ABSTRACT
Pornography is the most invisible yet abundant representational mode. Pornography is a representational system that developed from frontier, colonial sexual violence that enforced a binary between Native and non-Native sex. The absence of Indigenous people from pornography’s racialisations deliberately places Indigenous sex and futures outside colonial value. The paradox of pornography is that it survives through a claim to exceptionality that protects its producers and consumers but profits from its total integration and familiarity. The phantasma of pornography is not the narrative of pool boys and delivery men, it is the phantasma of a public performance of invisibility. The activation of pornography as a spectacular political tool can be understood through Jacques Ranciere’s notion of the distribution of the sensible, which addresses how images are distributed into public understanding. Pornography – understood as the public visibility of fucking bodies – is spectacular and because of this porn is commonly used as a metaphor and an adjective to denote spectacularity.
