses of
technology (for instance, Don Ihde's, but also Hansen's work) do focus on embodiment and how it
changes the moment human bodies encounter technology, they are criticized for often staying
within the body-as-organism perspective (Clough, 2010). That is to say, they take human body as a
system which can incorporate and respond to technologies but stay away from the question of what
counts as a body in the first place, as well as from the question of anthropocentrism that might be
inherent in their assumptions. With biology going computational, experience becoming mediated at
almost every step of everyday life, machines becoming smarter and economy capitalising on
affects, the lines between flesh and data are increasingly blurred, and there is a need for new
conceptual tools to account for paradoxical outcomes of this blurring (Braidotti, 2013).
Given these three complex contexts, I want to weave together pornography studies, media theories
of body-technology relation and posthumanist thought in order to produce a material-discursive
analysis of embodiment within the field that uses body both as its tool and as its addressee. The
question that will guide me through this thesis is the following: what exactly happens in the
moment of consumption of online pornography and how does it affect its human consumer? As I
have mentioned above, the way this question is answered has direct implications to how we
understand the affectivity of porn, and thus also what kind of politics do we build around it
(prohibition? censorship? using porn for subversion?).
My working hypothesis is that online pornography is affective and effective not only because it
contains sexually explicit imagery but also because of the specific aspects of technology and the
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way it is engaged during the consumption of online porn. There is a different position that my
embodied self occupies when I watch short videos on porn “tube websites,” being endlessly
bombarded by multiple images, pop-up ads, having to actively browse and click, and generally
constantly move through that peculiar space – a position quite different from watching a full-
featured “Deep Throat” movie on a TV screen or in the cinema. Throughout the work I will show
how this specific phenomenon of online porn consumption has something to do with body-
technology relation in which the organic/inorganic, body/environment, human/non-human
boundaries are blurred, as well as what implications does it have for pornography and media
studies.
The thesis will be structured in three parts. Firstly, I will discuss the embodied approach in the
fields of media and pornography that will serve as a primary theoretical basis of my analysis.
Starting with an outline of the pornography debate within the pro/anti and speech/discourse versus
practice approach, may aim will be to highlight the advantages of both camps and move to
introducing Joan Mason-Grant's embodied approach to pornography as practice that aims to explain
the incorporation of discourses into the lived realities. Afterwards I will turn to analysing the
embodied approach within the field of media studies, mostly using Mark Hansen's
phenomenological thought that is focused on body tactility and motility. At the end of this chapter I
will propose a framework that focuses on relations between different elements of mediated practices
and how they engage embodiment, without necessarily confining my analysis to any specific type
of representations – a framework that can be called a theory of pornography as dispositif.
The second chapter will be dedicated to engaging with the question of embodiment in online
pornography. I will analyse the three basic elements of pornographic dispositif: the basic apparatus,
mode of address and viewing situation. While discussing these, I will also pay attention to the
discourses that they are embedded in. Then, based on Hansen's concept of the body in code, I will
develop the concept of body in e-porn: a body whose sexuality is realised in conjunction with media
technologies. I will ask questions such as how does this body come into being, what animates this
body-technology coupling and what implications does it have for the embodied position of the
consumer, media theory and pornography research. My analysis that will allow me to develop the
concept of body in e-porn will be focused on examples of porn tube sites (such as YouPorn.com,
PornTube.com and the like) and the corporeal engagement with technology through multi-
dimensional movement (movement of the bodies on the screen, movement of the user in virtual
reality and movement of the affected body of the user) and touch (touch of the image, of the
hardware, and self-touch of the user).
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In the third chapter I will explore the body in e-porn from the perspective of posthuman(ist)
thought. The guiding question for this chapter is the politics and 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. By relying on works of Brian Massumi, Donna Haraway, Rosi
Braidotti and other posthuman(ist) thinkers, I will first outline how the concept of body and
embodiment shifts in the posthuman condition, as well as how this shift challenges the
phenomenological body-as-organism perspective. I will show that posthuman bodies are re-defined
as technobodies. This definition will allow me to re-think body in e-porn as a particular kind of
relational form which a technobody acquires by engaging in the practices of online pornography. I
will dedicate the biggest part of the third chapter to the political threats and potentials of techno-
embodiment in online porn, looking for alternative lines of affirmative ethics. Finally, I will also ask
what kind of political as well as academic implications does it pose for how we are to make sense of
phenomena such as “porn addiction”, “rape tubes”, but also what kind of new opportunities does it
open for pornography that would be subversive of socially accepted gender and sexuality norms.
Finally, a point about methodology. My methodological approach is situated at the intersection of
phenomenology and discourse analysis. In line with phenomenological approach, I will talk of
experiences and bodily practices pertaining to the use of internet pornography. It will also allow me
to put a highlight on the concrete, lived embodiment as well as embodiment as a site of resistance
All this is underlined by a discursive approach in order to do justice to the material-semiotic nature
of reality and embodied life. What is important to note, however, is that I do not wish to engage in a
detailed analysis of the content of pornography (which has been done numerous times in porn
research), neither do I want to produce empirical research of the consumption of pornography
(which is attempted by researchers in sociology, psychology and other disciplines). Rather, I want to
analyse that what is “beyond” the content, a sort of “meta-data” of internet pornography, which is
the very medium specific structures of its consumption, presupposing a certain “ideal” viewing
situation. For that matter, the concept of dispositif and the use of figurations as conceptual thinking
tools seem to be appropriate.
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Chapter 1
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A BODY? EMBODIMENT IN
PORNOGRAPHY AND MEDIA STUDIES
In this chapter I will first explore how the question of embodiment figures in the field of
pornography and media and technology studies. Before going further, however, I would like to
briefly outline what I mean by the term “embodiment”, in order to have some basic ground upon
which I will build my argument throughout this and other chapters to follow.
The concept of embodiment itself refers to the experience and the process of living body. Whereas
the term “body” denotes a biological entity, a body-as-object and what in phenomenology is called
the “third person perspective” of “having a body”, embodiment describes the state of “being a
body”. This body-as-lived state is inextricably related to specificity of socio-cultural context as well
as to physiological particularities (Hayles, 1999), already pointing to the entanglement of discourse
and matter, to the politicality of the body-as-lived. Embodiment thus is entangled with personal
experience (which is the focus of phenomenology), but also material conditions of one's situation,
in other words – specific location in time, space and discourse. When that location is taken into
consideration, embodiment can be studied as a dynamic process of living a body, and opens up the
possibility to ask the question about how this process is affected by body coming into relation with
other objects, bodies, and processes.
Embodiment, the way I understand and use the term, points to two important notes on related terms.
Firstly, embodiment is inextricably related not only to lived experience, but also to materiality of
the body and its sensorium (Hansen, 2006). The latter includes not only the five senses but also
overall body motility and proprioception. A second important implication of embodiment, in that it
is precisely not only a state of being but also a process, is its implicit reference to enaction.
Embodiment itself could be defined as an enactment, a realization of body and its capacities. This
focus on what a body can and does do, as well as on enactment in general will be explained in
greater detail in the chapter to follow.
Secondly, I see embodiment as inextricably relational and this is a provisionary statement that I will
elaborate on throughout the whole thesis. Instead of it being a fixed category, I appropriate Thurtle
and Mitchell’s conceptualization of embodiment as an open-ended circuit diagram (Mitchell and
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Thurtle, 2004). According to them, it is a useful conception because “it delineates a larger network
of potential communicative experiences on multiple conceptual levels: it allows for conception of
difference beyond simple binary distinctions (circuits, for instance, may have multiple components)
and it suggests the integrity of the individual component (as a body itself) while recognizing its
context as a linked entity (in a body immanent on a different existential scale)” (ibid, 5). This point
will be discussed in greater detail in the last chapter of this thesis.
A side note also needs to be made here on affect and affectivity. “Affectivity” in the context of my
research means the modes of how pornography affects its viewer/consumer. Affect, however, is a
more complicated concept. Even though I will not directly engage with theories of affect, I would
like to note that whenever this concept will show up, it should be read in a way proposed by Patricia
T. Clough: as body's capacity to act, to affect and be affected (Clough, 2010). It is not the same as
agency, however, since it is a pre-individual, open-endedly social (Massumi, 2011) force that cannot
be easily reduced to emotions or constrained to trigger-response scheme. Affect thus points to the
field of forces and relations across the human and the non-human. It is a force that cannot be
consciously “grasped,” and yet it can have very material effects that manifest as felt intensities
(Massumi, 2011). As such, then, affect cuts through the organic/inorganic, body/technology
dualisms, and provides the grounds to think about body and embodiment as relational.
In pornography the question of embodiment comes into picture quite often through the question of
how pornography affects its viewers, and especially its female viewers. It was what pornographic
images supposedly made the bodies feel or do that intrigued and troubled anti-porn feminists. The
same question intrigued sex-positive feminists, too, albeit their research yielded results that pointed
to porn's potentials and not only constraints. In media and technology studies embodiment is
significant as a primary medium of experience but also as a field of interventions for the new
technologies (Wegenstein, 2010). Finally, embodiment is also at the heart of methodological
approaches to pornography and media, a point of focus in research and theory. And it is precisely
these embodiment-centred approaches that I will discuss in the following pages.
1.1. Embodiment and pornography: wars, speech and practice
Late 1970s and 1980s witnessed a clash of feminist attitudes towards sexuality, sexual
representation and pornography both in academic and legal fields. This clash achieved names such
as feminist sex wars or porn wars, and roughly coincided with the growing interest in pornography
11
research among feminists in general. The debate – both activist and theoretical – was centred mostly
around the question of how pornography affects its viewers and what legal and political measures
are to be taken, if any. Anti-pornography feminists claimed that pornography feeds into
subordination of women by men. Speculations were made on whether watching pornography
encourages men to commit rape, whether “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice” (Morgan,
1974), and many anti-porn feminists argued for the introduction of censorship or other forms of
legal responsibility of porn producers (Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988).
Another response in this debate came from the side of feminists who voiced arguments of anti-
censorship or anti-anti-pornography. The movement emerged as a response to a response: it was
more in reaction to anti-pornography feminists that others started debating the question of porn in
general (Simons, 1972; Burstyn, 1985). Claims were made ranging from opposition to relying on
state-regulation (pornography is problematic but censorship is not the solution), highlighting that
anti-porn feminists (involuntarily, perhaps) are becoming strange bed-fellows with right-wing
politicians, to theoretical arguments that anti-porn feminists' assumptions and logics were simply
flawed (Cornell, 1995; Williams, 1989).
Sex-positive feminism constituted yet another voice in the feminist “sex wars”. Coming not least
from porn producers and workers themselves (such as Nina Hartley and Annie Sprinkle), this strand
of feminists claimed that women should be able to express their desires and explore their sexuality
freely. They focused not so much on fighting the mainstream pornography industry head-on, but
rather on the need to produce different pornography, to create alternative representations. Thus ideas
such as “feminist pornography” or “women-friendly pornography” were introduced to the academic
discourse as well as the genre of porn.
All of these responses to the question of pornography and its presumed effects rely mostly on
analysis of pornographic images and what they represent. It is through the image and its discursive
connotations that pornography is often approached academically, too – research concentrates on the
content of pornography, analysing the visual narratives, filming techniques and subject positions
that they provide, and fantasies that they feed and respond to. This approach seems to be in line
with the somewhat common sense of what pornography is: in the end, it is the sexual and explicit
nature of the image that qualifies it as pornographic. However, some feminists, especially those
from anti-pornography movement, claim that pornography is firstly a corporeal practice that
embodies oppression and sexualization of violence. These two attitudes towards porn constitute two
paradigms: “pornography as speech/discourse” and “pornography as practice” - both entailing a
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different account of the affectivity of pornography and therefore its subversive potentials and
limitations.
Anti-pornography and anti-censorship feminism: laying out the basics of pornography as
practice and speech/discourse paradigms
Probably the most famous anti-porn campaigners were Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.
One of the books to become the milestone of anti-pornography feminist argument was Dworkin's
Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). In her work Dworkin analyses pornographic images
and texts, first describing them thoroughly and then connecting them to the wider socio-economical
context. She claims that pornography is an embodiment of masculine power over women and
patriarchal order in general. It sexualizes violence and subordination, thus perpetuating the same
power relations that it feeds upon. In other words, it teaches men that all women want sex and that
oppression and certain physical and/or psychological pressure are legitimate and justifiable. It
teaches women that their role is to be subordinate and that sexual interaction is about submitting
oneself.
Dworkin's analysis of pornography in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) is constructed
around the statement that pornography is oppressive and objectifying to women and is developed
through explicating how this oppression takes effect. She analyses pornographic representations,
which she identifies as misogynistic and objectifying. Representing women's oppression and
objectification, pornographic images re-instantiate what they represent through the practices of
viewing and masturbation. During these practices, Dworkin implies, men necessarily identify with
oppressive males and women identify with victimized females, and learn these respective roles by
repeatedly engaging with pornographic material.
Furthermore, consumption of pornography as well its production – two related pornographic
practices - are inserted into a wider socio-economic context, both feeding on the oppression present
in this context as well as strengthening it. As she claims, pornography is a literal – carnal –
embodiment of power relations: “The strains of male power are embodied in pornography's form
and content, in economic control of and distribution of wealth within the industry, in the picture or
story as thing, in the photographer or writer as aggressor, in the critic or intellectual who through
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naming assigns value, in the actual use of models, in the application of the material in what is called
real life (which women are commanded to regard as distinct from fantasy)” (Dworkin, 1981: 25).
Taking a very structural approach to porn, Dworkin sees it as a material “thing” as well as material
practice, that has almost immediate effects on the viewers and general structure of women's
oppression.
Dworkin's account has been criticized many times by pro-porn feminists for being reductive, for
putting women in the role of a victim, for denying any alternative interpretations of pornographic
imagery, and even for open misandry (for example, Burstyn, 1985; Segal & McIntosh, 1992). One
of the key anti-censorship feminist1 thinkers Linda Williams in her already classic book Hard Core:
Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989) tries to overcome this lack of attention to the
complexity of interpretative process, suggesting that pornography is a certain kind of discourse
about sex, and pornographic texts are always marked by insecurity of the subject, instability of
meaning and identification, even while they support and suggest certain meanings and
interpretations more than others.
Pornography, according to Williams, originates from the male gaze – a gaze whose quest is to find
out the “truth” about women's pleasure – and is based on the assumption that body is able to
“speak” the “truth” of one's subjectivity and sexuality. In that it builds on the assumed relation
between truth and sexuality, pornography can be traced to the urge to “speak sex” – an obsession to
talk about sex, to make the body confess it secrets. Pornography is a “certain mode of speaking
about the issues of sex” (and especially sexual difference) (Williams, 1989: 130), “the visual (and
sometimes aural) representations of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually unfaked,
sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers” (ibid.: 30). She highlights that “however
much hardcore may claims to be a material and visible thing, it is still fundamentally a discourse, a
way of speaking about sex” (ibid.: 229).
What Williams does here is criticize, on the one hand, taking pornography as “reality” and “truth”
of sex, and on the other hand, regarding this reality as fixed, as the only way sex can happen and as
leaving no space for different interpretations and identifications. This appeal to the “real”, according
to Williams, simply masks that porn is a discourse, a fantasy. It has inherent instabilities and no
matter how much it tries, it always fails to deliver the “real thing,” thus providing an alternative to
1 The difference between pro-porn and anti-censorship feminism is, as Gail Dines suggests, that the latter usually acknowledged the harm of pornography for women, yet were against the censorship measures suggested by radical anti-porn feminists (Dines, 2009).
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Dworkin's line of thought that claims porn to be “real” in that it instantiates oppression and
violence. In other words, Williams questions two main claims of Dworkin and early anti-porn
feminism more generally: that pornographic representations are always to be read as depicting
violence against, oppression and objectification of women; and that they have immediate and direct
effects on its viewers.
Of course, Williams does not deny that pornography has effects on the way sexuality and gender are
lived and experienced. Her claim that porn is a discourse must be read in a foucauldian way:
discourse is a complex psychic, technological and social apparatus that produces certain bodies and
subjects. In the case of pornography it is a discourse that fuses power, pleasure and knowledge, and
generates multiple effects: the fusion of body/world and reality/fantasy, the implantation of the
“perversions” of voyeurism and fetishism, the social construction of women's bodies as objects
rather than subjects of vision. In other words, pornography as discourse functions as an apparatus of
control that appeals to a particular fantasy (namely, the fantasy of “knowing” sex through “seeing
sex”, and deriving both pleasure and power from this knowledge), moulding its subjects into bodies
that act in accordance to its logic.
Williams' and Dworkin's accounts of pornography point to two distinctive approaches to the
question of not only what pornography is, but also what kind of effects it produces and how.
Dworkin's analysis forms the grounds of what is called the “practice” approach to pornography by
focusing on the consumption of porn and highlighting that it is first and foremost a set of material
practices, which affect the consumers through the repetitive engagement with pornographic
representations. Williams, on the other hand, seems to be paying more attention to the complex
discursive apparatus at play in pornographic representations themselves2, and highlights how these
representations are neither stable, nor all-encompassing, and the discursive power that they posses
is tacit and productive.
