Porn studies:

a feminist project
Andrea B. Braidt (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
 Introduction
Literary Pornography and Enlightenment (Cf. Lynn
Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography, 1500
1800. Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, MIT
1996. Also in German available: Die Erfindung der
Pornografie.)

Why feminist debate?

Film porn (as opposed to literature, magazine, etc.)

 Genre definitions
syntactic/semantic (containing certain elements which are
arranged in a certain way)

aesthetic (canonical genre films defining the aesthetic norm)

pragmatic/functional (a Western is a film that most people would

call a Western)

Effect/ audience reaction (comedy seeks to amuse; porn seeks to

arouse)

Porn as functional genre (Gebrauchsgenre), like advertisments,

industrial films, promo docus etc.

my working definition: films that seek to arouse the viewer sexually

 http://www.youporn.com/categories/
Amateur Female Friendly Pantyhose
Anal Fetish POV
Asian Fingering Public
BBW Funny Redhead
Big Butt Gay Rimming
Big Tits German Romantic
Bisexual Gonzo Shaved
Blonde Hairy Shemale
Blowjob Handjob Solo girl
Brunette HD Solo Male
Casting Hentai Squirting
College Homemade Straight Sex
Compilation Instructional Swallow
Cosplay Interracial Teen
Couples Japanese Threesome
Creampie Kissing Verified Amateurs
Cumshots Latina Vintage
Cunnilingus Lesbian Virtual RealityNEW
Dildos/Toys Massage Voyeur
DP Masturbation Webcam
Ebony Mature Young/Old
European MILF 3D
Facial Orgy
Fantasy Panties
 Linda Williams,
Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,
Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991), 2-13
Founding text feminist approach to porn

Structuralist approach: form, function, and system of

seemingly gratuitous excesses in horror, melo, porn

gratuitous: not serving a narrative function, i.e. porn

is non-narrative (weak narrative) = point of departure
Williams

horror, melo, porn = low social esteem because of

non-narrativity; gross genres
 excursus: Narration in the Fiction
Film (David Bordwell, Madison
Wisconsin, 1985)

Hollywood narrative system (Hollywood realist

style): action oriented, nothing is superfluous, every
details has an end of its own (Bordwell, Thompson)

Narration is the process whereby the films syuzhet

and style interact in the course of cueing and
channeling the spectators construction of the
fabula. (Bordwell 1985, 53)
 Systems: syuzhet fabula
Narration
style

Excess

David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 1985

following Russian formalism, Prague School (Jan Mukarovsky)
 film viewing = active process (the viewers activity)

narrative comprehension functions through

protocols or schemata through which spectators are
cued by the film to construct a story based on an
inferential process.

prototype schemata, template schemata, procedural

schemata

Bordwell
 Horror, Melo (Weepie), Porn: body caught
(manipulated) in the grip of excessive emotion
which is imitated by spectator (unlike in comedy):
tear jerker, fear jerker

PA-approaches describe the pleasures of viewing

as perversions (sadism, voyeurism, fetishism,
masochism), feminist PA asking: status of woman in
this system (Mulvey, 1975)

Williams: ambiguity of perversion

Williams
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, 1975
Structures of fantasy (Jean Laplanche, J.B. Pontalis
1968):

fantasy is not a narrative that enacts the quest for the

desired object, but a place where desubjectivied
subjectivities oscillate between self and other,
occupying no fixed space in the scenario.
Body-genres are connected to the fantastic (not to the
real):

they do not solve problems but cover the

discrepancy between two moments connected to the
myths of origin: the actual historical event (e.g. the
primal scene) and the uncertainty of its hallucinatory
revival (Williams)
This in-between temporality (too late, too early)
generates desire, crucial for subject formation: original
fantasies (Freud) offer repetitions of and solutions to
three major enigmas:

1. enigma of origin of sexual desire solved by

fantasy of seduction; (porn)

2. enigma of sexual difference solved by fantasy of

castration; (horror)

3. enigma of origin of the self solved by fantasy of

family romance. (melo)
Porn as endless repetition of the fantasy of primal
seduction,

a pornotopia where it is always bedtime.

