ABSTRACT
In discourses academic and popular, pornography stands for that which disturbs: it disturbs individual people, social norms, boundaries between the public and the private, various codes of appropriate behaviour and good taste. Feminist scholars have investigated pornography primarily in terms of its disturbing, enraging and repugnant aspects. Holding pornographic texts, their producers and consumers at an arm’s length, the affective range of analysis has been mainly confined to the negative (see Paasonen 2007). Recently, the increased cultural visibility of all kinds of pornographies affected by online distribution, as well as the ubiquity of popular representations citing the codes and conventions of soft-core porn, have given rise to claims of not wanting to be disturbed by pornography (Rossi 2007). While these claims for consumer agency are undoubtedly justified, it is also important to ask more precisely what is considered disturbing in pornography, and what such disturbances may affect. Following Roland Barthes’ discussion on photography (1981: 99), one might also consider being disturbed as something connected to the appeal of, attraction to or even fondness for specific images – i.e. a broader and more complex range of affect. According to most definitions of the term, pornography aims to sexually
arouse its viewers and readers: depicting bodies, genitalia, sexual acts and bodily fluids in attentive detail, it routinely excludes the social settings in which the acts are embedded. The generic specificity of pornography has been located in the texts themselves (that which they depict), in authorial intentions (what the images are intended for), in their effects (what the images do), in audience interests (what is experienced as pornographic) and in combinations thereof. Film scholar Linda Williams (1991) has famously categorized pornography, melodrama and horror as body genres that aim to move their viewers in highly bodily ways. As a body genre, pornography not only displays bodily fluids but also has the power to make the viewers’ bodies leak (as with semen; similarly, melodrama brings its viewers to tears and horror makes bodies sweat). As Williams notes, the quality of pornography is evaluated through its sensory and sensuous effects rather than more formal considerations of narrative, character construction or aesthetics. Indeed, it would seem that there is very little to be read from or in porno-
graphy, given the genre’s commitment to carnal address (exploring bodies in
detail while overriding semantics) as well as the secondary role of characterization or plot development. Inspired by this methodological dilemma, this chapter experiments with close looking (Armstrong 1998: 3) at pornography that is not literal but tries to account for the ‘uncontrolled and uncontrollable’ aspects (MacDougall 2006) of images. In what follows, I address one specific image, a digital amateur photograph featuring a man and a running shoe – or ‘sneaker’ as it is know in North America – that has had a particularly haunting presence in my mind ever since I first encountered it in 2005 as part of a slide show of amateur pornography archived by Sergio Messina from alt.fetish newsgroups. The sneaker image brings me to questions concerning the materiality of
digital images and their networked circulation, but also the interpenetration of sensation and interpretation, which Isobel Armstrong (2000) has theorized as being a particular affective dynamic. In terms of reading, this exploration follows the paths pointed out by Jane Gallop (1988), Lynne Pearce (1997) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) in their respective discussions of embodied, implicated and reparative reading – namely, modes of interpretation that remain open to surprises and uncertainties while accounting for the affective power, or force, of the texts studied. Rather than posing the perennial question of cultural studies (i.e. ‘What does this mean?’), I consider the image as a particular kind of actor with the power to affect its audiences, myself included. In other words, the aim is to broaden the emphasis from questions concerning meaning to the workings and affective dynamics of pornography while thinking through the methodological challenges involved. In doing this, I draw on feminist theorizations of affect, reading and looking, on material anthropology, and on Barthes’s reflections on photography. Addressing violent affect in cinema and literature, Marco Abel frames
encounters with such texts as concerning ‘asignifying intensities’ (affects and force) rather than signification, meaning or mediation (2007: x; see also Massumi 2002). Instead of defining the question as involving either affect or mediation, I consider the two as intimately co-dependent – as attached at the hip, sharing some vital organs, and detachable only with some degree of violence and risk of harm.