“Pornography as discourse” approach envelopes the more specific “pornography as speech”
attitude. Porn as speech approach is based on regarding images that represent certain notions of
sexuality and gender roles as language of expressing these notions. How they are interpreted
depends on the viewer and wider socio-cultural context – thus what they actually represent depends
2 It must be noted that Williams does, to some extent, talk about practices of viewing pornography when she talks about early stag films. However, it seems that she does not focus on these practices as at least one of the keys to what pornography is and how it affects us.
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on the discourses that they are caught up in3. “Pornography is speech” argument can be found both
in pro-porn and anti-porn thought, though pro-porn feminists seem to have been more keen to use it.
Especially in the anti-censorship camp feminists claimed that even though pornography is often
offensive for women, it is still a speech, a certain mode of representation, thus powerful, yet
different from direct oppression and violence (see Burstyn, 1985). Post-1980s feminists such as
Lynn Segal and Mary McIntosh are also concerned with representations as interpretable expressions
that can be nonetheless used as a canvas for “real” action (Segal and McIntosh,1992).
But the field where “pornography as speech” paradigm is employed the most is the legal debates.
For example, when MacKinnon and Dworkin drafted an ordinance that would have allowed people
to pursue legal measures against pornography, it was rejected precisely on the grounds of the the
First Amendment of the US Constitution as it would supposedly have been an infringement of the
freedom of speech. The legal framework thus puts pornography strictly on the side of “opinion” and
fantasy, that, even if offensive, cannot be taken as “real violence.” Popular culture also draws on
“reality” versus pornography distinction by highlighting that sexual practices in porn are not always
the ones that one should be enacting in “real life”4. In a way “porn as speech” argument, at least in
legal and popular debates, seems to work as a tool to make porn a no-big-deal by employing the
“sticks and stones will break your bones but words [and images] will never hurt you” kind of logic.
In this light, approaching porn more generally as a discourse does much more justice to the complex
cultural, institutional and phantasmic apparatus at work in this realm.
The difference between practice and discourse/speech approach in the theories outlined above,I
argue, boil down to the following: Williams puts more highlight on porn taking effect on lived
bodies and socio-cultural structures through discourse that appeals to certain fantasy (namely, the
fantasy of knowing and gaining pleasure from knowledge), while Dworkin claims that porn takes
effect on real bodies rather unconsciously through practice and repetition of this practice, through
learning to get aroused and masturbate to pornographic images by doing that. Because Dworkin
emphasizes the bodily practice of consumption and production of porn, thus suggesting that it has
3 A clarification of how I use the concepts of “image”, “representation”, “speech” and “discourse” might be useful
here. In the context of speech/practice distinction “image” seems to be the actual visual object, while “representation” is a process – images represent but for the viewer to see them as a representations there has to be some interpretation going on. I believe that interpretation and “just seeing” cannot be clearly discerned: seeing the image always to some extent comes with interpretation, it always is a representation of something, at least for the viewer - the image “speaks” to the viewer and if it speaks, it is a representation. So if representation involves interpretation, then representations are inextricable from discourses. This is the reason why I cluster (though do not put a sign of equality between) speech and discourse. So discourse, as a wider apparatus, in this context envelopes speech of visual representations as a mode of discursive expression.
4 For example, Don't Try This at Home -- Stuff Guys Want in Their Porn, Not Their Beds,
http://www.lemondrop.com/2010/04/28/pron-moves-dudes-don-t-like/ (accessed on 01 February 2012).
16
implications for how the body is lived and experienced outside of pornographic context, in the next
section I will take a closer look at the “practice approach” to pornography outlined by Joan Mason-
Grant, that pays a special attention to phenomenological experience of the body, and attempts to
explain how porn and its discourse takes effect on lived experience through incorporation.
The “Practice Paradigm”: Mason-Grant's embodied approach to pornography
The term “practice paradigm” was introduced by Joan Mason-Grant who in her book Pornography
Embodied (2004) tries to recover Dworkin's and MacKinnon's anti-pornography claims by stressing
what, according to her, has been overlooked in their thought: that pornography is regarded as
practice rather than speech. The meaning of the word practice here is two-fold. On the one hand, it
refers to the way pornography is used: Mason-Grant claims that pornography is practice because it
is used for sex – either sex as masturbation, or incorporating the use of pornography during or as a
prelude the the actual sexual encounter. On the other hand, it is practice because it is “an
irrevocably systemic phenomenon: any one pornographic 'act' always refers to others; this
relationality is central to what pornography is; and … the power of what pornographic materials
'say' … is not traceable to a single authoritative source or origin” (Mason-Grant, 2004: 79).
According to Mason-Grant, it is precisely this relationality, this constant reference to a larger
context where pornography derives its force from.
To enforce her argument Mason-Grant employs Judith Butler's notion of performativity and Drew
Lerder's phenomenological theory of incorporation through which social meanings and bodily
practices are rendered mutually engendering. According to Lerder, our daily functioning is based on
the so-called absence of the body, its imperceptible motility and operations. It is a context from
which agency – not the “I think” but rather “I can” - emerges, and at the heart of it lies the
irreducibly corporeal know-how. Lerder explains that this know-how is achieved through
incorporation to a bodily level. He gives an example of swimming: one can watch the swimmer,
then try out swimming oneself, but only when swimming becomes an activity that is not the focus
of one's mind anymore then it becomes a truly incorporated bodily knowledge. This transforms the
very structure of agency and subjectivity: it is no longer simply that my body is able to swim – I am
a swimmer. Such incorporated knowledge stays as an active force in the field of agency even if one
does not use it actively.
17
In the same way one can incorporate objects and modes of behaviour: other human and non-human
animals as well as objects are part of our “phenomenological anatomy” (ibid.: 107). According to
Mason-Grant, the imperceptibility, a certain everyday “blindness” towards the body is necessary for
proper functioning. Drawing on Lerder she claims that bodies are least noticeable when they look
and act as everybody else's. We constantly relate to other people and groups, thus incorporation is a
process that takes place all the time. Butler's notion of performativity comes at hand when Mason-
Grant explains how social norms are incorporated just as any other skill on a bodily level: it is
through the constant performance of social norms that they become inscribed in the history and
presence of lived bodies, thus producing us as social subjects.
Likewise, according to Mason-Grant, with sexuality. Our sexual practices (understood more widely
than just intercourse and outercourse) become this tacit bodily know-how, and lays the grounds for
our (sexual) agency5. I quote her on this question at length: “over time, as a given form of sexuality
is acted out, rehearsed, it seeps into one's organismic ground, shaping sexual desire and pleasure,
shaping perception and expectation, and thereby shaping the way one interacts with others” (ibid.:
113). In this way we become not merely beings that have sex – we become sexual beings. Thus
using pornography for sex makes it a sexual practice that through reiteration, performativity and
reference to other sex/gender-defined practices fuses into the corporeal realm. Such an account
points to the affectivity (and perhaps effectivity) of pornography that takes its toll on a much less
conscious and much more material level. It also explains how pornographic modes of sex end up
being applied in “real life” sexual practices and provides the basis to support Dworkin's argument
that pornography is an embodied subordination of women.
Even though Mason-Grant points out that “incorporated practices” does not necessarily mean
“subordinating”, mainstream pornography, according to her, indeed is subordinating to women.
Thus seeing it and learning to “take off” on images of violence against and domination over women
affects women's and men's behaviour in “real life” situations towards other people. She does not
rule out the possibility of pornography that would not be subordinating, that would treat women
with respect and enable them to express their desires. Nonetheless, she still makes an argument
against pornography as such, claiming that by appealing to the visual (as opposed to the tactile and
other sensory modes) engagement with anonymous and controllable bodies it perpetuates
objectification and alienation that feeds into other sexual and non-sexual practices.
5 Mason-Grant even stresses that they produce sexual agency (ibid.: 113).
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Mason-Grant's account of pornography as practice introduces a point that is not so often analysed in
pornography research: the importance of physical engagement with pornographic images and the
apparatus of bodily incorporation of social norms that prevail these images. This encourages to
think about the limits of freedom of interpretation, of how the images are “read”, as well as shows
that this “reading” itself is not a solely conscious activity that takes place in one's mind – reading
images is no less corporeal. However, what it does not take into account is the specificity of the
media pornography employs. While scholars approaching pornography as discourse seem to do
justice to the mediated nature of pornography (Williams, 1989; Gaines, 2004; Gillis, 2004;
Patterson, 2004; Jacobs et al., 2007), those who analyse pornography as practice put the influence
of media aside (Dworkin, 1981; Mason-Grant, 2004; Dines et al., 1998). Yet mediation lies at the
very heart of pornography: it is images, texts, videos that one talks about when they talk about porn.
Not accounting for this renders Mason-Grant's analysis incomplete. Moreover, her claim that
pornography reduces sex to vision implies a somewhat simplified understanding of the visual and
ignores other elements of practice that are constitutive of the consumption of pornography.
***
To sum up, the whole pornography as practice versus speech/discourse debate can be situated along
two different axis. First of all, the proponents of practice approach, such as Dworkin and Mason-
Grant, seem to focus more on the effects of pornography on its embodied consumer and their socio-
cultural embeddings. This stance, as in Dworkin's case, for instance, is built on a certain assumption
about what do pornographic images represent and how are they to be interpreted. The
discourse/speech approach proponents in the mean-time try to pay a closer look at these
representations, prior (if at all) making arguments about what kind of effects these representations
might have. This does not mean that these two positions are necessarily in contradiction with each
other, and while they often are positioned in opposition, this oppositions is rather a result of the
intense political debates during sex-wars.
Having said that, I would also like to suggest that there seems to be a different position ascribed to
body and embodiment within these two strands of thought. The question of embodiment in practice-
based approach is rather central simply because it claims that pornography affects its viewer
precisely on and through the corporeal realm. Discourse/speech approach, on the other hand,
focuses on pornographic content, highlighting (at least this is what Linda Williams claims) that
pornography operates first and foremost through the realm of fantasy, thus its outcomes and effects,
some of which can be bodily, are never unequivocal.
The discursive approach to pornography seems to be much more prominent both in scholarship and
19
in public debates, while practice approach stays somewhat understudied. Given that in practice
approach the body seems to be at the focus point, I wish to explore this particular approach further.
However, two important points must be made here: firstly, practice is not defined only by action as
such, but also relates to discourses that encourage and shape them. Secondly, because pornography
is a primarily medium-dependent phenomenon, it is crucial to ask how is the body and embodiment
accounted for in media studies and practices. Thus in the next section I will explore the relation
between media technologies and embodiment, especially in the phenomenological tradition in
media studies.
1.2. Embodiment and media technologies: incorporating “the other”
Body and embodiment enters the realm of media, and technologies more generally, in several
different ways. On the one hand, body itself – as an object, a natural “given” - is seen as a tool for
human mind to control, especially since Descartes (in)famously split the mind and the body with the
help of doubt. In that way it is the primary technological object, controlled by the subject that
“resides” in the mind. It is also the primary medium of experience of the world, providing
information for the rational mind to process and react to. On the other hand, the split between
organic/inorganic and nature/culture puts human body and technology on the opposite sides of these
divides. And yet in another light, it is often reiterated that what distinguishes human beings from the
rest of animal kingdom is precisely the ability to make and use technologies.
Technologies, then, also have an ambiguous status that reveals itself in a question of technological
non/determinism: technological objects are seen as simply tools produced and employed by
reasonable human subjects, yet at the same time the question is raised how much these tools affect
and shape human life. In the field of media studies Marshall MacLuhan famously argued that it is
the medium that is the message and its message is the change that it introduces into the human life.
However, he also saw media as being “extensions of man” in a sense that they enhance capabilities
of human body: the radio extends the ear, camera extends the eye and “electric media” extend
human nervous system itself (MacLuhan, 1964).
In the phenomenological tradition of thought the question of relation between embodiment and
technologies (and not just the question of body as an object and technology) has been receiving a
considerable amount of attention. The famous blind man's stick example was used by Maurice
Merleau-Ponty to argue that technologies can be incorporated in the very lived body (which is to
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say, embodiment) of a human being. Technologies through their use, Merleau-Ponty claims, become
part of our bodies and influences how we perceive and experience the environment. Don Ihde – one
of the authors whose ideas will be discussed in the following pages – contributed to this account by
pointing to how same technologies can be differently embodied in different socio-cultural contexts.
When it comes to new media and other digital technologies, the distinction between “immaterial
information” and fleshy body runs deep and solid, both in science (for instance, DNA research) and
popular culture (Mitchell and Thurtle, 2004). Cyberspace becomes a place to escape and leave “the
meat” behind – which was thoroughly criticized, among others, by feminist scholars who showed
not only that information is highly embedded and embodied (Hayles, 1999) but also that relations
and identities in cyberspace often-times replicated those of non-virtual life (Nakamura, 2002;
Turkle, 1995). In this section of the chapter, thus, I will discuss the theories of two media and
technology philosophers who argued for an embodied approach to technology from a perspective of
phenomenology6.
Don Ihde's phenomenology of technology
I would like to start by outlining the main ideas of philosopher Don Ihde, a prominent North-
American philosopher of technology. His academic path started from hermeneutics and led him
through science and technology studies to develop a brand of thought that he calls
“postphenomenology”. According to Ihde, phenomenology, having provided rigorous analyses of
human experience, arrived at the place in time when it has to renew itself in response to challenges
brought by modern sciences and technological expansion (Ihde, 2009). Postphenomenology is his
way of bringing phenomenology up to date, so to say, by coupling it with pragmatism. Borrowing
from John Dewey Ihde welcomes the pragmatist's instrumental and experimental approach to reality
and science, and proposes that phenomenology should engage in empirical analysis while taking
more thoroughly into account material (physical) as well as socio-cultural embeddedness of
experience.
6 I use the term “technology” as a general concept that includes technological artefacts as well as practices of their
use. I consider media as one of these artefacts and practices. New media, though the “newness” is debatable (see Bolter and Grusin, 2000), is used in this work to include digital technologies of information and communication. I will use the term “digital technologies” in a somewhat synonymous way, especially since the ubiquitous use of computers in very different fields (from entertainment to biological research) makes digital technologies universal machines. However, “new media” in the context of this thesis will mean digital technologies that relate more to the communication, entertainment and infotainment function, while “digital technologies” in general will be meant to encompass both the latter and other digital technologies, the primary functions of which are linked to other uses.
21
One of these embeddings of experience is technological. In Ihde's account technology plays a
double role: it is part of human environment itself and at the same time acts as a mediator in the
human-environment interaction. According to Ihde, technologies arise from needs or natural
phenomena (for instance, clocks were developed in response to the need to measure time and maps
- to the need to account for the space) and at the beginning they serve quite simply as tools to
interact with environment. Yet gradually they become more autonomous and turn into devices that
shape these same natural phenomena, they become yardsticks against which these phenomena are
being measured (to use the same example, the clock eventually became quite independent from
actual rhythms of daylight) (Ihde, 1993). Thus technologies, when applied, also transform the way
humans relate to their environment and the environment itself.
But the effect of technologies does not end here: technologies-as-mediators also change humans
themselves, both hermeneutically (the way we interpret ourselves) as well as on a bodily level (the
way we live as embodied beings in the world). Technologies, according to him, are material-
discursive things, better yet – instruments, that are part of existential praxes, i.e. the ways we live
and relate to the world. In Existential Technics (1983) Ihde says: “all self-interpretation takes its
shape in a certain way with respect to some basic form of existential praxis which is projected upon
the world and reflected back in ways which have become the dominant ways to understand
ourselves and our world” (1983: 22, quoted in Selinger, 2006:96). This dominant way today is
technology. So Ihde's thought here makes a full hermeneutic circle: by relating to the world through
technologies we transform that relation as well as ourselves, and eventually also what we take as
“the world”, “environment” and “human”. This, then, is Ihde's relational ontology: human-
environment-technology co-constitute each other through relations.
Throughout several of his books, but most notably in Technics and Praxis (1979) Ihde claims that
there are three basic kinds of relations between humans and technologies: first, the embodiment
relations, which come into being when technology is taken into the bodily experience as a mediator
that shapes human encounter with their environment (like Merleau-Ponty's famous example of a
blind man and his stick)7. In this relation technology becomes transparent – it is a medium yet this
medium is effaced from experience as such. Hermeneutic relations arise when we encounter the
world through technology which has to be interpreted by the human to learn something about the
world (for instance, one has to read a thermometer to make findings about the temperature). Finally,
alterity relations characterize the type of relation in which technology is experienced as quasi-object
7 In his later work (2012) Ihde specifies that embodiment relations can entail incorporation, which is the case with technologies
that literally become part of the body, such as pacers or other kinds of implants.
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or even quasi-other. For instance, toys and robots would encourage precisely this kind of relation.
Ihde also notes that there can be background relations, which means simply that technology is part
of the environment, yet the three main relations remain embodiment, hermeneutic and alterity.
Let me zoom-in on the first kind of relation. Relations of embodiment and their effects depend on
the different uses of technology. Ihde explicates that through the method of variational analysis: he
looks at different variations of the same phenomenon involving the same kind of technology. For
instance, while analysing archery in different cultures Ihde notices that even though archery is a
common phenomenon across cultural contexts, there are several variations of archery that entail
different styles of shooting, the types of bow and possible bodily positions of the archer. (Ihde,
2009). These different combinations of bow+position+style is what Ihde calls “the structures of
multistability” (2009: 14). In other words, multistabilities are the possibilities to embody
technology in different ways and for different purposes (Rosenberger, 2009). This again highlights
the co-dependency of both human and technology as well as their entanglement in the socio-cultural
context.
When it comes to the effect of technology over embodied experience, Ihde suggests that technology
always operates in the double frame of magnification/reduction (Ihde, 1993). As a mediator,
technology enhances some bodily ability (for instance, vision) and thus reduces the rest. For
example, using a microscope entails magnification of the object – enhancement of vision – but at
the same time it reduces the environmental context of this object: the overall form of the object as
well as its relation to environment will be pushed to the background by focusing the lens on
molecules or atoms. This double process of magnification-reduction often leads to introducing
mechanisms of compensation. For instance, the impossibility of effectively introducing smell or
actual bodily movement to the cinema results in developing more sophisticated visualization and
audio techniques (3D and Dolby Surround, for instance) as well as using particular ways of filming
that would refer the images back to the embodied viewer (close-ups, certain camera angles, etc.).
Another important categorical distinction that pertains to effects of embodiment relations as well as
to how we embody objects is the distinction between “body one” and “body two”. “Body one”,
according to Ihde, is a sensory perception of the body “from within”, and “body two” – a socio-
culturally influenced image of the body (this seems to be the same kind of distinction that Merleau-
Ponty makes between body schema and body image). In his discussion of virtual bodies (1998) Ihde
employs these two concepts to account for the difference between Real Life (RL) and Virtual
Reality (VR). According to Ihde VR bodies operate from the perspective of body two – an “outside
23
perspective” on the body – and despite all the technological attempts to make VR appeal to body
one, it is still less immersive than RL is. In his own words, “VR 'bodies' are thin and never attain the
thickness of the flesh” (1998: 357). These “different bodies” also point to the conditions for
embodiment relations to arise: even though objects can become part of the “body two” (one can
incorporate a walking stick or an artificial limb to their (self)image), they can be truly embodied
only when they become part of “body one”8.
There are a couple of aspects of Ihde's philosophy of technology that are important in the context of
this analysis. Firstly, the empirical-experimental approach, which highlights, contrary to more
“traditional” phenomenological analyses, not only subjective experience but also the very practices,
physical engagement with technology and the material and socio-cultural embeddedness of these
practices. Indeed, in some cases it might be important to move away from understanding technology
and media as “things” or “institutions” but rather to pay attention to the practices of media, to take
media themselves as practice, as Nick Couldry suggests (Couldry, 2004). Even though Ihde himself
does not seem to go as far as to claim that technologies themselves are practices, his philosophy of
structures of multistability open up a possibility to see technologies in a less deterministic and fixed
way.
Second important aspect is the hermeneutic circle of interpretation. Ihde tries to go beyond
technological determinism and social constructivism, relying rather on the circle of influence:
people produce technologies but technologies, once in use, affect their users, the context in which
they operate (environment becomes technological environment) and experience of this context
(through magnification/reduction and compensation mechanisms).
However, Ihde's account of virtual reality and its relation to embodiment seems to thin-out the
complexity of cyberspace and experience of digital technologies. Furthermore, Ihde's embodied
human seems to become the measuring stick – it is their biological embodiment that is a natural
“zero point” to which technological and social environment introduces changes. To provide a more
detailed account of embodiment-technology relation as well how embodiment plays into the field of
new media, in the next section I will discuss philosopher's Mark Hansen's ideas of fusing body-
technology-world.
8 Of course, this does not mean that “body two” cannot affect the “body one”: there is often an overspill between the two and in
lived experience it can be quite hard to maintain the distinction, as critics have shown (Scharff, 2006).
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Mark Hansen: fusing body-technology-world
Media philosopher Mark Hansen in his phenomenological account of technology in Bodies In
Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (2006) argues that virtual reality has often been seen from a
representationalist standpoint. Basically this type of approach makes a distinctive split between
reality and virtual reality, where the latter comes to represent the former, often “improving” the
imperfections of the “physical world”9. Likewise, technology in general is then seen more as a
prosthesis in a very simplified way: we incorporate technologies only so much as to operate in place
of sense organs, but not change the way of experiencing. I would also add that this type of
representationalist discourse is well established in contemporary media landscape, especially media
that aim at representations of “real life”. For instance, social media, such as Facebook, are seen to
be “extensions” of “real” relationships, activities and identities as users are encouraged to use their
true names, document their leisure and work activities, and so on.
While traditional accounts of cyberspace have often centred on freeing the mind from the prison of
the body, more contemporary virtual reality projects aim at placing the body as a primary point of
access to the virtual. Taking these new virtual reality projects as examples, Hansen argues for an
embodied approach to the virtual and technology in general. Contrary to the representationalist
approach, body and embodiment, according to Hansen, not only serves as a primary access to the
lifeworld, but also is that through which technology connects and makes impact on it. Body, being
the gateway to the world, naturalizes modifications brought by technical developments, and at the
same time opens up the opportunity for these modifications to deterritorialize body's habitual
interaction with the world and possibly also expand it.
This deterritorialization and expansion is made possible by the coupling of body and technics – this
is a claim that pertains to not only the status of technology, but also to the way embodiment and
body is understood and felt in general. According to Hansen, representationalist approach reduces
virtual reality technologies to mere extensions, and implies that the body is felt first and foremost
through the body-image (or what Ihde calls “body one”): a sort of medium between the “inside” and
“outside. Criticizing body-image as a “primarily visual apprehension of the body as an external
object” (Hansen, 2006: 39), Hansen argues that body image is actually derivative from the body
schema. Body schema is a primary framework within which the body feels itself and gains access to
the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, on whose theory Hansen builds his work, it is a “flexible,
9 Think, for example, of the aforementioned desire to “leave the meat behind” as an unnecessary burden.
25
plastic, systemic form of distributed agency encompassing what takes place within the boundaries
of the body proper (the skin) as well as the entirety of the spatiality of embodied motility” (ibid.:
38).
This body schema (or “body two” in Ihde's terms) emerges from the operational perspective of the
embodied organism, that is to say, it has everything to do with motility and tactility as the primary
sense. It gives priority to the internal perspective of the organism, yet by doing that it opens the
door for body-technology coupling, as it includes also what is “outside” of the organism by
focusing on movement, on embodied enaction. To put it simply, technics can be incorporated in our
“phenomenological anatomy” through us interacting with them. Hansen claims that this interaction
is not a mere relation between two defined entities, but puts the technical “at the heart of human
motility” (ibid.: 39). This has consequences for how we, so to say, move around the world, how we
feel our bodies, and fosters the general indivision of body-technology-world, enabling Hansen to
develop an embodied, motor-centric approach to virtual reality.
At the core of this approach lies the concept of body in code: body, who's potential is unearthed or
enacted with the help of technology. Hansen writes: “[b]y this I do not mean a purely informational
body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday body. I mean a body submitted to and constituted
by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization – a body whose embodiment is
realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction with technics” (ibid.: 20). To unveil these bodies-
in-code, Hansen focuses not only on movement, but also on touch. Together with Merleau-Ponty he
claims that touch is the primary sense, the basis for the sensible per se. The visual, then, is but an
expansion of the primary sensibility of touch beyond the boundaries of the skin, which is in contrast
with understanding of visual pleasure as an alienating pleasure that seems to be implied by Mason-
Grant.
Hansen's philosophy also introduces affect as an interface between media and body (Hansen, 2004).
For Hansen affect is “the capacity of the body to experience itself as 'more than itself' and thus to
deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (Hansen,
2004: 7). New media, defined more as processes rather than “things”, open up the body's creative
potential by putting it in the circuit of information as an embodied processor of this information.
Affect, then, becomes an interface via which the body in-forms the digital. And even though
Hansen's account falls short of fully enforcing the understanding of embodiment as an open
circuitry diagram, which I mentioned in the introduction, it allows for the overspills and much
26
tighter connections between embodiment and technology10.
To summarize, this embodied motor-centric approach, at the heart of which lies the practices of
movement and the sensibilities of touch, has a manifold potential. Firstly, it withdraws from the
omnipotence of the visual and puts the body to the fore as that through which we gain access to the
world and, likewise, to technology. By this it draws attention to the practices, to the way we engage
with objects and environments on a very physical, material level. Secondly, it posits the body and
embodiment as a source of creative potential that can be actualized through/with technology, thus
challenging the clear-cut lines of the organic/inorganic as well as the human/non-human. I will
argue that these two points are important as we come to account for and make sense of the practices
of internet pornography in the next chapter.
1.3. Focussing on relations: pornography as dispositif
Let me reiterate briefly some crucial points that have been made so far. Firstly, from the discussion
on pornography as speech/discourse versus pornography as practice it is quite clear that there is a
need to account both for material, bodily engagement with pornographic images, as well as specific
way these images address and affect the viewer. Secondly, since pornography is always a mediated
phenomenon, attention needs to be paid to the same elements (bodily engagement and address) of
the specific medium in the analysis of pornography. Thirdly, I tried to show that embodiment –
which is related to practice/enactment, body sensibility and motility – is a concept that is very
present both in pornography and in media/technology studies, and thus can serve as a common point
of focus in an analysis of pornography that takes medium-specificity into account. I would like to
suggest now that a theory of dispositif can serve as a good methodological tool to bring the above
lines of argument together, and provide a way to focus on the relations between all of them.
The concept of dispositif was popularized mostly through the work of Michel Foucault, and
especially his work on the history of sexuality. In English translations dispositif was usually
translated as “apparatus”, though other terms such as “deployment”, “arrangement” or even
“situation” can be also found11. For Foucault dispositif refers to: “firstly, a thoroughly
10 For a more detailed critique of Hansen's understanding of body and embodiment, see the last chapter of this thesis. 11 Many authors (for instance, Agamben, 2005; Kessler, 2006) have expressed doubts about the suitability of the
translation of dispositif as “apparatus”. Thus while the term “apparatus” is perhaps more widely accepted in English translations, it connotes rigidity and clear demarcations and for this reason in my thesis I will revert to using the original term dispositif.
27
heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory
decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and
philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the
apparatus [dispositif – GK]. The apparatus [dispositif – GK] itself is the system of relations that can
be established between these elements” (Foucault, 1977: 194). So dispositif entails both discursive
and non-discursive elements as well as relations between them.
Further on, Foucault remarks that dispositif describes a particular nature of the relations between
multiple elements, which means that the same elements can be part of different dispositifs because
the relations between them will be different. Furthermore, these relations produce certain effects:
dispositifs always respond to some urgent need, they have a strategic function – in some way, they
are strategies of management. In this sense, dispositifs are historically contingent and engaged in a
close interplay with socio-cultural context. Foucault's understanding of dispositif also entails a
strong connection to power and knowledge. Because they produce certain effects, these effects feed
into power-knowledge structures and processes of subjectivation. Georgio Agamben sees this
relation between dispositif and power in quite negative light as capturing, constricting and
transforming living beings into subjects – it is a management strategy suffused with power
structures (Agamben, 2005).
However, the relations between elements that constitute a dispositif are never one-directional or
fixed. As Gilles Deleuze notes in his commentary essay “What is a Dispositif?” (1988), in a
somewhat more general account of the term, dispositif is a complex machine that entails “lines of
visibility and enunciation [i.e. what is rendered seen/unseen, speakable or not – GK], lines of force
[i.e. power – GK], lines of subjectification, lines of splitting, breakage, fracture, all of which criss-
cross and mingle together, some lines producing or giving rise to others, by means of variations or
even changes in the way they are grouped” (Deleuze, 1988: 162). In other words, dispositif “entails
a more sophisticated understanding of power – not merely domination but relational, strategic, and
always predicated on the structural possibility of resistance” (Coté, 2011: 385).
This affects not only how power is to be seen but also how does one account for effects of
dispositifs. According to Mark Coté (2011), there is always uncertainty and certain open-endedness
in what effect a dispositif might produce. Thus it is important to look not for unities or
universalities, but rather for singularities and possibilities for the new (Deleuze, 1988). Italian
media activist Bernardi a.k.a. “Bifo”, quoted in Coté, explains it beautifully: “For instance, a
technological device tends to produce certain effects. It is not mandatory, it is not unavoidable, but
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the television is producing an effect of conformism, passivity, and so on … It is a dispositif, a
machinic conglomeration working the flow, structuring things, creating some constant reactions,
and so on … So we can say that the television is a combinatory dispositif which is able to
standartize the generation of a certain kind of social composition. Foucault talks here of “variable
margins of uncertainty,” because the connection (l'agencement) between the dispositif and the
singularities it is going to produce is not deterministic and obviously foreseeable. In this field of
uncertainty … we find the freedom of political action” (Cote, 2011: 383).
In the field of media studies, the concept of dispositif has been introduced quite early by Jean-Louis
Baudry (1978) and laid the foundations for what became to be known as “apparatus theory” in film
studies. Again, though translated in English as “apparatus”, Baudry makes a distinction between the
“basic apparatus” and dispositif. “Basic apparatus” refers to technologies and operations necessary
to produce and project the film, while dispositif is a more general term to denote the arrangement of
these technological elements as well as specific viewing situation or position and mode of address
and a particular tendency (or effect) that this arrangement produces (Kessler, 2006). Frank Kessler
claims that for Baudry dispositif includes “1. a material technology producing conditions that help
to shape 2. a certain viewing position that is based upon unconscious desires to which corresponds
3. an institutionalised film form implying a form of address trying to guarantee that this viewing
position … functions in an optimal way” (Kessler, 2006: 61).
As we can see from the above, Baudry's dispositif is not much different from Foucault's, even
though Baudry seems to have been less focused on dimension of power. Nonetheless, the
subjectification line is present in Baudry's definition too: it is the form of address that creates a
viewing position (sometimes also called “viewing situation” or “subject position”) together with
basic apparatus, and therefore the question can be raised to what extent certain cinematic dispositifs
resonate with structures of power that saturate other spheres of social and cultural life.
How does all of this relate to embodiment? On the one hand, body enters the theory of dispositif as
one of its elements to be managed. In Foucault's theory the human body or the need to produce a
particular body (for instance, a homosexual body) can be that strategic function that a dispositif
performs (Foucault, 1978), and that specific body is embodied by specific subject (homosexual
subject). A particular way of embodying can also be the effect for a dispositif to produce. For
example, Judith Butler's notion that gender is performed can also be seen as a result of a complex
dispositif that seeks to produce an effect of specific “female embodiment” of a female-sexed
subject. And in the theory of cinematic dispositif the viewer is already addressed as an embodied
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subject, quite often appealing to that embodiment (for instance, think of early cinema's attempts to
shock the viewer through creating a visual illusion that the train is running straight into them but
also vibrating chairs in contemporary movie theatres). Thus embodiment and body can be taken as
an object of dispositif or as one of its elements, or both.
I propose to see pornography as a dispositif for several reasons. First of all, because dispositif
allows to account better both for discursive and non-discursive elements of pornography. If
dispositif is ultimately a set of relations between media technology (and related practices), specific
viewing position and the form of address that produces certain effects, it allows to account not only
for the content of pornography but also the way it addresses the viewer, the specifics of medium
involved, and practices of viewing. While Linda Williams' account of pornography as a discourse
can be equally encompassing, I believe that the concept of dispositif allows for better identification
of specific elements and helps avoid the common understanding of discourse as only related to
language. Furthermore, using the term dispositif instead of discourse helps blur the distinction
between “the viewer” as a human (read: ontologically prioritized), rational and autonomous subject,
and technology as a mere tool that this subject employs.
Secondly, dispositif is about relations, which connects it to embodiment. While “the body”, as stated
at the beginning of this chapter, is more seen as an “object”, embodiment is rather a process
inextricably connected to practice, enaction and experience. In a way, embodiment in itself is a
relation, an open-ended structure connecting matter to itself, mingling mind/body into one living
being beyond separation, and putting it in a constant circuit with other elements and environment as
a whole. Brian Massumi calls it a “technique of existence” (Massumi, 2011), Deleuze and Guattari
speak of an “assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) and Coté almost directly claims that body
itself – and I do read it as “living body” – is a dispositif by saying that “body is not only always in a
composition of relations with heterogeneous elements (which invariably includes forms of
information and communication technology) but its capacity to be affected is calibrated by those
mediated relations”(Coté, 2011: 385).
Finally, understanding pornography as dispositif opens a possibility to look closer at the very
phenomenon of pornography without immediately reverting to pro/anti debate and to recognize the
shifting political implications and resonances that pornography entails and allows for. It draws our
attention to implicit structures of pornography rather than concrete narratives of particular
pornographic films or videos (even though I do not mean to claim that focusing on specific movies
or videos is not worthwhile) and thus allows to speak about the mode of address instead of just plot
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and filming techniques. Dispositif also renders pornography's effects variable and to some extent
open-ended because these effects will depend on the specific relations of the elements of dispositif
instead on a universal understanding of what pornography is or is not.
So what are the elements of pornography as dispositif or the pornographic dispositif? First, a
particular medium through which pornographic content is delivered. It can be photography or film,
or digital video, or even digital animation video. Without going into detail of each medium, it is
important to note that pornographic dispositif, precisely because pornography is ultimately a
mediated phenomenon, entails a dispositif of that specific medium, such as cinema, or networked
digital video pornography online, and thus also specific practices of consumption related to it.
Second, a specific mode of address. Pornography's mode of address is profoundly visceral. It
appeals (or at least seeks to appeal) to the body of the viewer and not just body as object but a
sensing, living body – in other words, an embodied spectator. In a very simple way one could say
that pornography's mode of address is visceral because it seeks to arouse the viewer. This mode of
address manifests, as Linda Williams have showed, in particular filming techniques (such as cum-
shots and close-ups of genitals, for instance) and narratives that feed on and back into discourses
and desires prevalent in a particular society (such as the urge to “speak truth”, to make the body –
and especially the female body - “confess its secrets”), ascribing pornography to the list of films
that fall into the category of the “body genre” (Williams, 1991). This mode of address relies on the
affectivity of the body (its ability to affect and be affected) as a pre-individual force, as well as on
socio-culturally specific assumptions on what is sexy, desirable and “hot”.
Mode of address and “basic apparatus” of the medium thus creates the viewing situation. Viewing
situation, in my understanding, entails not just specific discursive position of the viewer but also
material practices that are part of what “watching porn” means. What exactly it means is historically
and culturally specific and dependent on the aforementioned two elements. Early stag films were
viewed privately and served as a social space for male bonding (Williams, 1989); Deep Throat
(1972) was screened in movie theatres and thus available to general audience; rental videos are for
home viewing on TVs, and online porn available via tube websites is accessible through personal
computers and smartphones that by today are quite ubiquitous in the Global North. Each of these
contexts produces a different ideal viewing situation that is dependent both on discourses on how
technologies and cultural products are supposed to be used, as well as practices of use encouraged
by and even built in the technologies themselves.
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I want to stress again that these three elements are interdependent – changes in one are likely to
incur changes in the others, and not necessarily in a linear way. Thus overall effects of the
pornographic dispositif will depend on changing relations between these elements and their socio-
cultural embeddings. Pornographic dispositif also resonates with larger formations. For instance,
while analysing perspectival painting, Brian Massumi argues that it resonated with absolutist
monarchy through the common feature of having one point of focus: point of perspective in
painting and the monarch in political structure (Massumi, 2011). Thus, for instance, Rosi Braidotti
also argues that pornography is ultimately about the commodification of representations, even a sort
of affect-mongering one might say, because it submits bodies and desires to the logics of capitalist
economy (Braidotti, 2011a).
While the latter might be true to a large extent, I believe that pornography's effects cannot be
reduced to one set of outcomes (such as feeding into the capitalist economy). A more thorough
analysis is needed of what are the specific affordances and constraints of the pornographic dispositif
and how does it reverberate other social, cultural, economic and political structures. Such analysis,
furthermore, needs to be attentive to the specifics of the practices that the pornographic dispositif
entails: both medium-related practices, as well as practices of consumption. In the case of
pornography, embodiment forms a “red thread” through all the elements of this dispositif in a sense
that it is at the heart of the media, the genre with its specific mode of address, and the viewing
position that it creates. In other words, the concept of the dispositif enables me to bring three focal
points together: the focus on practices, related discourses and the specificity of the medium, and ask
what kind of position does embodiment occupy in all these realms, as well as how it changes
throughout the operation of pornographic dispositif. In the next chapter thus I will analyse the
pornographic dispositif of a particular kind of pornography: online pornography.
Chapter 2
EMBODIMENT IN ONLINE PORNOGRAPHY: PORNOGRAPHIC
DISPOSITIF AND THE PRODUCTION OF BODY IN E-PORN
Consider opening one of the most popular free porn “tube” websites such as Youporn.com. What
you will be met with is thumbnails of videos you could chose from. As you move the pointer over
them, each thumbnails provides a short slide-show of what is happening in the video. Next to that,
some pop-up adds appear and there's an animated ad on the right hand side that captures the
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attention by showing a woman with apparently digitally enhanced breasts, moving up and down
over a man in speeded up rhythm. There are over 50 categories to choose from, or you can pick one
of the videos that appear on the front page (“Bounce that Ass”, “Skinny blonde gets huge facial”,
“Split my tight pussy with that big Cock”, “Teen girl tongue fucks a mature”, to name titles of just a
few). Browsing can take some time or no time at all – depending on how specific one's wishes are
and how well one can avoid pop-up ads.
After a while I open the video called “Secretary gives Blowjob in Elevator” in the Amateur
category. The video is only 3:55 minutes long. It is filmed by an elevator security camera. It starts
with a man and a woman, both in business suits, kissing, and continues with the woman going on to
perform fellatio. Camera zooms-in to focus on the woman (some users in the comments section
below the video speculate that the camera actually did not zoom- in but rather that the zoom was
done by the editor). The video is silent, and that strikes as odd, since usually there are at least some
sounds of heavy breathing and pounding. At the same time on the right hand corner next to the
video there is an image of a woman (she would be categorized as “mature” in conventional porn
language) inviting to visit some German website by showing her Brazilian-waxed vulva.
Next.
“Teen Raila Shows what She's Got at Girls Do Porn”, a 20-minute video that starts in a hotel room
with a young woman sitting on a large bed, answering questions to the camera about herself and her
sex life. I decide to skip to the “real deal”. I press the pointer on the timeline at the fifth minute. She
is now on the bed, being fucked quite hard from behind, with camera man giving directions (“slap
her!”, “change position a bit, you're making fanny farts”) to the male actor and the young woman
(supposedly an amateur from the street, but no one can verify that, of course) , while the camera
focuses either on the face of the female or on the genitals. There are no condoms, gloves or lube
used and it does not seem that the video was edited to cut any parts out. There are some bright lights
placed in the room and the video itself is in high definition. I go through the timeline animations
(the snapshots of the video appearing as you move the pointer through the timeline) and close the
video without waiting for a traditional “money shot”.
Next.
I visit live chat cam directory on Redtube.com. Again, they are outlined as small frames on the
page. As I move the pointer onto one of them, the image becomes bigger and live streaming starts.
If I move my pointer elsewhere, the live connection stops. I can see three people, two men and a
woman, sitting on a couch. Waiting, apparently. Some of them are yawning. I move my pointer to
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the other webcam image. A girl is inviting the participants of the chat to “tip” her if they want to see
her breasts. Depending on the amount, she might invite them for a “private chat” (“Three highest
tippers will get a private show, guys!”). In the meantime she moves closer and then away from the
webcam, giving a smile, showing of her cleavage. Yet in another webchat a woman is lying on her
bed, stroking herself, and at the same time responding to the questions texted to her in the chat
frame (“No Max, I am from Vegas. But I have family in New York”). Another girl in another cam
frame, puffing her lips – in popular culture this is called “a duckface”. Somehow it makes me laugh
uncontrollably.
Next.
***
In this chapter I will analyse online pornography as a dispositif constituted by basic apparatus, mode
of address and viewing situation. Before starting the analysis I would like to clarify my choice of
concepts. Online sex (or cyber-sex to use the older term) usually refers to live sexual interaction
online via webcams or sexually explicit real-time chat messages that might include both text and
images. Online pornography, on the other hand, refers more to pornographic videos disseminated
online through the websites and include much less “live” interaction (though there are “live”
webcam websites, but then usually only one person is visible as they perform in front of the cam).
The growing trend in the latter in the past years has been amateur pornography: videos produced by
so called non-professionals, usually blurring the lines between performance, production and
consumption. These videos end up on video sharing websites such as RedTube.com, YouPorn.com
and the like.
In the framework of this analysis, however, I will regard both “live” sexual interactions and
consumption of internet pornography as “online sex”. The reasons underlying this decision are
three-fold. On the one hand, taking both cyber-sex and internet porn as one is related to my
approach to pornography as embodied material-semiotic practice rather than only sexual
representations. Secondly, with the growth of amateur porn and also increasing availability and
accessibility of online pornography makes cyber-sex and consumption of online porn more easily
interchangeable. With a click of a mouse one can go from viewing porn videos to filming oneself, to
sharing this video online again, to engaging with another person through the webcam in real time.
Thirdly, the “tube” websites that are the focus of my analysis often include both porn videos and
live webcam chats.
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For these reasons I will use the concept of e-porn as the key notion that refers to these pornographic
spaces of tube websites, and will use the term “online sex” when referring to more general
phenomenon that encompasses the practices of e-porn. I will argue that in these practices the body
is closely engaged with technology. This tightly knit intra-active relation between body and
technology shows that the medium plays a significant part in shaping the embodied experience of
sexuality. I will regard this engagement as material-discursive and will therefore pay attention to
both elements.
E-porn and online sex should be seen as a part of contemporary technoculture in general. This
technoculture is characterized not only by the domination of sight over other senses (MacLuhan,
1964) but also by a peculiar “fear of the body” (Gillis, 2004: 93). The expressions of this fear can
be traced in a wide range of ideas, from early cybernerds' dreams to leave “the meat” behind and set
the mind free to explore cyberspace, to general claims that cyberpsace helps to prevent unnecessary
or undesirable face-to-face interactions. E-porn enters this context as a sort of “clean sex”: it
involves no exchange of bodily fluids, no need to touch or smell the other body, social interactions
are limited and more easily controllable (all you have to do is to go off-line, should you stop
enjoying), and your own body is supposedly more passive than it would be during the “real”
intercourse. In other words, it's just you getting off on “dirty” images sterilized by the machine that
delivers them.
Thus e-porn is paradoxically caught between aiming at dis-embodiment and strongly focusing on
the body. However, the practices of using online pornography and cybersex are inextricable from
physicality of movement and touch, as I will show throughout the course of this chapter. In addition
to that, the discourses of pollution, contagion and addiction characterize contemporary debates on
pornography, making it into a phenomenon that somehow poisons and perverts “natural” sexuality
(Smith & Atwood, 2013). Thus e-porn is both “clean” and “dirty”, “out there” and “little shameful
secret” at the same time.
The dialectics of exposure and covertness, excess and control is nothing new – Michel Foucault
discussed it in detail in his three volumes on the history of sexuality (Foucault 1978, 1985 and
1986). However, what I seek to do in this section is to look at online pornography through the
theoretical framework of dispositif as a material-discursive phenomenon and ask how this dispositif
engages and produces mediated embodiment of a desiring, sexual consumer. I will begin my
analysis with looking in detail at the three elements that make a dispositif of online porn, and then
will show how this dispositif relies on and re-produces an embodiment that is inextricable from
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technology, a body whose sexuality is enacted through and with technology: a body in e-porn.
2.1. The Dispositif of Online Porn
The Basic Apparatus
Let me start with the basic apparatus: the technological facilities that bring online pornography to
its consumer. Preliminary findings of porn research, conducted by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood
and Martin Barker in 2010 indicate that the most popular sources of pornography are “tube” sites
and downloads12, both of which first and foremost require a personal computer, with a working
Operating System and (assuming that the majority of personal computer owners do run their
computers with commercial software such as Windows or MAC) a graphic user interface. Secondly,
this computer has to be part of the network infrastructure, i.e. connected to Internet either through
wireless network or cable, and this network can be accessed through appropriate Internet browser
software. These two elements – personal computer and network connection – are by now part and
parcel of everyday work and leisure activities, at least in the Global North (Schäfer, 2011).
The everydayness of personal computer (which denotes both a discourse of familiarity as well as
the actual ease of usage) plays an important role here. In her book Queer Phenomenology (2006)
Sarah Ahmed claims that the un/familiarity of things and spaces either afford or hinder one's
activities through allowing (or not) to unproblematically extend oneself into and through them.
Specific spaces also allow easier the extension of certain bodies and not others. As for personal
computer and Internet, any computer-literate person is able to use the technology relatively without
major obstacles, and improvements are constantly developed to accommodate the needs of people
with disabilities. This makes the Internet a familiar place of everyday interactions and activities.
On the other hand, Internet is also posited as a particular kind of space. Popular discourse on
Internet from its very inception played around the imaginary of cyberspace to which the mind can
escape from the burdens of the fleshy everyday here-and-now. On the other hand, already as early
as 1995, Sherry Turkle has aptly pointed out that cyberspace (or virtual reality – VR – to use a more
12 Preliminary findings are available at the pornresearch.org website: http://www.pornresearch.org/results.html
(accessed on 23 June 2013).
36
contemporary term) is not disconnected from “real life” (RL): identities online often (at least
partially) correspond to those of RL. The rise of web 2.0 culture of user-participation,
prosumersim13 and social media further blurred the VR/RL divide (Schäfer, 2011).
However, while the widespread ownership of personal computers and computer literacy as well as
their use for leisure makes this medium a familiar part of the everyday private spaces and activities,
the network as a technology and its dynamics in fact problematises the relation of familiarity by de-
stabilising the linearity of information flows and blurring the public/private divide. An interesting
approach to the network as a space and analysis of it is proposed by Tiziana Terranova (2004). She
suggests that digital network is an informational space, which is characterised not so much by
computer mediation but rather by certain structural qualities. I quote her at length:
[informational space] presents an excess of sensory data, a radical indeterminacy in our
knowledge, and a non-linear temporality involving a multiplicity of mutating variables and
different intersecting levels of observation and interaction. … An informational space is
inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic: one cannot simply observe it, but becomes
almost unwittingly overpowered by it. It is not so much a three-dimensional, perspectival
space where subjects carry out actions and relate to each other, but a field of displacements,
mutations and movements that do not support the actions of a subject, but decompose it,
recompose it and carry it along. (Terranova, 2004: 37, emphases mine).
It is also not exclusively homo- or heterogeneous space. Internet is a network of networks –
internetwork (Terranova, 2004) – whose architecture is primarily open: it is designed in such a way
as to accommodate new additions, as long as they use several key protocols. Internet thus tends
towards “modulating the relationship between differentiation and universality” (Terranova, 2004:
56) by, on the one hand, solving the problem of incompatibility through either subsuming
differences vertically or horizontally, and, on the other hand, leaving opportunities open for new
elements to be added. Internet as the primary application of network technology allows
heterogeneous elements to be added to it without the necessity of one specific centre of control.
Moreover, not only computers but also many other technical devices, from phones to refrigerators,
can be connected to Internet, as long as they use the right “language” of communication.
Because of its ability to modulate the relations between the particular and the universal, network
13 A culture and technologies that allow the consumers of the content to be also producers (Lister, Dovey et.al., 2009:
34)
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technology resonates with wider cultural debates on and processes of globalization and capitalism
(Terranova, 2004). Internet is paradoxical in a way that it creates an experience of a distinct space
akin to homogeneity, and yet at the same time can be characterized by multiplicity of channels,
variety of content available and the possibility of the unexpected (you never know what you may
find wondering around online). Thus, just like globalization is better described by the term
“glocalization” (Robertson, 1995), so are the information processes on Internet better described by
the dynamics of centripetal force when it comes to explaining the relation between hetero- and
homogeneity. As Terranova writes when she talks about the particularities of network space:
“[r]emoved from the central controlling gaze of a single centre, space tends not so much to
fragment into individual cells, as to diverge, hybridizing itself around peculiar features of different
milieus and cultures” (Terranova, 2004: 57).
I consider pornographic tube websites one of those clusters of informational space. First of all, the
websites are structured in a way as to confront the viewer with excess and abundance,
fragmentation and coherence. Porn “tube websites”, such as the aforementioned Porntube.com or
Redtube.com, seem to have a pretty generic structure (see figure 1a and 1b). Each website contains
thousands of videos14, usually outlined in rows of frames, each offering a slideshow preview of the
content. Next to that animated advertisements are placed on the sides, with occasional pop-up ads
appearing as the user moves through the website. This immediate glance at the outline already
points not only to the excess but also to the fragmentation as well as coherence of the e-porn space:
there are multiple fragments (videos and ads; textual and graphic elements; promotional videos
linking to other websites – a sort of covert advertisements, excerpts from existing full-feature porn
movies and videos uploaded by consumers – “original” content) that are held together by the frame
of the website and common theme (excessive sexual explicitness).
Multiplicity and abundance of tube-porn informational space is managed through categorisation,
which could be seen as creating sub-clusters within a single website. Next to the thematic
categories15, one can choose based on the country of origin (either of the video, or of performers),
type of video (“live” streaming or pre-recorded), date, popularity, “viewed right now”, quality (HD
videos) – see figures 2 and 3. Some websites, such as Redtube.com, provide an option to search
14 To give an impression of the amount of videos available, on 24 June 2013 I estimated that free porn website
Redtube.com contained roughly 37.750 porn videos, most viewed of which had over 18 million views; Youporn.com, according to my estimation, had over 63.000 videos (6.352 pages with 10 videos per page on average). xHamster.com contained over 10.000 pages of videos, with 10 to 30 videos per page.
15 Again, to give an example, Youporn.com has 64 thematic categories, Redtube.com – 32, xHamster.com – 90 thematic categories divided in “Straight”, “Transsexual” and “Gay” sections.
38
according to the most popular search-terms16. Of course, these sub-clusters are by no means static:
Figure 1a: Layout of porn tube website Youporn.com
Figure 1b: The layout of porn tube website Redtube.com
16 On 24 June 2013 the list contained 500 search-terms, from “latina” to “rimjob”.
39
Figure 2: Categories of videos on Youporn.com
categories change, converge (one video can be ascribed to multiple categories) and overspill (same
category can contain both “professional” and “amateur” porn, which also are available as separate
categories and characterize more the type or a particular “feel” of porn rather than content). Thus
categorisation serves both as an excess management strategy, but also as a mechanism of further
multiplication of this excess.
