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Abstract
This article examines the results of the online questionnaire (www.feministdesires.com) focused on the audience engagements with feminist pornographies. The analysis is centred around the ninety participants that mentioned Tumblr in their qualitative responses. The goal is to highlight the themes emerging from the inductive analysis of the sample in relation to why Tumblr might be an important space for the access, circulation, curation and creation of queer, feminist and BDSM porn. In addition, the analysis aims at understanding the internet access practices of porn audiences and shed light on the relationships between images, affects and networked community. Since the research focuses on audiences that access pornographic texts that they would define as ‘feminist’, it also sheds light on the political, ethical, aesthetical dimensions of engagement with and definition of feminist sexual texts, practices, communities.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Alessandra Mondin has a BA in Visual Arts (DAMS – Bologna University) and an Erasmus Mundus MA in Women’s and Gender Studies (GEMMA – University of Hull and Utrecht University). She is currently researching at the University of Sunderland where she is also an academic tutor. Her PhD research is on feminist pornographies and the intertwining of the aesthetics, ethics and politics of feminist desires. In addition, her research interests include investigations around feminist and queer theory, affect, visual arts, disability studies and theories of the body.
Notes
1. The web-questionnaire http://www.feministdesires.com received ethical approval from the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Sunderland. It featured 27 between quantitative and qualitative questions that sought to assess the phenomenological experience of viewers of queer and/or feminist pornographies. The aim is to trace patterns and understandings of the politics, ethics, aesthetics and importance of pornography produced with feminist endeavours. The questionnaire has been circulated via a snowballing technique and it has gathered 226 complete questionnaires.
2. Tumblr is a microblogging platform created by David Karp in 2007 and acquired by Yahoo for approximately 1 billion dollars in May 2013 (Swisher & Kafka, Citation2013). Research from the Global Web Index (Citation2014) notes its active user base in the previous six months grew by 120%, while Facebook’s grew by only 2%.
3. My framework is thinking through affect within its material-semiotic entanglements and through its stickiness. Turning to affect does not mean turning away from texts because ‘theorizations of affect are just as much a form of textual and linguistic exercise as any other type of scholarly investigation. There is no retrospective access to the initial, precognitive visceral encounters with porn and the sensations they evoke’ (Paasonen, Citation2014, p. 139). The research goes beyond the distinction between affect/emoti on, beyond the ‘implied dualism of affect and representation’ (Koivunen, Citation2013, p. 98). The analysis is ‘both retrospective and linguistic reflection of an event after the fact. While the pre-reflective cannot be reached, we may hold on to its traces in acts of making sense’ (Paasonen, Citation2014, p. 142). Along with Ahmed (Citation2010a), my focus is on ‘the messiness of the experiential, (…) how we are touched by what we are near’ (p. 30).
4. Since its creation, Tumblr has been constantly ameliorating its features: ‘the original search mechanism on Tumblr only applies to tags, which means there is no way to retrieve a post from the Tumblr search engine if it is not tagged. This search function was improved in late 2013 to provide more comprehensive search results by checking other textual information in post contents and image captions’ (Xu et al., Citation2014, p. 15). In terms of groupings through tagging, it means that broader and more variegated categories of posts and affective entanglements are being created. Tumblr (Citation2015) community guidelines permit to post explicit content if tagged #nsfw (not safe for work) and state that if not tagged it would be removed. The argument that porn is ubiquitous on the internet might be dismissed by the quantitative research that reports how the #nsfw tag is the least frequent one in a chart of the thirty most mentioned tags on the platform, the first one being #love and the penultimate being #doctorwho (Xu et al., Citation2014, p. 17). I have not found any data regarding the quantity of explicit posts on Tumblr that are not tagged #nsfw and the quantity of posts that are removed because violating the community guidelines regarding explicit content.
5. Rhizome is ‘the connections that occur between the most disparate and the most similar of objects, places and people; the strange chains of events that link people’ and a ‘moving matrix, composed of organic and non-organic parts forming symbiotic and aparallel connections according to transitory and as yet undetermined routes’ (Colman, Citation2005, p. 231). Also, ‘there are no singular positions on the networked lines of a rhizome, only connected points which form connections between things’ (Colman, Citation2005, p. 232).
6. Queer temporality could be defined, as Dinshaw says, as the ‘refusal of linear historicism’ (Dinshaw et al., Citation2007, p. 178).
7. To the philosopher, the sensate body possesses ‘an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis’ (Merleau-Ponty, Citation1968, p. 135).
8. This is the hashtag that accompanied the discussion of the topic on Twitter.
9. The 2014/2015 Global Wage Report by the International Labour Organisation has found a substantial gender wage gap (ILO, Citation2014). The findings of the Gallup Report say that the U.S. LGBT population is at higher risk of poverty and ‘the results from this analysis run counter to some media stereotypes [from the 2012–2013 Where are we on TV Glaad.org report] that portray the LGBT community as predominantly white, highly educated, and very wealthy’ (Gates & Newport, Citation2012).
10. The participants refer to it as a(n) (online) community, while I acknowledge that it would be more apt to refer to it as a sexual scene. Following Straw (Citation1991/1997), sociologically speaking a community is a ‘population group whose composition is relatively stable’ and whose exploration of cultural objects is rooted geographically and historically in a specific cultural landscape (p. 494). Instead, a scene is a ‘cultural space’ in which different objects and practices ‘coexist, interacting with each other with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization’ (p. 494).