ABSTRACT
One of the overarching themes of this work has been the need to examine the experience of vulnerability and the significance of images of vulnerability in their social context. This chapter considers one dimension of the social life of vulnerability—that of sexuality—with the aim of articulating more precisely how vulnerability can operate as an ethical resource. Sexuality is both a dimension of social life through which individuals commonly experience vulnerability in diverse ways, and a mode of experience that is saturated with ethical significance. Though the chapter begins by exploring sexuality broadly as a site of vulnerability, the central argument turns to the ways sexuality and vulnerability are represented in pornography and experienced in relation to that medium. As I argued in the preceding chapters, if vulnerability is the basis for ethical relation, then how we relate to vulnerability is an ethical matter of fundamental importance. Harm and wrongs occur not just through the exploitation of others’ vulnerability or failure to respond well to it, but also find their precondition in disavowal of one’s own vulnerability and denials of relationships. The culturally pervasive understandings of vulnerability and invulnerability, which permeate our social milieu and shape the practices in which we engage and the ends to which we aspire, impact how we relate to vulnerability—our own and that of others—and facilitate such denials and avoidance. Thus, the question of how the nexus of meanings surrounding vulnerability and invulnerability impacts how we experience and live sexuality is both a socially and an ethically significant one. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is neither to condemn nor to condone the wide array of sexual imagery, but rather to take stock of how vulnerability is imagined in this context, what kinds of ideas and experiences of vulnerability are facilitated for viewers, and what sense of sexual subjectivity is formed in relation to them. Although I conclude that representations of and approaches to vulnerability that are reductive, and thus conducive to its exploitation or repudiation, are likely ethically problematic whereas those that express or enable experience of the full complexity of vulnerability are likely more ethically valuable, my aim is not to render judgment about the content of pornography or behavior in relation to it. Rather, by analyzing the issue of pornography from the perspective of vulnerability, I 149seek to furnish a perspective on the ethics and politics of pornography that moves beyond the stalemate in feminist discussion of the topic.
