Gag the Fag , or tops and bottoms, persons and things

Dados Bibliográficos

ID13086288
AutoresDamon Young (University of California, Berkeley, autor correspondente)
Ano2017
Volume4
Fascículo2
Páginas176-192
Data de publicação2017-04-03
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoPorn Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2326-8743 • E-ISSN: 2326-8751
EditoraTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/23268743.2017.1307138
OpenAlexW2613718698
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas10
Referências citadas14

Scholarly studies of pornography since the advent of Linda Williams’ Hard Core have typically assumed that pornography is a genre which pursues the secrets of sexual pleasure. But much recent online gay pornography, far from imagining a ‘pornotopia’ in which free agents endlessly pursue their mutual pleasure, stages a radical dichotomy between tops and bottoms, in which the bottom is rhetorically transformed into what Catharine MacKinnon once described as a ‘thing for sexual use’. Examining recent online French pornography and the popular US series Gag the Fag, this article argues that neither the rubric of ‘pleasure’ nor the diagnosis of misogyny provide an adequate framework for gauging what is at stake in these theatricalized and mediatized scenes of domination. At first glance, such pornography appears to confirm the most damning pronouncements of anti-pornography feminists, reducing sex to a relation of instrumentalization. I argue, however, that it is not exactly clear who is instrumentalized and for whom: both top and bottom labour in the service of what appears to be something like a law, a principle of abstract differentiation not reducible to anatomical sex. At the same time, it is precisely the body’s inability to fully submit to the requirements of this law, or to the idealization it requires, that this pornography solicits, exposes, and celebrates. This dynamic cannot be reduced to confessions of the body’s ‘pleasure’, and its formalization as a genre also raises the troubling thought that pleasure is not what lies at the heart of sex

Aesthetics · Human sexuality · Pleasure · Political science · Pornography · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology