ABSTRACT
Pornographic photographs are not alone in their preoccupation with sexual difference: other visual representations are also interested, in their own ways, in this question. Sexual difference is dealt with in a variety of ways across different media, genres and forms, is produced through diverse codes and conventions. All representations are coded: they do not merely reflect a world outside the bounds of the text, but mediate external discourses, as it were rewriting and reconstructing them. Representations – or readings available from them – are constituted by a series of discourses which circulate both within and beyond the text itself. Thus, for instance, the appeal pornography makes to distinctions between masculinity and femininity refers outwards to constructions of these categories already in cultural circulation, drawing on and reproducing them in its own forms of address.
