6 - Pornography

Summary

The experience of our actions, emotions and sensations and of those of others always takes place within a we-centric dimension.

— Vittorio Gallese

Introduction: I watched it, but I swear it didn't turn me on …

The affective experience shares strong affinities with the pornographic. After-all, if something is geared toward the body and its sensations, “porn” is often affixed as a suffix: food porn, poverty porn, war porn, and so on. Nonetheless, in the (sub)discipline of porn studies (within media studies), the affective experience has often been strangely overlooked, or even disavowed. In many cases, the porn genre is subject to some version of content analysis. From queer theory and post-colonial theory to feminist film theory, porn studies has largely directed its attention to reading porn content in order to situate it within a cultural environment. And there is a near paradox in the analysis of pornography, because whereas “[p]ornography aims to create proximities between viewers and images,” Susanna Paasonen observes, “content analysis is efficient in obscuring these proximities. Both content analysis and studies of representation can be critiqued for being based on and giving rise to a distance between the images studied and the one doing the study.” The discourse of analysis, and the paradigms of content analysis and studies of representation, places a safe distance between the scholar and their subject of analysis. “When studying pornography, such a distance may create a comforting sense of safety as the imaginary line keeps the body genre and the carnal reactions that it evokes at bay.” However, this distance comes at a price, because “the distance may keep the researcher from asking some crucial questions concerning the genre and its affective force.”

Often studies of representation or content analysis attempt to either “redeem” pornographic material because of its progressive potential, or to critique it as a manifestation of regressive political representations. Lover or Hater. While I have no intention of dismissing these important socio-political interventions, and I do my fair share of content analysis, I nevertheless want to honestly engage with what is often left at the front door: the affective experience. Regardless of the ideological implications of the pornographic material, the object of the genre is nearly singular in its intention: sexual arousal.