Multiplicity of fragments and phenomenon of categorization renders e-porn space not only
excessive and indeterminate, but also non-linear. Non-linearity, according to Terranova, relates
directly to movement, which is here to be understood both as movement through space (crossing
different spheres or moving from A to B), and as duration (movement in time that also always
leaves a trace, changes the space that is crossed through). This non-linearity manifests both in the
movement of information, and of the movement of the consumer in informational space. First of all,
at the very basic level of any digital network technology, the paths of information do not always
make a straight line: packages of information are let loose to find the most convenient path between
sender and receiver17.
17 When the name of the website one is trying to reach is typed into the web browser, a command is sent to the Internet Service Provider, and from there travels on till it reaches the Domain Name Server, which then directs it to the web server that stores information of the intended website. Web server responds by breaking down the information file (say, a particular article or a video, and the whole lot of other elements that constitute the appearance of the website) into smaller packets of information. These pieces are let free to find their own most convenient routes back to the computer that made the request, where they are assembled again into a coherent message: the website appears in one's browser
40
Figure 3: Video frame on Redtube.com. Note the possibility to rank the video (right-hand side) and
sort videos according to when they were uploaded, how highly they are rated, etc. (the bar above
the video frame).
The consumer in online space, and especially in e-porn space, moves likewise in a non-linear, to
some extent indeterminate way: consumers move through the space of e-porn, as Keilty has shown
(2012), not through the search but through the act of browsing. Browsing, as opposed to search that
is more target-oriented, entails spending time stumbling through the space, allowing random objects
to catch your attention and lead you to unexpected places. On the other hand, browsing is not
necessarily a dis-interested kind of wandering around: it is a sensation of being in-duration which
goes hand in hand with repetition and craving. As Keilty puts it, “we constantly shift to new images,
creating a process of browsing in which pleasure derives from the habitual and repetitious delay and
deferral of satisfaction” (Keilty, 2012: 5).
Consumer's movement in e-porn space also cuts across the spacial and discursive division of
public/private and real/virtual. Porn tube websites today usually are designed in such a way as to
include at least some of the web 2.0. elements, namely, elements that encourage some degree of
interaction or user-feedback (see figure 4 and 5). Therefore there is often a comments section under
each video, “like” and “dislike” buttons, possibility to register and have your own profile on the
website where you can compile lists of favourite videos, upload videos yourself and interact with
window. This shows that even at the very basic level of network architecture there is a possibility of flow and connectivity between basically any two (or more) points in the network.
41
other viewers (in some cases these profiles look not unlike Facebook personal pages). In some
websites, such as Youporn.com, viewers are also allowed to categorize, tag videos, and label them
as belonging to a particular group or style: movement e-porn space thus always leaves a trace, even
if that trace is just the change in a number of views for a particular video.
Next to the aspects related to movement, touch is also an important element in the basic apparatus
of e-porn. First of all, there is the very material fact of the actual touch of mouse and the keyboard.
At this level touch correlates with movement: the pointer moves on the screen, text appears in the
browser window, video is launched, paused or stopped at the touch of a button. However, the sense
of touch also comes in through the immersive quality of e-porn as an informational space. As
mentioned earlier, informational space overflows the consumer through excess and abundance, it
carries them away yet at the same time allows for temporary stops, thus alternating between the
intensity of a brief stroke and engulfing entirety.
Figure 4: The comments section at Redtube.com, live streaming.
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Figure 5: Example of a personal user profile on Tube8.com
Mode of Address
The way informational space of e-porn is structured at the level of basic apparatus in its turn
impacts the mode of pornographic address and invests e-porn with qualities different from its non-
networked forms. First of all, most of the online porn videos in tube-websites are relatively short,
with an average length of 15 minutes18. This speeds up the regular sequence of “sexual numbers”
(Williams, 1989: 72) or forces porn directors to either cut some of them out, or focus on a particular
number. Furthermore, with more videos being produced by amateurs, sometimes the whole video
focuses just on one position or one particular moment of the whole sex act. This has as much to do
with the positioning of the camera (whether it is stationary or hand-held, and whether there is a
camera person behind it), as with the editing work (or lack of thereof). In any case, this makes e-
porn both more dense (in terms of availability), and more fractured and dispersed (in terms of
content) at the same time.
The density/dispersion dynamics are also re-instantiated through the compression/diffraction of
pornographic space content-wise. If pornographic DVDs (not to mention full-featured movies) are
18 Source: http://www.salon.com/2013/05/30/is_success_killing_the_porn_industry_partner/ (accessed on 25 June
2013). Longer videos, sometimes even up to one hour, are also available occasionally, but they do not seem to be in the majority.
43
typically dedicated to one particular genre or fetish (except for compilations, though even those
usually come under a specific thematic heading, such as “amateur compilations”), tube-websites
contain numerous genres and themes, separated into categories, yet still just a mouse click away.
The possibility in many tube-websites to switch between pre-recorded videos and live streaming
further increases the abundance of choice and variety. Thus e-porn is a space where the variety of
genres and themes exist next to each other and are easily available for the consumer, exemplifying
the movement of centripetal force that operates throughout the networked space of Internet in
general.
The possibility for the consumer to switch from one video to the next without almost any effort, as
well as the phenomenon of browsing that is part-and-parcel of the movement in e-porn space,
creates the circumstances where different videos are in constant competition for the viewer's
attention. As the user engages in the practice of browsing, half-curious, half-disinterested, for porn
producers it starts coming down to catching the attention. Thus if porn has always been famous for
its excessive language and anatomical detail to create a visceral appeal through exposure, the
abundance of porn online pushes the excess and exposure, eliminating or reducing to the basics all
the other techniques that do not concern the body directly (such as narrative, for instance).
Some have argued that this exponential growth of porn online and its increasing availability have
made porn more extreme than ever (Dines, 2010). To some extent, I would agree with that: e-porn
space is populated not only with tube-websites that are able to cater for a large variety of tastes, but
also with productions that are as specific as they are controversial, especially from a feminist
perspective (think, for instance, of 1rapetube.com or forcetube.com: videos available on these
platforms can easily raise the question whether the scenes are performed, or are they real footage of
an actual sexual assault and abuse). Since the major tube-websites are often linked together19, this
makes these controversial niches easily available not only to those with specific interests, but to
every one who is looking for porn online: sexual niches of all sorts are both more visible, and much
more part of the mainstream consciousness (Paasonen, 2012: 37-9).
Thus if full-featured porn was aiming rather at seducing the viewer through allowing them to slide
into the narrative space, go through the sexual numbers and come out satisfied – a rather smooth
movement of “sliding in” to the pornographic space, e-porn attempts to catch and hold the attention
19 For instance, Pornhub.com also serves as a gateway to the website ExtremeTube.com, among others, and sexual-
abuse connoting videos can be easily found on xHamster.com by searching “rape”, while the search for “extreme” gives a list of videos that mostly picture insertion of large objects into vaginas and anuses.
44
by what Susanna Paasonen calls “the grab” (Paasonen, 2012). This grab, according to her, is
affective, operating through the material-discursive quality of porn: porn appeals to the viewer's
viscerality, to their bodily knowledge, but also to the discursive tropes and imagery related to them,
notions of cultural value, taste, social hierarchies (ibid.: 256-8).
The most direct and easily noticeable technique that pornography employs in order to grab the
viewer is exposure. This is not new: already early porn scholars highlighted that pornography aims
at revealing and exposing that which is not normally visible through the technique of cinematic
close-up and a certain scrutinizing, almost medical, gaze that it creates (Williams, drawing on
Foucault, calls this phenomenon scientia sexualis). This scrutiny comes from the will to know, from
the imperative for the body to confess its secrets. At the same time, as Paasonen points out, porn
also works through tapping into the bodily knowledge of the viewer, a certain intercorporiety, which
is especially the case with the appeal of amateur porn: it is supposedly easier for the viewers to
relate to, to “feel like” the bodies on screen when they resemble bodies of “real people” as opposed
to the polished bodies of porn stars.
However, I argue that “just knowing” is not enough in the age of e-porn: it is not anymore only
about revealing how sex “actually” happens, but about expanding the boundaries of and
experimenting with how sex could possibly happen. The videos of “deep-throating” and gagging20,
double anal penetration, complicated sex positions, “ass-to-mouth” and other similar sexual
numbers21, “facial”22, bukkake23, gokkun24, “snowballing”25, smothering and “face-sitting”, and so
on, are if not part-and-parcel of mainstream e-porn, then at least not only delineated to fetish
sections or to performance by professionals only. It does not mean that these sexual practices are in
itself necessarily “extreme”, but rather that they do defy the stereotype of “normal” sex, i.e. smooth-
penetrative-heterosexual-reproductive intercourse. 20 “Deep-throating” refers to deep fellatio technique, when the whole of the penis is in the mouth, literally going into the
throat. Gage reflex is often a result of this, and it might come with the shortness of breath.“Gagging” thus refers to forced deep-throating, often when the one performing the fellatio is not in control of how deep or how fast the penis moves into the throat. Other synonyms for gagging are “throat fucking” and “face fucking”. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-throating (accessed 23 June 2013)
21 Ass-to-mouth involves anal sex followed immediately by oral sex. It is one of the generic sexual numbers in porn, next to others such as “ass-to-pussy” and “ass-to-other-mouth”. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass_to_mouth (accessed 23 June 2013)
22 Ejaculation on the face. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_%28sex_act%29 (accessed 23 June 2013).
23 Bukkake is a pornographic genre where multiple men ejaculate on the body (usually the face) of a woman or another man. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukkake (accessed 23 June 2013).
24 A sexual act of (usually) a woman drinking semen of (usually) multiple men, often from a glass or other sort of container. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gokkun (accessed 23 June 2013).
25 Transferring semen from one person's mouth to the other's, usually by kissing. Often involves multiple partners, thus making the amount of transferred liquid to grow larger (to “snowball”) because of the mixture with saliva. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowballing_%28sexual_practice%29 (accessed 23 June 2013).
45
Furthermore, I argue that parallels can be found between a sort of “jackass culture”26 of
experimentation with taboos, cultural as well as bodily boundaries; “fail culture”27 exemplified by
the immense popularity of websites such as Failblog.org and related websites dedicated to the
humorous “fails” on Facebook, at the workplace, during parties, dates, text-messaging “fails”, etc.,
and free porn websites such as Daftporn.com, Heavy-r.com or E-fukt.com. While the latter also
contain videos of sexual acts that cause pain, involve faeces, dirt, incest, animals, depict drunk sex
and drunk “gang bangs” etc. to induce the shock reaction, quite a few videos are dedicated precisely
to “fails” that are meant to make the viewer laugh (“Hilarious cum fails”, “Funny girl causes
premature cumshot”, “French teen, anal fail”, “Accidental squirt in own face”, to mention just a few
titles). More mainstream porn tube-websites, such as Redtube.com, also have a special category
“Wild and Crazy” that features sex with people dressed as cartoon or fantasy film characters, sex
with various unconventional objects, acrobatic sex, public sex, and so on.
The “fail” and the “fucked-up” are both phenomena of web 2.0 media culture, thriving on user
participation in the production of content. Mixing humour, shock, disgust, intimidation and the
carnivalesque, “fail” and “fucked-up” are produced by the users themselves, drawing from the
situations of everyday life: the freak-show is not limited to the circus arena, but spills over to the
mundane. In e-porn this means stretching the boundaries of what a body can do, ridiculing the
seriousness of porn performance, rupturing the “digital smooth body” (Bernardi, 2007) and pointing
out its failures, exposing the grotesque of the body and defying the imperative of the “normal”.
Finally, this convergence of cultures, and the presumed threat that it poses to the “normal” and
“decent”, is at the root of popular discourses around porn. These discourses position porn as both
ubiquitous and effaced (the “dirty little secret”), making an artificial split between the “normal”
users of internet and porn-watchers (Paasonen, 2012: 32). Smith and Atwood argue that the
resurgence of contemporary anti-porn is based precisely on the idea of porn as pollution and
contamination of otherwise “healthy” sexuality (Smith & Atwood, 2013). The public outcries on the
supposed addiction to porn, the urge to “protect the [women and] children”, posit e-porn as filth and
threat and express great anxieties both about the perversion of the non-mediated life, as well as the
contamination of the organic, natural, integral and intact body by the inorganic, non-natural, de-
26 “Jackass” is an American reality series, originally shown on MTV from 2000 to 2002, featuring people performing
various dangerous, crude self-injuring stunts and pranks. Source: Wikipedia,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackass_(TV_series) (accessed 25 June 2013). 27 More on the phenomenon of “fail” can be found here: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fail (accessed 25 June
2013).
46
composable, fractured technology of the network.
To sum up, the e-porn mode of address is the one of a material-discursive, affective grab, made
possible by the investment of labour of the viewer, fluidity of informational space and convergence
of popular and porn culture. Where does this leave the consumer of e-porn?
Viewing Situation
The specifics of the basic apparatus and mode of address of e-porn construct a particular viewing
situation. It must be noted that this viewing situation is an ideal one: the way each particular person
consumes porn online is specific, however, I argue that the specifics of e-porn outlined previously
in this chapter afford certain general positioning of the consumer, a positioning that is a result of
material practices as much as discourses around e-porn. Thus what follows is the analysis of the
viewing situation as constructed by e-porn structure, and the examples will be used to illustrate
rather than accurately represent the way porn is consumed online.
One of the commentator online has described porn in the following way:
Porn (noun) - Any video or image you lose interest in immediately after orgasm. Usage:
"Porn *click* fap fap fap"28
Even though described from a male perspective29 and implying a certain judgement of the
quality/attractiveness of porn, I see this commentary as a quite emblematic depiction of the ideal
viewing situation of e-porn. This situation involves two basic elements: movement and touch, both
virtual (the clicking-through in the virtual space to reach the video or image that enables the
statement: “porn”) and actual (the act of masturbation, the implied arousal that leads to orgasm, the
physical movement of clicking and setting the video/image in motion). It also exemplifies the
inextricability of movement and touch: one moves in the space of e-porn through touching and is
touched by the movement going on around.
The kind of consumer's moving-touching that is going on in this space is not entirely smooth but
28 Commentator forgotmymath, full comments thread available here: http://imgur.com/gallery/oqcBL (accessed 25 June
2013). 29 The “fap” is meant to express the sound of male masturbation, thus giving birth to the word “fapping” which is used
as a slang for masturbation. See “fapping” in Urban Dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fapping (accessed 25 June 2013).
47
entails different intensities. The relatively low-intensity moments of browsing are ruptured by
affective responses of pleasure, disgust, revulsion, amusement, etc., that correspond to physical
movement of the consumer's body: self-touch, closing and opening new videos, freezing in
anticipation, stillness in waiting, etc. The overall feeling of the flow which comes from immersion
in any informational space, as Terranova has shown (2004), leaves the consumer in a state of
double-consciousness of being here and being in a place of fantasy (Callois, 2001), or perhaps
rather – a state of inhabiting a “mixed reality” that knits together virtual and actual and allows these
different intensities to cross through.
These different intensities characterise not only the affective reactions to e-porn, but also the kinds
of spaces the viewer crosses. As mentioned before, e-porn mixes private and public both through
the actual practices of consumption encouraged by the basic apparatus (the personal computer or
laptop or even a smartphone with appropriate software connotes solitary use, while the network can
be seen as a relatively public space; inclusion of the elements of social media in e-porn brings the
public, the social element out in a quite explicit way), as well as by discourses around these
practices (the discourse of porn as a shameful little secret further encourages covert, solitary
consumption). Thus the consumer itself is placed in a spot of both concealment and exposure, and
not least because their movement online always leaves a trace: a trace of views-per-video, browsing
history, comments and other interactions, for instance. In addition to that, it is not only the
consumer that leaves traces in online space – e-porn leaves traces in the “bodily archive”
(Sedgwick, 2003), be it the intensity of the sexual pleasure or other affective states.
Furthermore, the fact that consumer always leaves a trace in the space through which they pass
exemplifies the prosumerist aspect of the viewing situation. The user both consumes videos and
produces internet traffic, hits, categories. Next to that, with the increasing availability of video
cameras and the ready-made genre of amateur porn, one can turn from a viewer into a porn director
in a matter of minutes. The growth and popularity of amateur porn even, I would claim, establishes
an imperative to perform, record and expose one's own sexual practices to a broader audiences.
Thus it is not just a viewer being passively touched and moved by the pornographic video – the
direction can be reversed or even made into a circle, if we consider live porn cams or live sex on
platforms such as Chatroulette.com.
Finally, the discourses around e-porn position the viewer in a place of intense discursive overload:
they are the sinners and the pleasure seekers, sex-addicts and frigid subjects, freaks and fetishists,
victims of porn industry but also the empowered ones, free to enact their desires as they please.
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Being at the intersection of different value-loaded discourses produces multiple effects for each
particular viewer, but in terms of ideal viewing situation being at the intersection of multiple
discourses makes this situation a radically unstable one, increasing the indeterminacy that is already
present in the basic apparatus and mode of address. It is not so much a situation of dialectical play
between the forbidden/shameful/dangerous and desirable/pleasant/comforting (though, without
doubt, this dynamic is also there), but rather an intra-active field of cross-overs between discourses,
intensities and practices.
Perhaps the most suitable way to capture the kind of touching-moving that characterises the viewing
situation in e-porn is through terminology of rhythm. In his essay On the Temporal Quality of the
Normalistic Fun and Thrill Tape (2004) philosopher Jürgen Link outlines the structure of the
cultural “rhythm” of contemporary Western cultures. Link defines rhythm as the “subjective and
culturally constituted immanent organization, classification, and articulation of a lived temporal
continuum” (2004: 73). He uses an example of driving: the rhythm of driving is comprised of stand-
still of the traffic-jam, the normal phase of driving and the speeding up. Speeding up provides the
thrill, which, however, is also linked to the fear of denormalization (a car crash), while traffic-jams
provide negative frustration. Link sees a similarity of structure between driving and contemporary
pop music as well as overall visual media and the cultural rhythm. He calls this rhythm basso
continuo sincopato – a dynamic march rhythm, syncopated yet continuous: it has its “ups” and
“downs”, its disruptions, and yet it never ceases.
The continuous/disrupted rhythm of basso continuo sincopato, the intensity of resonances, the
moving-touching of the consumer in the e-porn space constitutes a viewing situation that is a
position of being in affective, informational loops. Traces left in the bodily archive of the viewer
and in the online space of e-porn points to the phenomenological reversibility of the flesh: touching
implies being touched, moving means also being moved. Because of the rhythmic ruptured
continuity, the viewing situation position one occupies is constantly de/recomposed: one is a porn
viewer, but also an affective labourer, a drop in the online traffic, a hit of popularity at the video, a
line of digital text, a pair of eyes and hands that need to be grabbed.
To summarize: the viewing situation is inextricable from the basic apparatus and mode of address.
They put the viewer in a position of fragmented yet continuous, indeterminate and excessive space,
through which he/she moves rhythmically, and making him/herself susceptible to be crossed by
intensities and affected by different discourses. I will argue further that this complex dispositif of e-
porn produces a particular body – a body in e-porn – that is both a theoretical figuration and a
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material position of an embodied consumer of pornography online.
2.2. Body in e-Porn: enacting the desires of mediated flesh
Let me briefly recount Mark Hansen's concept of the body in code. It is a kind of body whose
embodiment is enacted in conjunction with technology, thus also expanding the potential of human
embodiment. As Hansen explains, it is a body who enacts the digital code and “whose (still
primary) constructive or creative power is expanded through new interactional possibilities offered
by the coded programs of 'artificial reality'” (Hansen, 2006: 38). This is made possible by the body
schema that allows for incorporation of non-human objects into ones' lived embodiment. At the core
of the body schema lies the sensibilities of movement and touch, and technologies appeal to this
motile-tactile language of the body, de- and re-teritorializing them through human-technology
interaction. Thus even if digital technologies present themselves to the user through the visual, the
appeal to the motile-tactile body schema is still there, since vision, according to Hansen, is nothing
else but the expansion of tactility beyond the boundaries of the skin (2006: 79).
Tactility is also important because it is precisely what opens up the body to technical de/re-
territorializations. Touching means always also being touched, which gives rise to the worldskin or,
as Merleau-Ponty calls it, “the flesh” (Hansen, 2006: 82). In other words, the relation of the world is
already included in the relation to oneself through the notion of “flesh”. From this comes the
concept of intercorporiety: a generality of sensibility instead of the mediation of the image of the
other. This sort of intercorporiety introduces reversibility at the core: not only I share my body
schema with the other but also this schema is made of others' corporeality (ibid.: 83), to which I
open through enaction and interaction.
If a body in code is a body whose potential and embodiment is enacted with technics, the body in e-
porn is one whose sexuality is enacted with technics and whose sexual embodiment is de/re-
territorialized through online pornography. This body emerges through the multi-layered movement
and touch that characterise the dispositif of online pornography, and it constitutes a kind of
embodiment that is based on intra-action between wires and flesh, organic matter and inorganic
machinery, discourses and affects. Body in e-porn takes shape in the practice of the consumption of
online pornography, a practice during which the body of the viewer, network technology and
pornographic imagery work together, engage one another to produce “carnal resonances”
(Paasonen, 2012). As Paasonen explains, “ [t]o resonate with one another, objects and people do not
50
need to be similar, but they need to relate and connect to one another. Resonance encompasses the
emotional and cognitive as well as the sensory and affective, and it points to the considerable effort
involved in separating the two” (Paasonen, 2012: 16).
Co-movement of the body-image-technology that produces body in e-porn also renders it de/re-
territorializable in this “intra-action” (Barad, 2007). It is de-territorialized through non-linear
movement through a space that is indeterminate and excessive; through experience of different
intensities that deny the normative idea of sex and arousal as always related to pleasure (think of
aforementioned experiences of shame, disgust, disorientation); it is functionally dis-assembled
through occupying the position of the viewer, consumer and producer simultaneously; it is de-
territorialized by seeking for sexual pleasure out of “normal” reproductive framework and through
the contact with bodies on screen that are themselves fractured into body parts rather than
positioned as integral bodies. The body in e-porn is re-territorialized and re-assembled again
through the touch at the moment of masturbation that leads to sexual gratification: e-porn serves a
function and re-establishes the correlation between sexual pleasure and body parts that are “meant”
for sex – in other words, it puts the organs back into their rightful place for the rightful function
(even if this function is not connected to reproduction anymore).
Thus the body in e-porn is rendered malleable: it is fragmented with the help of the digital and the
network, yet always present via the carnal appeal of e-porn's mode of address and the materiality of
the viewer's body. It is also susceptible to wider cultural discourses. In fact, these discourse get
inscribed in the very digital-material flesh: the sexual body of the consumer of e-porn is effaced
through the shame and secrecy, and rendered excessive at the same time. Furthermore, the body gets
connected to the media culture phenomena of “fail” and “fucked-up” both as a source of these
phenomena, and as a consumer of them. Intra-action with technology and wider media culture
constitutes the body also as a “failing body”, the “fucked-up” body, the experimental and
experimenting body whose boundaries can always be stretched and played with.
Finally, because the operating framework of the body in e-porn is intra-action rather than linear
reaction or inter-action between already clearly demarcated units, the informational space of e-porn
gets affected by the carnal presence of the sexual. Body in e-porn “meats” the internet30, pollutes it
with the messy and sticky substance of the flesh. Thus also the body on screen is not only and not
30 I am borrowing this phrasing here from Maria Llopis' performance “Meat/ing the Internet”, performed at Berlin
Porn Film Festival in 2011. For more information see: http://www.mariallopis.com/en/portfolio/meating-in-the-internet/ (accessed 12 June 2013).
51
always the “digital smooth” (Bernardi, 2007), i.e. unproblematic, “clean”, easily consumed. The
digital body on screen is also that of an amateur: raw, misperformed, difficult to categorise. The
Internet is not a place to escape from the “meat” - it is a place to experience the excess, complexity
and multi-layeredness of it. It is a channel to express and enact one's sexuality, and also a place to
challenge and enhance their desire31.
The concept of the body in e-porn encourages to take seriously the question: what does it mean to
have sex via and with the machine in a networked informational space? What does it say about
embodiment in media and in contemporary culture? And most importantly: can we still speak about
the body as we know it, i.e. human body that is co-evolving with technology, yet somehow retains
its clear boundaries? The latter is precisely the critique that is often voiced with regard to
phenomenology in general and Mark Hansen's concept of the body in code in particular. According
to Patricia T. Clough (2010) Hansen's analysis stays within the boundaries of the body-proper as
well as sticks to the humanist idea of the human body as integral and wholesome (even if
malleable).Thus in the next section I will look at the emerging posthumanist thought and will ask
what kind of new perspectives does it bring to thinking about bodies in technologies and what
happens when these perspectives serve as lenses to look at online pornography.
Chapter 3
MATTER RE-CONFIGURED: FROM BODY IN E-PORN TO THE POLITICS
OF TECHNO-EMBODIMENT
In this chapter I would like to come back to the question of human embodiment and the dynamics of
power that this embodiment is entangled in. I will suggest that the body in e-porn allows to re-
define human body as a technobody: an embodiment that mixes organic and inorganic and
effectively (even if discursively the purity of dualisms is often maintained) blurs the lines between
the human and the machine. Technobodies not only are susceptible to different modes of power, but
also point to different sources of potential, alternative strategies for sexual politics. To arrive at
these points, however, the phenomenological line of thought that I have been following so far needs
to be “updated” or perhaps rather “looked at” through the posthumanist theories of body and
embodiment.
31 Preliminary findings of the Online Porn Research, conducted by Atwood, Smith and Barker (2012), indicate that
consumers go online for porn not only when they “are horny” but also when they “want to feel horny”.
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Posthumanism is a relatively recent strand of critical thought and philosophy. It refers first and
foremost to the critique of Western humanism that is marked by anthropocentrism, clear-cut
Cartesian dualisms (mind/body, human/animal etc.), identification of subjectivity with rationality
and free will (Braidotti, 2006). It also questions the very status of the human as a clearly defined
entity, separated from other forms of organic and inorganic life, aiming at re-defining what counts
as a human and what counts as a subject in general. The figure of post-human then is a post-
anthropocentric subject whose being is not a fixed ontological category, but rather a process of
becoming, an actualization of multiple intersecting forces constituting a fluid and non-unitary
subjectivity.
However, posthumanism can also refer to the current condition or predicament that humanity finds
itself in the midst of. This condition is a result not only of a mounting body of critique of
humanism, that gained its momentum with post-structuralism (Braidotti, 2010), but also of
technological developments that challenged the integrity of the human and his placement at the
privileged ontological position (Braidotti, 2013, Wolfe, 2010). Most notable among these
developments are those of biotechnologies and information-communication technologies,
establishing science and technology studies as one of the main fields in which contemporary
posthumanist thought takes shape.
As Rosi Braidotti argues, science and technology studies give birth mostly to the brand of analytic
posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), as well as to cultural-theoretical movements such as
“transhumanism”32 and “singularity movement”33. Posthumanism coming from the field of moral
philosophy, however, establishes itself as reactive to the posthuman predicament (Braidotti, ibid.),
often with a great dose of scepticism towards new technologies and their impact on the human. Last
but not least, she argues, there is posthuman thought that builds for the biggest part on continental
philosophy, anti-humanist philosophies of subjectivity and aims at developing a brand of “critical
post-humanism” (ibid.: 38) that would remain sensitive to the modes of power and lines of
difference that posthuman predicament affects.
32 Transhumanist's movement envisions a future in which development of technologies will have impacted the current
human condition and humans' psychological, intellectual and physical abilities to such an extent that it would give birth to posthumanity. For a detailed description of the movement see Bostrom, 2005.
33 “Singularity movement” or “singularitarianism” is a movement and thought whose followers hold that in the near future technological developments will aid the emergence of super-intelligence and the merging of human and technology. For more details see the website of Singularity University, http://singularityu.org/ (accessed 4 July 2013).
53
Another important issue that Braidotti notes is the different kind of ethical and political trajectories
that different posthumanisms take on. She stresses that quite often the post-anthropocentric thinkers
go towards the direction of responding to the challenges brought about by posthuman predicament
by offering neo-humanist alternatives, that lead them – on a normative level – back to the same-old
unified category of “the human” and universal humanist values (Braidotti, 2013: 78-80). As an
alternative she suggests to focus on affirmative politics of the posthuman, without reducing its
complexities or ignoring its paradoxes. Tying the different strands of posthumanist thought together,
she aims at putting the questions of subjectivity, ethics and politics back to the fore in science and
technology studies, while not surrendering to the nostalgia, technophobia or neo-humanism of
moral philosophies.
This being said, my own stance in the debate is much like Braidotti's. I wish to pay attention to the
role of information-communication technologies in their interaction with human embodiment,
borrowing from theories developed in science and technology studies and feminist theory, while
staying away from techno-utopianism, but likewise from technophobia. At the same time I do
believe that it is crucial not only to do the analysis, but also to point to the constraints and potentials
that are opened up by the kind of techno-embodiment that is at the core of body in e-porn. What is
at stake here is not only the theoretical conceptualization of human embodiment, but also the way it
is enacted and rendered susceptible to the new modes of power that are intensified by body-
technology coupling.
3.1. Posthumanist take on the body: re-defining matter and information
I would like to start with drawing some lines along which the de-stabilization of what counts as
human and human embodiment has taken place across the multiple brands of posthumanist thought.
Key markers for these lines are what traditionally has been left out of the definition of the human:
the non-human, be it the animal, technology, Earth, etc34. This non-human in Western humanism,
like the Woman in a patriarchal order, works not only as a category of difference, but also as that in
contrast to which the human is defined (Derrida, 2002). Traditionally the non-human has been seen
as something that lacks its own agency and can only be invested with it by the Human (think, for
example, about technology and the cliché that it is not technology that matters, but what we do with
it).
34 Woman, in a way, also partly falls into that category, if we consider that she has always been slightly less than
human, since Man was the ultimate embodiment of humanity.
54
Lacking authentic agency then confines the non-human to passivity and further perpetuates the
dualism between (active) mind and (passive) matter/body. This proliferates the clear cuts between
any categories that relate to the Human and his embodiment as well as rises the fear of the
“infections” brought by the non-human entities (think about the unconscious fear of bacteria
invading the body, science-fiction horrors of machine taking over the world, of the unruly couplings
between organic and inorganic in technology, etc.).
Donna Haraway also stresses the indebtedness of humanity to these non-humans that are parts of
our every-day lives and thanks to whom our scientific, cultural and economic endeavours can go
further. She calls them “companion species” and highlights the multiple interconnectedness both
through space and time (Haraway, 2008). In her earlier work she also argued for an even closer
connection by developing a figuration of the cyborg (Haraway, 1986 [1991]). Through taking the
popular cyber-fiction figure and disclosing its potentials she provided solid grounds for re-thinking
the fleshy intermingle between the technological and the organic. Being so inextricably connected
to our technologies we are all cyborgs, either literally (through body aesthetic or medical body
improvements) or figuratively (by relying on technologies to be able to function effectively in the
daily life).
Haraway's figuration of the cyborg also highlights that human body is not really entirely “human,”
i.e. made of organic matter, integral and “pure.” In other words, human body is not made up of
entirely human elements. A closer look at human biology opens the question not only of the
category of the human, but also its embodiment and sexuality. Take, for example, sexual
reproduction as the site that provides ground for the distinction between sexes and idea of the
“normal” sexuality: certain reproductive sexual organs constitute sexes in the human world as well
as define what counts as sex (reproductive penis-vagina intercourse). Luciana Parisi shows that this
sexual reproduction is only one sort of reproduction that goes on in the body. Other sorts of non-
sexual reproduction that she calls “bacterial sex” are inextricable from the processes that take place
in every single (human/organic) being (Parisi, 2004).
Her account poses a challenge to at least two ideas at once: firstly, confinement of sex to sexual
reproduction and thus clearly demarcated sexual identities; and secondly, the “purity” of the human
body, the idea of it as most developed, “better” sort of body on the evolutionary line. This renders
clear how the non-human operates as a shaper of what gets to be counted as human, but also how
ignoring the non-human part of the human leads to narrowing down the possibilities of human
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expression.
However, some posthumanists argue that this is still too anthropocentric. For instance, in his book
Alien Phenomenology, or What's It Like to Be a Thing? (2012) Ian Bogost claims that we should
stop asking questions about human experience, and turn to the phenomenology of things. Human-
world relationship, according to Bogost, is just one particular kind of relationship between two
entities. Drawing on Graham Harman he says that “hammer, human, haiku, and hot dog are all
ready-to-hand and present-at-hand for one another as much as they are for us” (2012: 16). In other
words, things (and by things he means both material and immaterial entities) relate to each other
and to environment not only through human action but also independently of it. They also structure
their own environments in their own ways, thus we should speak about plurality of environments
rather than employ such over-arching concepts as “the world”.
The latter argument resonates with another posthumanist: Cary Wolfe, whose book What is
Posthumanism? (2010) was one of the major attempts to outline some possible interpretations of
what can be regarded as “posthumanist thought”. He calls “the environment” a “multidimensional
space” since each autopoietic system (that includes humans, animals and other non-human others)
structures its own environment through its embodied enaction. Even though Wolfe and Bogost have
their own differences (most notably Wolfe's reliance on activity as the focal point of any system,
while Bogost claims that studies of life, couplings and inter/action are overvalued in comparison to
studying entities as they are), they both seem to be thinking in terms of less strictly demarcated and
ontologically hierarchized units.
However, if Wolfe goes further into the analysis of complex autopoietic systems, Bogost calls for
something he coins “posthuman phenomenology” or “phenomenology for” as opposed to the
traditional “phenomenology of” (Bogost, 2012). Though obviously we cannot exactly experience
what it means to be a thing, we can learn about it by observing how things relate to their
environments. According to Bogost, this would entail engaging in speculative realism – in
observing and speculating on phenomena and acknowledging that these speculations (such as how
computers structure their environments, not to mention what it means to think from a position of a
microchip) may be impossible to verify.
