Hester - Beyond explicit: pornography and the displacement of sex

Beyond Explicit

Beyond Explicit

Pornography and the
Displacement of Sex

HELEN HESTER

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2014 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu

Production by Eileen Nizer
Marketing by Kate McDonnell

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hester, Helen, 1983

Beyond explicit : pornography and the displacement of sex / Helen Hester.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: Develops a novel characterization of the pornographic as a cultural conceptProvided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4384-4961-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Pornography. 2. Pornography in popular culture. 3. Sex in popular culture. 4. Sex. I. Title.

HQ471.H47 2014

363.4'7dc23

2013006613

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

I have been fortunate enough to have received exceptional support during the course of the preparation of this manuscript, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of those who have helped to make Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex happen. I am particularly indebted to Benjamin Noys, for his guidance and encouragement over the past years. He has been a significant influence on this text and, indeed, on my thinking more generally. I also thank the English Department at the University of Chichester for providing financial support throughout the early stages of the project, and Middlesex University for affording me so many wonderful opportunities to challenge myself as a teacher and a researcher. Thanks are due to Lisa Downing, whose work continues to be an inspiration, and Robert Duggan, who provided helpful comments at numerous stages in the development of Beyond Explicit.

An earlier version of

Introduction

Critical Voices in Porn Studies

This book represents an attempt to contribute to the branch of cultural theory known as Porn Studies. This emerging academic discipline takes as its object pornographic representations of various kinds, and aims to extend the understanding of a genre that has historically received too little in the way of sustained and dispassionate scholarly analysis. As a critical approach, Porn Studies is still relatively young; many of the edited collections that have been influential in shaping the discipline were first published in the opening decade of the new millennium, including Linda Williams Porn Studies (2004), Pamela Church Gibsons More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography, and Power (2004), and Peter Lehmans Pornography: Film and Culture (2006). Nevertheless, Porn Studies has quickly gained a sense of its own identity and developed its own disciplinary conventions, and I address some of these conventions here.

The valuable work of Porn Studies in generating new strategies for talking about adult entertainment within an academic context has very much informed my own perspective on pornography. Like many Porn Studies scholars, for example, I am keen to go beyond repetitive and simplistic discussions about whether pornography should be viewed as either a positive or a negative phenomenon in terms of its cultural influencediscussions that are widely understood to be the legacy of the partisan feminist politics of the 1970s and 1980s. I agree with Williams when she states that these feminist debates have impeded discussion of almost everything but the question of whether pornography deserves to exist at all. Since it does exist, however, we should be asking what it does for viewers; and since it is a genre with basic similarities to other genres, we need to come to terms with it (Hard Core 45). Beyond Explicit, therefore, turns away from questions of whether we should be for or against adult entertainment in favor of a more nuanced analysis of the contemporary pornographic landscape.

This kind of approach unites much of the work currently being undertaken within a Porn Studies context, with historians and theoreticians staging a partial escape from the dead-end of the feminist censorship debate (Preciado 26). As Feona Attwood notes in her survey of new directions in twenty-first century research, contemporary theorists of porn have increasingly sought to move away from a debate about whether pornographic texts have fixed and simple meanings, embody and encourage clearly oppressive power relations, produce direct and quantifiable effects and can be challenged only through the regulatory mechanism of the state (Reading Porn 92), in favor of a re-examination of pornography, sexuality and the politics of representation (Reading Porn 92). This departure from the polemical feminism of old involves both a commitment to studying specific pornographic texts (rather than trying to generalize about pornography as a whole) and a new sensitivity to the diversity of adult entertainment as a genre. Porn is no longer discussed as if it is a single thing to be either condemned or defended, but is instead viewed as being as mutable and multifaceted as any other regime of representation.

One of the first scholars to attempt a more nuanced and historicizing analysis of adult entertainment was Linda Williams. Her book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible, first published in 1989, is arguably the founding text of Porn Studies, and represents a ground-breaking attempt to think critically about pornography as a moving-image genre. In Hard Core, Williams goes beyond generalizations and value judgments in an attempt to develop a more subtle critical vocabulary. She foregrounds the centrality of the principle of maximum visibility (Hard Core 48), for example, stressing that this principle has operated in different ways at different stages of the genres history (Hard Core 48). It is testament to the quality and critical sophistication of Williams work, I think, that it remains so influential and widely cited today; indeed, ideas regarding the frenzy of the visible will surface repeatedly throughout the present study, providing a valuable insight into the mechanisms of contemporary pornographic texts.

Problems Within the Discipline

Despite my engagement with and my esteem for certain of its central texts and theorists, however, there remain several key points on which I am at variance with Porn Studies. For example, despite its admirable attempts to transcend the reductive arguments of previous approaches to pornography, I feel that much of Porn Studies is still mired in debates about whether adult entertainment is a good or a bad thing for the wider culture. Indeed, many of the disciplines most prominent figures are evidently still committed to the ideas of pro-sex or anti-censorship feminisma movement highly invested in demonstrating the cultural value and political importance of pornography. Susanna Paasonen, Kaarina Nikunen, and Laura Saarenmaa are among those who have remarked on this heritage, arguing that although Porn Studies scholars have distanced themselves from the binary logic of the porn debates to date, they have also built on anti-antipornography perspectives (17). Paasonen reiterates this point in her recent book