Beyond privacy: bodily integrity as an alternative framework for understanding non-consensual pornography

ABSTRACT

Activists and legal scholars seeking remedies to non-consensual pornography (known colloquially as ‘revenge porn’) have generally framed it as a violation of privacy; however, the concept of privacy a fraught history, linked to women’s exclusion from the public sphere, denial of their sexual expression, and impunity for abusers. I argue that the concept of body integrity better maps onto the experiences described by victims, who seldom distinguish between digital representations of their body and the body itself and who often liken non-consensual pornography to sexual assault. However, a feminist approach to bodily integrity (rather than one rooted in classical liberalism) is require in order to account for the disproportionately negative consequences non-consensual pornography has for women.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• sexuality
• surveillance/privacy
• CITAMS
• pornography
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

PJ Patella-Rey is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Maryland and a visiting scholar in Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies department at the University of Pittsburgh. His dissertation research explores professional sex cam models’ labor, micro-celebrity, and digitally mediated intimacy with clients. He co-founded Theorizing the Web and the Cyborgology blog and hosts The Peepshow Podcast [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

PJ Patella-Rey http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3619-5316