Ian Bogost, together with other contemporary thinkers such as Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton and
Quentin Meillassoux, are coming from a new strand of philosophy called “object-oriented
ontology” (OOO) that attempts to strip the human of its ontological privileges and assert the equal
56
existence of all objects and their relations35. However, this kind of posthumanism, in my opinion, is
precisely the brand that Braidotti criticizes for flattening out of structural differences and complex
power relations at work. Her own brand of critical posthumanism or feminist posthumanism does
not in itself contradict OOO, but rather goes a different direction: acknowledging the structural
relationality and vitality of matter (thus also bodies), she rather asks how does that affect
contemporary human condition, remaining sensible to the fact that this “human” cannot be seen as a
universal and privileged category anymore (Braidotti, 2013: 30-5).
The relationality and affectivity of matter, its core vitality, gets reconfigured via new bio- and
information-communication technologies. Drawing on the article of media scholar Eugene Thacker,
Patricia T. Clough argues that because of modern biotechnologies media cut to the very core of
biological matter and thus also human bodies (Clough, 2010). Thacker in his article “Data Made
Flesh” (2003) shows that especially with the birth of cybernetics bodies are seen as operating
according to the same logic of feedback loops and information dynamics. Even more than that:
DNA researchers manipulate biological matter with the help of computer software, with
applications as far reaching as artificial growth of separate organs, thus inscribing the cybernetic
logics of information into matter itself.
What both Clough and Tacker highlight is that not only bodies can in some ways “incorporate”
technologies, but also that the very matter of the body is seen as operated and thus manageable
through and as technology. Mater itself is informational: it is self-organising, dynamic and
affective (Clough, 2010). This opens a new direction to think about human-technology relation
without presenting the human as the main point of reference. It also allows to blur the distinction
between human and machine because informationality of matter means the possibility of the flow of
affect within as well as between different bodies. This process is not at all power-free: capitalism
thrives on genetic material and tools of biomedia are quickly appropriated in order to manipulate
and control matter itself. It is an important point precisely because it prevents techno-utopias and
also reveals that power relations can saturate the very basic level of life – something that
phenomenology has been prone to ignore, as many feminist and postcolonial critics have shown
(Braidotti, 2013).
Informationality of matter and thus also bodies makes it hard to maintain the phenomenological
35 For a very simplified definition of OOO, see Ian Bogost's blog entry “What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A
Definition for Ordinary Folk” at Ian Bogost blog, http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml (accessed 5 July 2013).
57
lines of the body-proper. As media theorists Mitchell and Thurtle put it, the phenomenological body
“too often reifies the body as the “zero point” of sense experience and does little to help us
understand the integrity of mediated experience in linking and transforming bodily interaction. The
cultural dimensions of mediated experience end up as a problem that begs explanation, rather than
being understood as a reverberant and active part of embodied experience” (Mitchell and Thurtle,
2004: 5). In addition to that, phenomenology often enforces the dividing line between the human
and the technology – one can incorporate the other, make it part of their embodiment but the
ultimate ontological distinction remains. Coupled with the “tradition” to take difference as
pejoration (Braidotti, 2013), this ontological demarcation often leads to asymmetry between the
non-human and human, and thus makes human perspective the organising principle of experience
and the world.
As I see it, it is the problem that has as much to do with ontological assumptions as well as with the
way of analysis itself, and specifically the units of analysis. Phenomenology does start from the
human body-as-organism, building further its insights on how this embodiment relates to and is
modified by other objects, contexts, discourses. Clough and Thacker, on the other hand, start from
matter itself and Donna Haraway starts from “knots” and “folds”: “the infoldings of others to each
other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things”
(2006: 176). I would like to combine this sensitivity to the level of matter and how it is reconfigured
as informational, with the idea that things – or knots and folds – come into being through and within
relations (Hayles, 2004). This double move of zooming-in on matter and zooming-out on relations
will allow me to show how bodies in e-porn are relational sexual beings of flesh and wires.
3.2. Techno-embodiment in online porn: media, porn and politics
Embodied “practice” approach to online porn and posthumanist thought has profound implications
to how we think about the whole phenomenon of wired, mediated sex enacted through conjunction
with technology. It points to the body as a primary gateway to mediated sexually explicit images,
yet such body is not a clearly defined entity that utilizes technology as a mere passive tool: its
embodiment is enacted in relation to the technology that brings pornography to its users. Thus
human body in online pornography is re-constituted as a technobody: technology is at the core of its
embodiment, but also of its sex and sexuality. Bodies in e-porn then are technobodies who come to
enact their mediated sexuality online. Bodies in e-porn are technobodies becoming sexual in and
through relation with technology. By this I do not mean to imply that bodies become sexual only by
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engaging in online pornography. Rather, I am claiming that online pornography is one of the
spheres where human sexuality is constituted and enacted as mediated, and human embodiment as
technologized.
This mediatedness of sexuality and technological embodiment is grounded in the relationality and
informationality of matter itself. E-porn thus becomes a space where this ontological relationality is
played out in and through the practices of consumption, inscribing technobodies in power and
economic structures. Thus there are multiple questions to be asked: what modes of power are
technobodies in e-porn susceptible to? What possibilities does e-porn open for creators of
pornography that aim at challenging the mainstream narratives and gender roles? How can
becoming a (techno)body in e-porn allow women – subjects who have, on the one hand, always
fallen on the body-side of the mind/body split, but also who have been shamed because of their
carnality – to explore and enact their desires? Where does the discourse on sex and sexuality, as
well as on gender roles, come into play and how does it work in a digital environment?
The informational flows of vulnerability
First of all, there is an important point to be made about the economy of online porn. Rosi Braidotti
claims that pornography re-enforces the logics of market economy (Braidotti, 2011a). Capitalism is
well know for incorporating movements and ideas that started as radical and subversive. It also
feeds on the production and consumption of affects (Terranova, 2004). E-porn is no exception here:
for instance, if at the beginning the phenomenon of “amateur porn” – low-cost home-made sex
tapes uploaded or otherwise shared online – created an alternative space for San Fernando Valley
productions36, nowadays large porn corporations issue “amateur collections” to squeeze some profit
out of the supposedly “real”, “unfaked” and “unscripted” qualities that amateur porn is said to
exhibit (van Doorn, 2010).
More than that: since capitalism turns matter itself into a mode and source of production (Braidotti,
2013, Clough, 2010) and employs bodily labour via digital environments (Terranova, 2004;
Paasonen, 2010), embodiment – including sexuality – becomes one of the main sources of
commodification as well as the field which is constructed as commodity. In the business of e-porn
the number of orgasms almost directly translates into profit: website views generate traffic, which in
36 San Fernando Valley is where adult entertainment production is concentrated in the US, generating around 90 percent of all US adult films produced (source: HBO documentary TV series Pornucopia, 2004).
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turn generates income from advertising. And yet interestingly, if categorization in e-porn can be any
indicator, not all orgasms have the same value: from several major free porn websites that I have
been drawing my illustrations from (RedTube.com, Youporn.com, PornTube.com and
PornHub.com), only PornHub.com has a category labelled as “female friendly” porn.
The visceral affective grab that e-porn employs, practices of browsing and the failure to deliver the
“real thing” (Williams, 1989: 19) further perpetuates the craving that begs and always fails to be
fulfilled, thus resulting in more “clicks”, more pop-up ads – a situation perhaps best illustrated by
one internet commentator comparing porn to the image of a pizza in the ad and upon delivery (see
figure 4).
Figure 4: Porn before/after masturbation
Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/oqcBL
Furthermore, e-porn fuels “perverse capitalism” (Braidotti, 2013: 61) not only – or perhaps rather
not so much – by fuelling sexual drive, but by framing this drive towards a certain direction and
suggesting particular practices that would lead to its supposed satisfaction. As Atwood and Smith's
preliminary research findings show (Atwood, Smith et.al., 2012), consumers look for porn both
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when they “feel horny” as well as when they “want to feel horny,” which implies the expectation of
online porn to satisfy this “horniness”. The way satisfaction is suggested – go online, find a video,
masturbate, orgasm – creates a very simplified and limited imaginary of what one can do with one's
sexual craving. Thus if e-porn deterritorializes bodies, as show in chapter 2, through inserting them
into informational loops and non-linear time-spaces, this popular narrative of “easy satisfaction” re-
territorializes it again by functionally connecting sexuality, network technology, pornographic
imagery and specific body parts (“click*fap, fap, fap”).
E-porn also feeds into the capitalist logic by proliferating differences which are structured as
“identities” or “preferences” and packaged as consumer choices (Braidotti, 2013: 58). Classifying
each and every single video under one or several categories allows for identification of these
choices and further multiplication of them. This is not simply a matter of convenience or sales – as
Foucault has shown (1995), classification systems are easily used for management of “perversions.”
As a result, popular discourse attempts to single out “the good kind” of porn from the perverse and
censurable, or “wrong” yet tolerable. For instance, the UK “porn ban” suggests that “rape porn”
should be completely banned, while however not specifying, whether the definition of “rape porn”
also implies BDSM practices that can potentially include rape role-play scenes37. Other discourses
attempt to acknowledge the supposedly “general” idea that porn is smut, while noting that, however,
“it's not that all porn is evil”38.
The fragmentation and multiplicity that, as I have shown in chapter 2, are so prominent in online
porn, can be good starting points to think through the non-unity and non-fixity of (human) bodies
and subjectivities. On the other hand, they also allow for the proliferation of “disposable bodies”
(Braidotti, 2011b). Technobodies in e-porn being fragmented, standardized into categories and
multiplied through exponential growth in number on and off screen, become both easily
interchangeable and “usable.” These disposable bodies populate online porn spaces, such as free-
access porn website RapeTube4U.com and PunishTube.com that border on a very thin line between
consensual sex and actual footage of sexual violence. In both cases it is the women whose bodies
are used and abused, and it is very doubtful that all of them are “professional actors and models” as
the disclaimers on the websites proclaim. 37 Different sides of the debate are well highlighted in the articles “Don't ban rape porn – introduce more porn with
negotiation and boundary setting”, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/dont-ban-rape-porn--introduce-more-porn-with-negotiation-and-boundarysetting-8727612.html (accessed on 12 August 2013) and “Should accessing 'rape pornography' be restricted by law?”, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/24/accessing-rape-pornography-restricted-law (accessed on 12 August 2013).
38 “Porn is not a bad thing, but letting fantasy impact reality is” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/9928261/Porn-is-not-a-bad-thing-but-letting-fantasy-impact-reality-is.html, accessed on 12 August 2013).
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In a way, online porn is a space of technobodies of what Deleuze calls “dividuals” (as opposed to
“individuals”) – re/shapeable, de-/trans-formable entities entangled in the networks and workings of
power and, most importantly: malleable (Deleuze, 1992). Particular outline of “porn tubes” collides
a variety of different fragmented bodies into one collage of images (see chapter 2), while the
experience of browsing (“stumbling through”) and immersion in an informational space in general
puts them in the constant stream of videos. This malleability manifests not only in the body
becoming one flash of the flesh in the abundance of online porn, certain body parts rendered as
random points to stumble upon, comment on, enjoy, be disgusted by. I suggest that malleability is at
the core of phenomena such as “porno chic” - the performance of gendered identity of a “porn star”
in popular culture and fashion39, and it is difficult not to wonder about resonances between the
“ideal” image of the genitals as seen in porn, and the increasing number of labiaplasties and
vaginoplasties worldwide40. This is perhaps the most direct and, dare I say, the most banal
perversion of “self styling” that R. Braidotti speaks of when she discusses the potentials of a
relational, non-unitary posthuman subject (Braidotti, 2013).
Yet even if technobodies in the space of e-porn are fragmented, circulated together with and
alongside the information flows, capital-generating and malleable, there is still a question to ask: is
this all that a technobody can do when it goes online to enact its mediated sexual embodiment? Are
there any points that would yield political potential in fragmentation and becoming a dividual
(Deleuze, 1992)?
Towards the affirmative politics of sexual technobodies
In her discussion of the affirmative vision of the posthuman as becoming-machine Rosi Braidotti
eloquently draws the lines of potential that are engendered in technology constituting an
inextricable part of human milieu. She argues that:
[t]echnological mediation is central to a new vision of posthuman subjectivity and it
39 Annette Lynch has recently published a book on this phenomenon – see Lynch, 2013. 40 Vaginaplasty and labiaplasty are re-constructive surgeries of the vagina and the labia, respectively. If the former is
often done in order to deal with injuries from child-birthing, the latter is more of a cosmetic surgery, usually done to reduce the inner labia in order to make it more “discrete”. For an insightful journalistic investigation into possible interconnections between censorship, porn magazines, and labiaplasty in Australia, see Kirsten Drysdale and Ali Russell's video “Labiaplasty”, aired on ABC1 channel Hungry Beast on March 1, 2010. Also partly available on Vimeo at: http://vimeo.com/10883108, and Youtube at: http://youtu.be/pK9GtT-khb0 (accessed on 12 August 2013).
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provides the grounding for new ethical claims. A posthuman notion of the enfleshed and
extended, relational self keeps the techno-hype in check by a sustainable ethics of
transformations … The emphasis on immanence allows us to respect the bond of mutual
dependence between bodies and technological others, while avoiding the contempt for the
flesh and the trans-humanist fantasy of escape from the finite materiality of the enfleshed
self … I want to argue for a vitalist view of the technologically bio-mediated other. This
machinic vitality is not so much about determinism, inbuilt purpose or finality, but rather
about becoming and transformation. (Braidotti, 2013: 90-91).
She indicates three major elements for sustainable politics of the posthuman, which I would like to
apply for the analysis of potentials of the technobody in e-porn. Braidotti argues that it is through
non-functional and non-profit experimentations with what technobodies and mediated selves can do
that the possibilities for sustainable future are opened up. In addition to that, she also highlights the
importance of “collectively shared, community-based praxis” (ibid.: 100), through which
alternative scenarios can be enacted. I would also like to add that this praxis and extended notion of
the body as technobody points to a source of embodied and bodily agency that does not reside in the
atomised individual or Cartesian subject of reason, but rather is distributed across the organic and
inorganic, material and semiotic, individual and collective.
This re-defines agency as a transindividual phenomenon, to use Gilbert Simondon's term. Simondon
suggests that instead of thinking about entities or beings we should rather focus on relations and
processes as a dimension of being (Simondon, 1992). He thus calls the variety of these processes an
“ontogenesis” (ibid.: 300), and argues that it entails (but is not exhausted by) a process of psychic
and collective individuation. The category of a transindividual is that which accounts for “the
systematic unity of internal individuation (psychic) and external individuation (collective)” (ibid.:
307).
Transindividual is not a collective entity as such but rather spans across the collective and the
individual, inside-out and outside-in like a Möbius strip, tapping into the pre-individual potential,
but also the dimension of the social/collective (Combes, 2012). Furthermore, it points to practices
as a field of emergence, rather than fixed essences. As Adrian Mackenzie explains, transindividual
“moves the focus away from the split between devices and bodies toward a less visible but vital
middle ground of material practices” (Mackenzie, 2002: 118), since it weaves together corporeality,
technology and temporality. Transindividual, thus, is a way of conceptualizing experience without
giving priority to the single established individual, nor a totality of the social (ibid.).
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The notion of transindividual is also important because it suggests a different kind of causal relation
and directionality. Instead of induction or deduction, Simondon suggests to think of transduction – a
process “in which an activity gradually sets itself in motion, propagating within a given area,
through a structuration of the different zones of the area over which it operates” (Simondon, 1992:
313). It begins with activity and extends itself outwards and inwards, without denying the
specificity of different elements or environments, but rather working through them, allowing
different actors in the process to be articulated together. In this respect transduction is the same
what Barad calls an “intra-action” or what Brian Massumi describes as “analog contagion”
(Massumi, 2011:64).
Let me propose some examples where these affirmative politics of a technobody are enacted in and
through mediated sex online. For instance, in their work performance artist Maria Llopis and the
GirlsWhoLike-porno collective41, while acknowledging that fragmentation and exposure can be a
source of victimization, attempt to find ways to make it a source of empowerment. Llopis' online
performance “Meat/ing the Internet” (2011)42 weaves together vision and touch, shared collectively
through technology, effectively producing a body in e-porn, a flesh wired with desire. The
performers and audience were invited to engage in online sex with random people through live
video-chat platforms (that are very often used for cybersex with strangers) CAM4.com,
Chatroulette.com and Manroulette.com. The viewers on the other side of the screen were able to see
the audience and masturbate together with performers, while the images from performer's laptops
were also projected on screens in the performance space. In this way “Meat/ing the Internet”
allowed for multiple elements to transduce (the network, the multiple images of bodies, present in
the space, and on the screens, images of bodies mediated through webcams), cutting through the
private/public, producer/consumer, performer/viewer distinctions, and establishing all these spaces
as collective spaces of sexuality.
Another interesting example of what technobodies can do is Porno terrorism or guerrilla porn.
Porno terrorism is a type of performance or visual material (quite often both) that uses sexually
explicit imagery, and even visual and narrative codes from the mainstream pornography, to convey
a certain political – in the broadest sense of the word – message. These range from invading the
41 See http://girlswholikeporno.com/ (accessed on 12 August 2013) 42 “Meat/ing the internet,” a performance hosted by Maria Llopis, Ariel Efraim Ashbel and Jürgen Brüning, presented
at Berlin Porn Film Festival 2011. Several photos of performance are available at http://www.mariallopis.com/en/portfolio/meating-in-the-internet/ (accessed on 12 August 2013).