(Steven Marcus in Linda Williams)

 Ecstasy Temporality
Audience Perversion Excess Fantasy
shown by of fantasy

adolescent
boys sado- blood,
Horror violence castration too early!
(active/pass masochist shudder
ive)

female woe, sob,

Melo masochist emotion origin too late!
(passive) tears

male orgasm,
Porn sadistic sex seduction on time!
(active) ejaculation
 Historical context of Williams text:
1980s/early 1990s
The pornography debate portrays its contestants within sex
and gender stereotypes, its contending figures drawn in the
broad outlines of a Harlequin romance. Rapacious men with
libidos of mythological proportions heartlessly brutalise innocent
women as the hopeless victims of their lust, while the anti-
pornogrphy feminist poses herself as the sacrificial victim, the
barrier to a tide of male sexuality that threatens violence. Bold
freedom fighters ride out, drawing their lances against the
oppressive feminists, the purported enemy of these brave
warriors.

Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain. Abortion,

Pornography and Sexual Harassment, Routledge 1995, p.95.
1988
Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, US 1972)

https://www.vielerporno.com/fil
me/kompletter-deep-throat/
 these gross body genres which may seem so violent an
inimical to women cannot be dismissed as evidence of a
monolithic and unchangin misogyny, as either pure sadism for
male viewers or masochism for females. Their very existence and
popularity hinges upon rapid changes taking place in relations
between the sexes and by rapidly changing notions of gender
of what it means to be a man or a woman.

To dismiss them as bad excess whether of explicit sex, violence,

or emotion, or as bad perversions, whether of masochism or
sadism, is not to address their function as cultural problem-
solving. Genres thrive, after all, on the persistence of the
problems they address; but genres thrive also in their ability to
recast the nature of these problems.

Linda Williams
 Imaginary vs. Narrative
Porn has been discussed as non-narrative genre, criticism focusing solely
on the showing - following the PA paradigm of the gaze.

Different thesis: arousal must be told in order to be imitated emphatically

by the recipients. Sexual arousal is organized by suspense-relieve
mechanisms, and suspense is a narrative and not visual device. These
narratives follow dramaturges of beginning, middle and end and present a
solving scheme to the problem of How can arousal be satisfied.

Leaving behind the construction of the subject (the recipient) as a stimulus-

response machine, according to the drive theory described by Sigmund
Freud and resting upon the paradigm of the visual. Rather trying to come up
with answers to the question of why we are aroused by different films.

How does porn achieve to tell the story of arousal-satisfaction in such a way
that it turns us on?
 two crucial dimensions in porn
narrative (Cf. Andrea Braidt,
Erregung erzhlen, in Montage
AV, 2009)
1. The porn-narrative must present sexual arousal as
a problem that needs to be solved. This
presentation makes the actions of the characters
plausible. And the extent to which the viewer
empathises with the arrousal (of the characters)
relies on this presentation.

2. The solution of the problem (how is arousal

satisfied?) must be presented in such a way that
the viewers can empathise.
 what do we gain from a
narrative approach
differentiation

non-reliance on psychoanalytic paradigm which has

been much criticised for its homogeneity

looking closely at porn films, analysing their

construction of gender through e.g. character
presentation, possible because in a narrative
paradigm it matters how the characters are
presented
Marc Dorcels Russian Institute. Lesson 1, Herv Bodilis, F 2004.
Marc Dorcels Russian Institute. Lesson 1, Herv Bodilis, F 2004.
 Final Discussion
What to look for when analyzing porn?

Is porn dangerous? (Youth debate)

Is porn-sexism different to other sexism?

Production context / sex work

Women's porn/ Annie Sprinkle et al?

Educative and emancipatory aspects?