On “War Porn” and “Porn of War”: The War on Terror in Interracial Adult Film

• In Event: Sexual Policing from Colonial Wars to Culture Wars: A SWANA Feminist Approach

Abstract

This paper attends to the particular context of ‘war porn’ during the War on Terror as a means of identifying the discursive entanglements between ‘the pornographic’ and the visual depictions and dissemination of warfare—specifically in the context of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East – and how it affects the questions, affective responses, and approaches involved in the study of the industry and genre of pornography depicting U.S. militarism overseas. I take as a case study TourofBooty.com, a now-defunct pornography website that ostensibly claimed to upload candid footage of U.S. soldiers deployed in the Middle East having heterosexual encounters with local women. Though actually staged productions and part of the larger interracial internet pornographic subgenre of ‘hijab porn,’ which gained popularity in the U.S. in the 2010s, Tour of Booty utilized both textual framing and a ‘gonzo’ filmmaking style to assert a sense of reality-based documentary pornography which forefronted military endeavor as the central setting by which interracial fantasy and performance was contextualized. However, even as Tour of Booty evoked an entwined narrative of reality sexual tourism and military tour of duty to construct a sense of the ‘real’ through both intratextual and extratextual gonzo aesthetic strategies, I argue that the social context these films were produced in–where, as authors like Judith Butler (2009) have noted, pornography and visual depictions of torture and military campaigns during the War on Terror have been problematically intertwined– reflects upon how the construction of the military scene exhibits particular strategies of negotiation. In so doing, I orient my analysis to what strategies of negotiation and representation we might find in and extract from pornography that depicts the War on Terror. Employing an analytic situated at the intersections of SWANA American and women of color feminist pornography studies (including the works of Parreñas Shimizu (2007), Miller-Young (2014), Nash (2014), Rodríguez (2014) and McBride (2019)), I explore how the fantasy of transactional interracial sexual contact during military deployment reveals carefully mitigated strategies around depictions of gendered, national, and racial difference and American nationhood as a means of negotiating the production and marketability of its pornographic content. I then conclude with an analysis of user comments on Tour of Booty clips uploaded to video hosting site XVideo.com to discuss the complex methods of affective negotiation expressed by some users in their viewing of the military pornographic scene – bringing into stark focus inquiries about pornographic depictions of the War on Terror and their affective tensions for producers and users alike.

Author

• Sena Duran, University of Michigan