Feminist Pornography, Creative Resistance, and Consumer Culture

• In Event: Deviant Leisure, Resistance and Harm

Abstract

Pornography has become increasingly more accessible and visible in/as popular culture (Tibbals 2013). Consequently, in academe, it has gone from being a marginal subject, to a field in its own right (Atwood and Smith 2014). Although pornography has received more scholarly attention in recent years, a preponderance of the theoretical and empirical work from the left on the topic has remained polarized between camps that emerged decades ago during the academic ‘sex wars’ or the ‘feminist sex debates’. Broadly conceived, one side claims that pornographic culture exacerbates inequalities, while the other maintains that it ameliorates disparities. This paper works outside of those paradigms in order to examine the propagation of ‘feminist pornography’ as a pornographic niche market that emerged from, and exists within, neoliberal-capitalism. Based on critical cultural criminology (Hayward 2014), and the critical stance of ultra-realism (Hall and Winlow 2014), this paper asserts that the commodification of feminist pornography can be seen as inseparable from consumer markets, representing another type of culture in which the new, the political, or, in this case, pastiche novelties that are a hybrid of both, can be turned into capital. Accordingly, it is improbable that the tack of commodifying feminist ideology will disrupt material reality. While it could be said that feminist pornographic culture entails the creation of political sexual fantasies, as a form of creative resistance, feminist pornography is merely political fantasy.

Author

• Corina Medley, Northeastern University