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Energy Summit and staging a stylized sex act43, to reading poetry while masturbating, or addressing
the issues of gender norms, violence etc. while having sex or being sexually stimulated44. Even
though quite a bit of these performances were designed to be enacted on stage, they are freely
distributed in user-generated content websites such as Vimeo or Youtube, or on blogs. I read these
performances as directly high-jacking the standardized functionality of pornography and sexuality
in general, i.e. its use for consumption of bodily pleasure only.
Both M. Llopis' performances and porno terrorism can be seen as part of the PostPorn movement
(that especially active in Spain – references are provided in the webography). PostPorn performers,
such as Llopis herself or Beatriz Preciado, are taking the phenomenon of transindividuation up and
focusing on it in search for potentials that it engenders. One of the key figures in this movement –
Tim Stüttgen – writes about the subversive potential of porn: “where there is repetition, there is
difference. Where there is power, there is counter-power. And where there is forced totality, there is
something that fleets” (Stüttgen 2009: 42). Thus artists as well as researchers dealing with post-porn
focus on non-reproductive, non-functional sexuality, and highlight the exploration of the potential
of the body to de-stabilize sociodiscursive structures.45
One of the most interesting examples of collective praxis that aims at affirmation and exploration is
appropriation of e-porn technological structures by queer communities at Queerporntube.com. The
structure of this free-access website is based on the same template as e-porn websites that I have
analysed in the second chapter: video thumbnails aligned in rows, side-bar advertisements, special
“user sections” for registered users, possibility to comment under the videos, “like” them, filter the
videos based on categories (ranging from “hardcore” to “gender queer,” “hetero non-normative,”
“just because,” “sexy education,” “solo showing off” etc.), time of upload, number of views and so
on (see figures 6 and 7). Even though there are quite a few videos that are “teasers” of DVD
releases, a considerable amount of content is user-generated and produced in a DYI fashion.
In Queerporntube.com the same dispositif of e-porn produces a space that is open for creative,
experimental and non-functional enactment of mediated sexuality and techno-embodiment. First of
all, the non-integrity, the malleability and fragmentation of the bodies in e-porn here become
sources of potential to explore the embodiment and sexuality of the bodies that are already
considered “non-normative”: the differently racialized, sexed and abled queer bodies. With the help
43
“Oil Orgy” Invades Energy Summit, http://www.petethetemp.co.uk/?p=297, 5-1-2012. 44 Videos by the collective Pornoterrorismo http://pornoterrorismo.com/mira/video-de-performances/ (5-1-2012). 45 For a good overview of the contemporary development of PostPorn movement, see essays in Post/Porn/Politics (ed. Stüttgen, b_books, 2009).
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of personal cameras and network, users plug their sex lives and drives online, not only filming
“scenarios,” but also videotaping specifically for the e-porn space – an illustration of which are the
videos labelled as “Solo showing off” and “Masturbation.” The imaginative approach to the
question “what a technobody can do?” is also exemplified in the kind of (usually queer) e-porn that
is slowly becoming a genre of its own: bike smut,46 as well as exploratory performances by
genderqueer, trans folk and kink-lovers.
In addition to that, videos that are not specifically aiming at arousing the viewer are not that rare on
Queerporntube.com. Calls for different sexual politics, educational videos on consent, fisting, DYI
sex tools and many other topics included along the explicitly sexual ones makes this particular e-
porn space
Figure 6: The layout and structure of Queerporntube.com (1)
into a realm that traverses private/public distinction highlighting the inter-connectedness of politics,
sexuality and embodiment in a fashion that is affirmative rather than constricting, and practice-
based rather than descriptively normative. Queerporntube.com, as I see it, aims at “playful and
pleasure-prone relationship to technology that is not based on functionalism” (Braidotti, 2013: 91),
46 See, for instance, a video “whatsBikeSmut” (http://queerporntube.com/watch_video.php?v=YY3H3HBARXX1,
accessed on 12 August 2013), that celebrates the erotics of bicycles and human bodies.
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and highlights practices of exploration and relationality: in the end it is the practice of plugging
oneself online into a mediated space in order to get back to one's own body, access and take part in
the shared discursive and networked space, and relate to the bodies of others, that makes
Queerporntube.com a sustainable project.
It is important to remember that pornography has a long-lasting tradition of acting as a form of
cultural critique (Paasonen et al., 2007) but also – and especially queer pornographies – of bonding.
Ingrid Ryberg calls such a public-subjective space of porn an “intimate publics” (Ryberg, 2013). I
argue that these intimate publics, an example of which is Queerporntube.com, for instance, are
based on transindividual relations in that they mingle intimate lived experience of queer bodies with
publicity of the network and common pornographic codes, as well as politicality of the different
techno-embodiments. What is important here is that just as pornography in general, according to
Williams, implants perversions with the help of cinema, so these videos try to implant ideas or
make statements, or simply affirm the sexual pleasure experienced by “deviant” bodies by using the
very same logic and technologies that are used in internet porn: DYI, making the private public, and
a certain degree of depersonalisation/fragmentation.
Figure 7: The layout and structure of Queerporntube.com (2)
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Finally, spaces of e-porn have potential to re-define agency as a transindividual, distributed quality.
A great example to illustrate that is a website ishotmyself.com.47 The latter specifically promotes
self-production of the content either with a regular photo camera, or video camera. The emphasis is
placed on representing sexuality in a way that would “subvert the paradigm” of pornographic
representations, in order to reveal the value of “human form and imagination”48 in a way that is
appealing, erotic and empowering for the creator of the content herself. The fact that this is done
with the help of digital technology (the network, the camera) is crucial: it is the working with/in the
technological on a very intimate level that produces the embodied sexual agency in this case. This
working with/in is, I claim, is the core which the ethics of technobodies derive from.
What is highlighted throughout the latter example as well as those examined above, is that sexual
agency of an embodied and embedded human subject is re-constituted through close intra-action
with technologies. Furthermore, this agency is distributed through the image-body-technology
assemblage, rather than “owned” by the human subject. In other words, the “I can”, emphasized by
Lerder (see chapter 1) is shifting: the “I” is not identical with the body, and the “can” is not identical
with the “I”. And sexuality of this embodied non-self-identical “I” gets de- and re-territorialized in
e-porn, highlighting that it, too, is a process, rather than a fixed category (Braidotti, 2013).
To conclude, posthumanism destabilises the category of the human and its embodiment by
highlighting other bodies at play (machinic, animal, discursive), as well as their inextricability from
human bodies. Technological “others” are at the heart of what gets to count as human and as a body,
and their inter-mingle. Online porn becomes one of these technological environments that re-
constitutes human embodiment as techno-embodiment and highlights the mediatedness of sexuality.
This is not an unambiguous phenomenon: while challenging ontological dualisms, techno-bodies
also get fragmented, commodified, rendered disposable. Yet I would like to see it as a paradoxical
contemporary state that humans are in, a part of posthuman predicament, that further propels critical
theory and ethical accountability through the focus on relationality and sustainable practices.
47 See http://www.ishotmyself.com. I am aware that it is actually a paid-membership website, contrary to the ones I
explored or mentioned before, that mixes both photos and videos. However, I am using this example here because: firstly, the content of this website is first and foremost user-generated. Secondly, it is hosted by a company (Feck) dedicated to facilitating content-distribution, and strive to employ a minimal amount of editing/selection of the videos and photos that are submitted (this information is based on a private conversation conducted in 2011). Finally, it encourages self-exposure, yet also urges the contributors to experiment with porn/art/erotica in a creative and non-normative way.
48See the section “About” at: http://www.ishotmyself.com/public/general.php?p=about (accessed on 12 August 2013).
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CONCLUSION. FOR THE ETHICS OF WORKING WITH/IN
In this thesis I engaged with the question of embodiment in online pornography, and specifically
with how embodiment gets enacted and re-defined through enaction in the space of “tube” porn
websites – a space which I coined e-porn space. In other words, I asked: what happens to the bodies
when they practice sex with networked images online? And how do these practices change the
conceptual and political landscapes within which these bodies are to be seen? Finally, what kind of
potentials and constraints do these bodies encounter in the realm of online pornography?
I attempted to answer these questions by looking at e-porn through the practices of its consumption
and their medium-specificity. The “practice approach” to pornography, employed mostly by anti-
porn feminists, goes a different direction than a “discourse/speech approach” that is more notable in
pro-pornography, pro-sex or anti-censorship brand of feminist thought. While not willing to strictly
take sides, I believe – and attempted to show – that practice approach can be a very productive
theoretical framework to work through the question of embodiment in online porn, precisely
because it focuses on material practices as well as their phenomenological implications, without
denying the discursive element of these practices (Mason-Grant, 2004).
I paired this practice-based, body-oriented approach to porn with phenomenological accounts of
media and technology. These accounts, and most notably Mark Hansen's (2004, 2006)
enactive/embodied view of technology, highlight that the sensibilities of movement and touch,
which are at the core of what is called “the body schema,” provide the basis of seeing embodiment
as co-evolving with technologies. More than that: technologies, and especially new media/digital
technologies, have the potential not only to provide space for enactment of embodiment, but also
productively de-territorialize it and expand the potential of the human body.
Both practice approach to porn, and embodied approach to digital media highlight the relational
aspect of body–technology as well as body–pornography interaction. To capture this relationality as
well as the interconnections between media and pornography and how these relations involve and
influence embodiment, I used the framework of dispositif as a complex structure composed of basic
apparatus, mode of address and viewing situation to analyse pornographic tube websites online.
Furthermore, the theory of dispositif allowed me to focus on embodied practices of consumption
and related discourses on a sort of “meta-level,” instead of sticking to the analysis of specific genre
or patterns of representation, which seems to be a common approach to pornography in general, and
has been done extensively in feminist research of the field.
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My analysis of the dispositif of e-porn, with a particular focus on how it engages embodiment
through movement and touch, revealed that tube websites constitute an informational space
(Terranova, 2004), which is fragmented, indeterminate, excessive and immersive at the level of
basic apparatus. This space and its excessiveness is managed through tools such as categorizations.
In its turn it influences the mode of address that characterizes e-porn: instead of slowly seducing the
viewer, e-porn tires to “grab” them (Paasonen, 2010) by using visceral appeal, and exposure.
However, I also noted that simple exposure, the “will to know” (Williams, 1989) how sex happens
is not enough anymore: e-porn aims at experimenting with bodily boundaries and abilities,
resonating with the “jackass” (or “fucked up”) and “fail” phenomena that are part of contemporary
web 2.0. culture.
E-porn also relies on prosumerist aspect of this culture, encouraging and feeding off the blurring of
the lines between producer and consumer, performer and viewer. Thus the viewing situation (or
perhaps it should be called “consuming situation” in this case) of the consumer of e-porn makes
them invested in the networked sex, even if this investment manifests simply as generating web
traffic. The specifics of the basic apparatus as an informational space and mode of address of
affective grab leave the consumer in a radically unstable situation of discursive overload,
rhythmically moving through space through touching, and touching this space through moving.
Encouraged to self-expose in a space that cuts across public/private divide, implicated in the
informational loops of data, always leaving a trace and collecting traces of passing intensities in
their own bodies, consumers are rendered in a state of inhabiting a mixed-reality that is radically
unstable and de/re-composable.
This multi-layered dispositif of e-porn produces a body in e-porn: body whose sexuality is enacted
with and through technics, and whose embodiment is de- and re-territorialized through this
enactment in online porn. The body in e-porn is both a figuration to think about embodiment, as
well as a very material position of an embodied consumer. This figuration/position is of a body
wired with desire and plugged-in the informational loops. Body in e-porn is thus deterritorialized
through indeterminate and dynamic elements of e-porn, and re-territorialized again through e-porn's
constricting aspects, such as its functionalism (one goes online to masturbate) and strategies of
excess management (such as categorization). It is a malleable, mediated body, an experimental and
experimenting body, who is both constrained by standardized “digital smooth” and ruptured by the
“jackass” and “fucked up” cultures of mis-performed and failing bodies. Not to mention the
paradoxical discourses that frame bodies in e-porn as sinners/empowered ones, excessive and
70
erased at the same time. Bodies in e-porn are “contaminated” in and through the intra-action with
technology, and they ooze their bodily fluids, extend their flesh into technologies, thus effectively
“meating” the Internet.
However, the body in e-porn as a concept, a posthumanist critic would say, is still too caught-up in
the phenomenological “body-as-organism” perspective (Clough, 2010), thus not fully able to grasp
the implications of posthuman condition. This condition, marked (amongst other things) by rapid
advancement of information-communication and bio- technologies, points to the relationality and
vitality of matter (Braidotti, 2013). I argued that this needs to be given considerable amount of
attention in order point both the enabling and constricting lines of power that permeate the space of
e-porn. In order to do that I proposed that bodies in e-porn are technobodies that enact their
mediated sexuality and technologized embodiment in the sphere of e-porn. A body in e-porn in this
light then is re-defined as a relational form that technobodies enter into while consuming
pornography online.
The political implications of techno-embodiment are crucial here. The kind of power that operates
in the sphere of e-porn is diagrammatical: it is tacit, saturating, yet also leaving spaces for
subversion and for the unexpected. The most important points of negative power or potestas
(Braidotti, 2011a) in e-porn come from the capitalist logics that turn sexuality into a very profitable
commodity. Number of views generate website traffic, which almost directly links the number of
orgasms with capital flows, retaining the lines of difference yet multiplying them by categorizations
in the name of profit. This not only encourages a sort of mindless consumption of e-porn (which in
popular discourse is framed as “addiction” and blamed on porn itself rather than economic system),
but also proliferates “disposable bodies” that are mostly female, and confines human sexuality as
well as specific body parts to strictly functional purpose (even if that purpose in e-porn practices is
not sexual reproduction). In the system of advanced capitalism technobodies are again revealed as
malleable, re-/shapeable, and manageable as such – the bodies of dividuals (Deleuze, 1992).
However, I believe it is crucial – and not least because of the public outcries against pornography as
“perversion” of “natural” sexuality – to indicate the lines of different politics for and of
technobodies wired with desire, to draw contours of ethical and affirmative enaction of techno-
embodiment and its mediated sexuality. I claimed that these lines are opened up by asking whether
this is all that a techno-body can do. Focusing on appropriation of the same media technologies
(tube porn websites) by queer communities, performance artists, post-porn activists and guerrilla
porn “fighters,” I argued that there is affirmation and potentia to be found in the same malleability
71
and fragmentation of techno-bodies by re-defining agency as distributed across the
organic/inorganic, private/public, human/non-human divides. Tapping into the transindividual
potential of distributed agency, the key ethical imperative would be to switch to the mode of
creative working with/in technology to experiment with the capacities of the relationality of techno-
embodiment.
To conclude, the practice-oriented approach to pornography, paired with embodied approach to
media and technologies, also invites us to re-think the status of pornography itself. Since sexually
explicit imagery is inextricable from the media, it calls both pro-porn and anti-porn feminist
activists to take into account not only the semantic meanings of pornographic texts, but also the
modes of their consumption. I would suggest that it would be helpful to see pornography as a
complex dispositif of practices and representations that combines multiple elements, one of which
is technological. Thus also a more complex account of the affectivity of porn, i.e. how it affects its
viewers, is needed – an account that would consider not only the affectivity of the content of
pornography as representations, but also of the technological apparatus that mediates them.
Media studies, and especially its phenomenological branch, I suggest, should take seriously the
challenges and complications that are posed by posthuman condition, and especially the
implications of this condition to power relations and their role in structuring and managing human
experiences. It is an open question, of course, whether phenomenology should not actually just stay
with the human experience to keep its methodological and conceptual focus. However,
experimentations with new brands of phenomenology (a “posthuman phenomenology”, perhaps?)
that would remain sensitive to human condition and power differentials, could open possibilities
that are yet to be explored.
Finally, even though I did not touch specifically upon the question of sexed embodiment and female
embodiment in particular, I suggest that in the light of the resurfacing debates on porn and
censorship, the exploration of what a female technobody can do in online space of mediated sex, is
much needed. Women's bodies, as I have pointed out, are still the ones that make the majority of
disposable bodies in e-porn. This rises questions both about practices of the consumption of
mediated sex, as well as politics of representation. What kind of imaginaries a female technobody
would generate, both in e-porn practices and feminist theory? What kind of sources of potentia and
potestas would it be able to tap into? What kind of sustainable ethics she would propose? In the face
of these questions I would call for replacing the exclamation “next!” with a more invigorating “to
be continued.”
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Free-access tube-websites: - www.youporn.com - www.porntube.com - www.redtube.com - www.pornhub.com - www.xhamster.com - www.forcetube.com - www.rapetube4u.com - www.punishtube.com - www.Daftporn.com - www.Heavy-r.com - www.E-fukt.com - www.queerporntube.com Other pornographic platforms: - www.chatroulette.com - www.manroulette.com - www.ishotmyself.com - http://girlswholikeporno.com/ - http://pornoterrorismo.com/mira/video-de-performances/ - post-porn activist Maria Llopis: http://www.mariallopis.com/en/
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