CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Marczali , Ferenc Csaba |
|---|---|
| Title | Problems with Feminist Pro-Porn Discourse And its Fantasy about the Male Subject of Pornography |
| Summary | In recent years, one can witness an intensifying celebration of pornography in online feminist media, a strengthening popular discourse claiming that pornography can be a feminist project. Although this discourse is problematic since it seems to contradict the lived experiences of many people who are affected by pornography, it has been scarcely criticized systematically. In my thesis it is this critical analysis of pro-porn feminist arguments that I attempt to do by investigating the growing body of academic pro-porn feminist scholarship, which seems to serve as inspiration and a point of reference for feminist popular discourse that is celebratory about pornography and by doing an ethnographic research on pornography consumption to evaluate pro-porn discourse’s hypotheses about this practice, which hypotheses are often used to support the discourse’s claims about the harmless nature of pornography. Regarding the analysis of pro-porn discourse, I argue that in order to be able to achieve its ideological goals, the discourse has developed a contradictory understanding of the speech act forces of pornographic speech. It downplays its illocutionary and perlocutionary force when arguing for its “harmlessness”, yet it assigns strong perlocutionary force to it when arguing for the liberating and transgressive potential of pornographic speech. Through a critical discursive analysis of representative texts of academic pro-porn discourse, mostly papers published in Porn Studies and in The Feminist Porn Book, I demonstrate that this ambiguity around the speech act force of pornography is concealed by generating knowledge about the aspect of representation and production of pornography and by keeping the aspect of consumption – where the speech act forces of pornography most prominently figure – in the blind-spot of the discourse. Not paying critical attention to the consumption aspect of pornography led to the birth of a fantasy about the consumer of pornography in pro-porn discourse. This consumer is imagined to consume pornography with similar agency, consciousness and critical distance than he or she would consume any other kind of media. I challenge this fantasy through an ethnographic research carried out by interviewing nine heterosexual men, aged 18-35 about their practices of pornography consumption and masturbation. My results suggest that pro-porn discourse’s fantasy about the consumer is unfounded. The respondents disregard those structures of the narration that are typically important resources of the meaning-making process in relation to fictional products and they predominantly perceive pornography as documents of non-fictional events. What is more, for my respondents the experience of watching pornography while masturbating to it seems to be closer to having sex with those women represented in the material than to consuming media texts. My findings support those anti-porn feminist claims according to which pornography plays an important role in maintaining the union of capitalism and patriarchy by providing men with micro-power in the form of endless possibilities of virtually having sex with easily and freely accessible female bodies. |
| Supervisor | Barát, Erzsébet |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/marczali_ferenc.pdf |
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